Jon Heyman: Font of Genius-Speak

It never fails to occur: baseball writers first attack sabermetricians, and then try to co-opt sabermetricians to prove their point, and in the process, prove their own lack of intelligence. Let's look at today's piece of genius from Jon Heyman of SI.com:

Even so, I wasn't shocked that stats people have taken issue with Rollins winning the MVP award. There are numbers crunchers out there -- including a firejoemorgan.com author who wrote a guest piece in Sports Illustrated last week -- who believe baseball writers rank somewhere between morons and idiots for voting Rollins as MVP over David Wright, who had a higher VORP. The stat people seem to believe VORP -- a Baseball Prospectus statistic that stands for Value Over Replacement Player -- defines a player, but why haven't many of them championed last year's VORP leader (Hanley Ramirez) as MVP instead?

I assume the stats guys favor Wright because he played for a contending team. I guess the rule is this: Highest VORP wins unless the VORP champion is playing for a loser.

If Wright's offensive stats were slightly better than Rollins', and I will accept that they were, especially considering the respective ballparks they play in (VORP accounts for ballparks), shouldn't Rollins get points for playing a superb shortstop compared to Wright's slightly-above average third base? And shouldn't Rollins get credit for showing extraordinary initiative and leadership? For helping his team barrel into the playoffs from seven games back with 17 to go, as opposed to Wright's team, which perpetrated a historic choke?

Though the Mets' collapse was no fault of Wright's, for the MVP to come off the all-time choke team, he'd better have a greater advantage in stats than this: Wright outhit Rollins .325 to .296, but both hit 30 home runs and Rollins beat Wright in Runs Created by 13. Wright's big advantage apparently comes down to the fact he got on base more often (his on-base percentage was significantly higher, .416 to .344), usually via a walk (he had 94 walks to Rollins' 49). To the stat guys, walking is more thrilling and much more valuable than actually winning the pennant.

Let's go ahead and ignore the moronic infatuation with "extraordinary initiative and leadership". Let's also just ignore the fact that Rollins didn't single-handedly win the pennant, and to insinuate he did is a somewhat large insult to Ryan Howard, Chase Utley and my boy, Fat Squirrel. Let's also put aside that Heyman for the umpteenth time has chosen to use his column and the fact that he somehow has a BBWAA card as a way to pick on people twice his intelligence level.

Let's instead note Joe Sheehan's article on this subject back in November, who cogently addresses the VERY FACT that Heyman raised: that VORP doesn't account for defense and that WARP is really the way to analyze a player's full complement of skills, and drops him from first to 9th on a real list. More importantly, it saliently states a truism that Heyman ignores:

I’m not sure what the answer to that is, but I know it isn’t "enough to make Matt Holliday or Jimmy Rollins the MVP." The NL MVP was one of Pujols, David Wright, or Jake Peavy, the three best players in the league who happened to play on three teams that didn’t make the postseason. The one-game, or half-game, difference between the Mets and Padres, and Rockies and Phillies, is so small that it doesn’t belong in this discussion. The excessive weight that the actual voters will put on that difference skews things in a way that makes it impossible to have a real discussion about value.

Word to the wise Jon: if you're going to misquote and misrepresent a subject, you're better off pulling a Joe Morgan and simply stating that you don't need to read it because you know better. At least then you have the facade of genius on your side. Instead, you look like you read a book and either the key part of the plot, or worse, were too stupid to get the point. I leave it to you to tell us which it is.

Five Oddities in NL MVP Voting

Joe Sheehan's already done a bang-up job in analyzing why Jimmy Rollins shouldn't have won the NL MVP (for roughly the same reasons Justin Morneau shouldn't have won last year), though I don't really agree with his conclusions---the defense a first baseman has to offer is pretty much whateverific, and Chase Utley, to me, was the best player in the NL all year when healthy. But enough about the winners. I use this platform to note five oddities from the voting results, which can be found here:

(1) All of those carping about Ryan Braun beating out Troy Tulowitzki for Rookie of the Year (and I'm looking at.....you, Mr. Neyer) can take solace in the fact that somehow, despite the exact same people voting for both awards, Mr. Troy finished a good 11 points ahead of Braun in the MVP voting. Most of the 11-point differential between the two stems from a rogue 3rd place vote for TT, presumably from someone voting with Dan O'Dowd in the room.

(2) I'd like to find the voter who put Prince Fielder 8th and shake his hand. He's the only person to put him below 4th, and he's the only person that's right.

(3) I watched Carlos Beltran play the entire year. Check that---I watched Carlos Beltran saunter about like an injured elephant for 5 months, and then start to play after the Feast of the Assumption. He was a waste of money for 3/4 of the year. So of course, he merits a pair of 8th place votes. Good job of paying attention, lads.

(4) Is Brandon Phillips the first player ever to get the only MVP votes from his team when he wasn't the most valuable player on his team? Outside of steals and shortness, there isn't a category where Adam Dunn didn't whup his ass. Phillips isn't awful, but please, tell me his stats are different from Chris Sabo with speed. Or on speed for that matter.

(5) And lastly, and most hilariously, there's the person who voted Carlos Marmol for a 10th place vote. This is even more laughable than when the Hall of Fame ballot comes out and players like Gary Gaetti and Scot Sanderson are nominated. I realize that VORP doesn't tell everything, and I'm going to piss off Jon Heyman by using numbers, but Marmol's VORP was squarely between Greg Maddux and John Maine for NL pitchers, and roughly equivalent to that of Fat Squirrel for position players, and we already know my feelings on him. I have to think the guy who made this vote lost a bet.

This lends itself to an obvious question: why do we allow voters 10 spots on the MVP ballot? Has someone ever won because of a 9th or 10th place vote? (Maybe Pudge?) Why not just give them 3 or 5 and be done with it?