On the contrary, Matt Holliday, for reasons stated, really deserved the award.

They can find themselves in varying situations, yes, but circumstances such as number of men on base, number of outs and so on are largely team-dependent. Basically, a hitter only really affects what happens when he’s at bat, with what the players batting ahead of or behind him wholly out of his control. You could get into arguments over the nebulous concept of “protecting hitters,” but smarter men than I have concluded that that idea is much ado about nothing.

I stand by my assertion that whether the team wins or not is also largely team-dependent. Better performances by individual players obviously help the team’s chances, but by most any conventional metric, Wright had a better season than Rollins. That one player’s team imploded around him down the stretch isn’t really a reflection on that player so much as it is a condemnation of that player’s team, particularly when the player in question performed well.

If you simply switched the performances by the Mets’ and Phillies’ pitching staffs on the last week of the season, for instance, the Mets win the division. You can try to credit Rollins with some mythical ability to make his pitchers step up and deliver, but you’d have a hard time making that argument hold water with me.

Conversely, if you swapped Rollins’ September (or season-long) numbers with Wright’s, I’d argue that the Phillies would have won the division by a few more games.

Yes, Wright had a terrible April, but I think his struggles were magnified by the fact that it was April. In May, Rollins hit .250 and OBPed .279 (despite his noted slump, Wright got on base at a .370 clip in April). Rollins went homerless in May, but he had a bit of a buffer in that he had already enjoyed a stellar April, so his struggles didn’t seem so pronounced. If Wright had been terrible in July, but had already hit 20 bombs and was clipping along at .330, I don’t think it would have been nearly as noticeable. Similarly, if the Mets had slumped in July and roared back in September to finish a game out, Wright would have been touted as a major reason why, and not wrongly fingered as part of the problem. Say what you will about the timing of the slump, but you can’t possibly blame Wright for his team choking.

As Jonathan said, talk of “context” can often lead to the “clutch hitting” red herring, with some players being credited with special powers that help them elevate their game when it’s all on the line. So called “clutch” hitting has been shown to be as much a matter of fluke as hitting in any other situation. Though they’re not particularly predictive, though, I think they can be used retroactively - if a player performed extremely well in a limited sample size of “clutch” situations, you can point to that come awards time as a measure of how a player did in certain instances in the past. You just can’t say that player is definitively clutch, as those numbers will likely regress to the mean in the future.

Even using those metrics, however, Wright has the edge:
.310/.431/.544 with RISP
.346/.447/.590 Close and Late

Rollins:
.272/.339/.538 w. RISP
.255/.318/.490 C&L

Wright did struggle to a .200/.366/.400 line with RISP and two outs, but Rollins only managed a .239/.302/.534 line.

As I said before, it depends on your definition of “value.” If someone wants to say that a very good player on a playoff team is necessary more “valuable” than a similar or better player on a non-playoff team because the objective is to make the playoffs, I’m not likely to change their mind. Hell, I thought that way myself in the not-too-distant past. I just think there’s a lot to be said for the impact a supporting cast has on a team’s playoff fortunes.

In any case, I’m with Richie in the sad and Sisyphean world of Blue Jays fandom, so I’ve wasted waaaay too much of all of our time writing about players on a couple of teams I don’t particularly root for.

A great example is Frank Thomas for the Jays. Last year he went on fire in September when Oakland was in the thick of it and carried them into the playoffs. He was a hero, came 4th in MVP voting, etc, etc. This season he did the exact same thing but the Jays were not even close by then, so it was widely suggested it was a BAD thing that he waited until the “season was over” to put up his numbers. If you’re looking at a context that is largely based on what situation the rest of the team has put a player in, it’s not really fair to talk about an individual’s value.

And just my two cents on the “same opportunity to impact the outcome over the course of a season” thing- that’s not necessarily true, but how significant the situations a player is put in over a season can be measured, and it’s pretty clear that no player performs any better in more important situations from one year to the next. But now we’re into the clutch hitting thing…

Richie- thanks, will do! Are you a closet Jays fan, or just confident in wishing them well when they are stuck in third place for eternity? Those awards are great- I think there should be more farcical awards of all kinds. In fact, that gives me an idea…

Haha! Copied my comment before submitting it this time! Boy I’m bad at getting those letters right…maybe I AM a bot.

Justin,

At the end of the day, statistical analyis is very important, but not the only factor in determine one’s value. It is important to realize that using some of the more complex statistical methods are not unbiased as many would suggest. In order for them to work, there needs to be some underlying assumptions. Like:

“each hitter having roughly the same opportunity to impact the outcome over the course of a season, assuming they all play a similar number of games”

That’s a pretty big assumption to make, and in my opinion, not a given. Context is important to understand, as in how they players actually peform. That is something that can not be found in a calculation that translates performance in to theoretical wins. Whether or not the team really wins is more important.

I too am saddened by the loss of your novella. Keep up the good work over at The Mockingbird and as always, GO JAYS!

Nick will probably never forgive me for this, but David Wright certainly wasn’t to blame for the Mets’ demise the last 2+ weeks of the season.

In 17 games and 73 AB during the fateful blowage of a 6.5 game lead, Wright had a .397 Avg, .451 OBP, .575 SLG, and an 1.027 OPS. All above his 2007 averages. He had a hit in every game and had 11 RBI and 15 Runs (only 2 HR however).

I still wouldn’t have considered him for the 2007 NL MVP. I’m a real believer in the MVP going to a member of a playoff team. Hence the farcical Andre Dawson Awards.

In the last week of the season, for instance, the Mets went 1-6, but in five of those six losses, their pitchers gave up seven, eight, nine, 10 and 13 runs. Was Wright less “valuable” because Glavine crapped the bed in his last game? With the rest of his team effectively tanking, there’s no way he - or any one player - could have put up enough runs to win under those circumstances.

The Phils, meanwhile, went 4-2 in the last week, thanks largely to a pitching staff that came around. Can you honestly argue that Rollins somehow “led” his pitchers to pitch better, whereas Wright’s lack of “leadership” led to his staff imploding? Things like leadership and chemistry are all fine and good, but curiously, you only hear about those things when a team’s winning. Look at this year’s Yankees - for the first two months, everyone was suggesting Torre had to be fired and that he had somehow lost his ability to “lead” the team. Once the Yanks righted the ship (as anyone who looked at the simple run differential stats predicted they would), he was being touted as Manager of the Year material and it was scandalous that the Yankees didn’t bring him back. In short, leadership doesn’t create a winning atmosphere, a winning atmosphere creates claims that a team has leaders, chemistry, blah blah blah.

More than any other “team” sport, baseball relies on individual accomplishments, with each hitter having roughly the same opportunity to impact the outcome over the course of a season, assuming they all play a similar number of games.

David Wright didn’t let the team down by contributing to (for instance) Delgado’s down year, or to the pitching woes. He only helps or hinders his team based on his own accomplishments (apart from the predominantly team-dependent statistics such as runs or RsBI). Based strictly on the numbers, he helped his team far more than Rollins, whose low OBP led to him making the highest number of outs by any NL MVP ever, or Mr. Coors Field.

But hey, Rollins led the league in Smiles Above Replacement Player and in pre-season predictions that he was lucky enough to have come true, so it’s not surprising that the voters went with him.

Sorry about the lost novella. As for your apples and oranges comment, I disagree, not all value can be captured by the math. Sure, most of it is, but sometimes context is important. That is why there is no way David Wright should be considered the MVP this year.