Anyway, I can definitely see yours and Patriot’s stance, so maybe I should think about it some more. Or maybe I shouldn’t, because like Tango said, nobody will care in a week.

Also, very few people interpret the Cy and the ROY in the literal value sense, and so if you do so with the MVP, there is really no overall player counterpart to those awards.

Personally, for any of those awards, my standard is the player’s actual performance, with no regards to timing, but also no adjustments to try to put the player in a neutral context (run-based park factors don’t try to put him in a neutral context, they just place the value of each run on par with its win value). If the player had a high BABIP, I wouldn’t hold this against him (I might for a pitcher a little bit since there is an argument that the defense deserves some credit for it; there’s no one to share credit with on the offensive side). It seems like this puts my thinking on this pretty close to Sky’s.

Perhaps not so incidentally, Sky and I picked the same top four, but in a different order (I went Wright-Jones-Pujols-Utley).

If we take a WPA-style MVP award and move further into the land of “who’s performance makes the best story”, then count me completely out. I love storylines (although probably a little less than the next guy), but judging performance based on storylines is stupid. It’s like hiring Tom Cruise as your agent because he was good at it in Jerry Maguire. If there wasn’t an MVP award, I don’t think the Jimmy Rollins or Matt Holliday love-fest would have been muted.

As statboy as it sounds, I would consider “best player” as the guy you’d love to have for your Strat-o-Matic team, the guy who would help your team the most if you knew exactly how he’d play before the season started. That’s just one definition of best player, though. You may prefer something more true talent for other discussions.

[As an aside, VORP, my TVAR, and stuff like that definitely are not a measure of true talent. Jorge Posada’s getting tons of credit for a BABIP that he can’t sustain, for example. The best 2007 true talent player would be the one you’d most want on your team headed into 2008 based solely on 2007 performance. Pujols and ARod would be way up there, while I’m guessing people would give less thought to some other top players like Maggs (can he really hit .360 again?), Ryan Braun (can he keep that pace up for more than 400 PAs?), or Jimmy Rollins (he was more of a good storyline than a great player.)]

I have to say that I had never really thought about it enough to realize that VORP, OPS, RAR in any form, don’t really make sense at all for the MVP. Sky, I saw your post there so I think I know your stance already … anyway, your rankings are great for true talent, which in general, imo, is more important. But for purposes of the MVP, I agree with Tango (not MGL so much, although to a large degree I do) and therefore I think Rollins was a pretty legit choice.

Baseball will always be a game driven by its love affair with numbers, but what makes the game above all others is the stories that become legend. Like Kirk Gibson’s homer off the Eck. Like the BoSox coming back from down 0-3. Like Jeter’s redirection of the errant throw home. It makes the game special, and its players legend. It is that stuff that can move someone listed as 6th in a statistical measurement to1st in a vote.

I haven’t had a chance to adress your other questions, yet, but I will soon. Keep up the good work.