Welcome to The Pregame Lineup, a weekday newsletter that gets you up to speed on everything you need to know for today's games, while catching you up on fun and interesting stories you might have missed. Today's edition is brought to you by Anthony Castrovince.
For those of us who lived through the knock-down-drag-out American League MVP debates about Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout in 2012 and ’13, it’s stunning to see how much the voting for the award has evolved in a relatively short time.
Back then, it was Trout’s all-around excellence pitted against Miggy’s offensive onslaught. The results weren’t close. Cabrera clobbered Trout in the MVP votes each of those years, despite Trout’s clear edge in Wins Above Replacement.
These days, we put the WAR in aWARd in a substantial way. Only five of the last 20 MVPs between the AL and NL were not the end-of-year leaders in their league in either fWAR (FanGraphs model) or bWAR (the Baseball-Reference version), and two of those five were in that strange COVID season of 2020 (ironically, Trout in 2019 was one of the rare non-WAR leaders to win it in this timeframe):
2019: Mike Trout (AL MVP)
2020: José Abreu (AL MVP), Freddie Freeman (NL MVP)
2021: Bryce Harper (NL MVP)
2022: Paul Goldschmidt (NL MVP)
We bring all this up because the AL WAR leaderboards are threatening to challenge the way the voting has gone in this era. Entering tonight, they look like this (we’re excluding pitchers here, taking into account that a non-Shohei Ohtani pitcher has not won an MVP since 2014 and they have not received much voting support in recent years):
bWAR
Bobby Witt Jr., KC: 6.3
Kevin McGonigle, DET: 6.1
Yordan Alvarez, HOU: 5.8
Ceddane Rafaela, BOS: 5.6
Wilyer Abreu, BOS: 5.6
Junior Caminero, TB: 4.8
Miguel Vargas, CWS: 4.5
Willson Contreras, BOS: 4.4
Dillon Dingler, DET: 4.4
Steven Kwan, CLE: 4.4
fWAR
Witt, 6.4
Alvarez, 5.8
Dingler, 5.0
McGonigle, 4.6
Ezequiel Duran, 4.4
Vargas, 4.4
Caminero, 4.3
Rafaela, 4.0
Contreras, 4.0
Pete Alonso, BAL: 4.0
As you can see, we’ve got some disagreements between the two lists, but both models agree that Witt has provided more value than any other AL player. The same Witt who ranked third in our latest poll of 37 MLB.com experts.
It’s Alvarez, despite being third in bWAR and second in fWAR, who ranked first in our poll and is the favorite on many of the oddsmaker sites. It’s Caminero, who is out of the top five on both lists, ranking second in our poll and on many of those same sites.
As Alvarez continues his bid for the Triple Crown in a series against the first-place White Sox that begins tonight (8:10 p.m. ET on MLB.TV), you could say he’s also attempting to turn back time to 2012-13. He’s in the lumbering slugger vein a la Miggy, but his offensive exploits are so extreme (1.039 OPS, 191 OPS+) that they might render the WAR trend moot. Caminero is similarly making such an offensive dent for the first-place Rays (.908 OPS, 150 OPS+) that he, too, appears to have way more MVP traction than Witt, who is fantastic at every facet of the game but not having an outlandish offensive season (.812 OPS, 130 OPS+).
WAR isn’t going away, obviously. But it might not be the decisive factor in this particular ballot the way it has been in many recent votes. Miguel Cabrera probably approves.
