What I Dislike About The MVP Award

First, let us thank the Tampa By rays for saving us from more Boston teams vying for championships. I probably shouldn't hate the Red Sox, but the '04 Cardinals were the best Cardinals team I'd ever seen, and the Sawx made them look like chumps. Then, the media had to spend the next nine months reminding me of that, by constantly talking about the bloody sock, and how they were idiots who didn't know better than to Cowboy Up, and the Curse is broken, and blah, blah, fucking blah. Then they went and signed J.D. Drew and that sealed the deal. "Oh, I have a sprained toe, I'll sit out for a few weeks and you can watch So Taguchi start in right." Hey J.D. do what you think you gotta for your career, but don't expect us to love you for that shit. Not when Ozzie played for a decade with a torn rotator cuff.

Enough of that. MVP award. I think my issue with it comes down to 2 points:

1) There's no solid definition. Each sportswriter gets to decide how they define it. So some guys only conisder players from teams with winning records, so only consider players that went to the playoffs. But wait, if your team makes it into the postseason too easily, that counts against you, because then you didn't play meaningful games in September, which overlooks the fact that the games you won in April count for just as much in the standings and you shouldn't penalize players for doing well all year, as opposed to just at the end of the season. So, some pople vote for basically the best August/September. So voters won't consider closers, some will. Some won't consider any pitchers. Some use stats, some don't. it's just a big clusterfuck, and we have no idea why one player wins it or one doesn't, expect when one of the voters deigns to tell us why they specifically voted, which doesn't help with all the ones that won't say.

Still, I could probably just live with that. It's just a seasonal award, and if it just concerned whether a player got a contract incentive or not, I probably wouldn't care so much. But that brings us to. . .

#2) Use of MVP awards and placing in MVP voting as evidence for making the Hall of Fame. As far as baseball goes, the Hall of Fame ought to be a pretty big deal. In theory, a player who makes it in there is really something special, the creme de la creme. So there's something that strikes me as wrong about a player's entry being argued for or against based on an award handed out by sportswriters. Jim Thome's lack of MVP awards, and his lack of high finishes in the voting has been used as evidence against his getting in. Is Jim Thome a Hall of Famer? I'm not sure, he has the home runs, those his hits total is a bit low, but it seems wrong that because sportswriters didn't perceive him to be outstanding in certain years (even if he was outstanding) that he could be deemed not good enough.

I think if sportswriters would sit down and hash out a set of criteria, then stick to it, that would help. The voting process would actually be understood, and it would seem like such a clustertfuck, and I wouldn't feel so annoyed by the whole thing.