- Posts: 21
- Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2012 2:38 pm
By the best measures of performance that we have, Trout is clearly more valuable than Cabrera. How many wins did Trout add to his team? How many did Cabrera add to the Tigers? WAR, while not good for distinguishing value of performance within tenths of a win, is certainly good enough to tell us that Trout was ~2 wins more productive than Cabrera. If you value Avg, HR & RBI above WAR, wOBA or WRC+, you are ignoring better, more accurate measures of performance. Sure, you can do that if you like. I'm not gonna stop you. But you're going to be objectively wrong a lot more than if you use better information.
If I had the first pick in a dispersal draft - guaranteeing you got this year's performance for the one and only year you would have the rights to that player - I'd pick Trout. He's simply been the best and most valuable baseball player in the world this year.
All that said, Cabrera had a great season and, if the writers want to ignore better stats, giving him the MVP won't be a travesty. We've seen much worse mistakes made in the MVP just in the last decade.
If I had the first pick in a dispersal draft - guaranteeing you got this year's performance for the one and only year you would have the rights to that player - I'd pick Trout. He's simply been the best and most valuable baseball player in the world this year.
All that said, Cabrera had a great season and, if the writers want to ignore better stats, giving him the MVP won't be a travesty. We've seen much worse mistakes made in the MVP just in the last decade.