Now We Know...

Now we know why Justin Morneau, who might have been among the half-dozen best players in the American League, was judged the most valuable by 15 MVP voters (and among the four most valuable by all 28 voters). Enough baseball writers have written about Morneau that we know he won because, as Phil Pepe says, 

On June 7, the Twins were 25-33, 11½ games behind the Tigers in the AL Central and Morneau was batting .236 with 11 home runs and 38 runs batted in. From June 8 to the end of the season, Morneau batted .362 with 23 homers and 92 RBIs, and the Twins went 71-33, passed the Tigers and won the division championship. That, to me, is the definition of a Most Valuable Player. How much clearer can it be?

1. Those 58 games before June 8 do count in the standings. Morneau’s partly responsible for that 25-33 record, and if not for Joe Mauer the Twins would have been even worse than 25-33. It’s patently ridiculous to ignore anything that happens before a certain date, simply because it makes your particular point on a particular day.

2. Correlation does not prove causation. Yes, Morneau’s numbers were excellent from June 8 through the end of the season. So were Mauer’s. So were Johan Santana’s. So were Francisco Liriano’s, and Brad Radke’s. Getting Tony Batista and Juan Castro out of the lineup helped quite a bit. Rondell White’s OPS in September was higher than Morneau’s. If we split the season into arbitrary pieces, we can make the case for just about anybody we like.

Yes, it’s been said that Morneau’s candidacy trumped Jeter’s because if you took Jeter out of the Yankees’ lineup they still would have made the playoffs, while the Twins would not have done the same without Morneau. But that’s a red herring. For one thing, it still doesn’t explain Mauer’s poor showing in the balloting (any sort of comprehensive analysis will show Mauer being at least as valuable as Morneau). And for another, it doesn’t explain all the past MVPs who played for teams that finished with big leads (anybody want to rescind Joe Morgan’s two awards?).

No, it really is as simple as Morneau playing well at the same time the Twins played brilliantly. More, it’s as simple as Morneau piling up a lot of RBIs, every baseball writer’s favorite statistic. Which reminds me of something that Bill James wrote, some years ago when I was working for him. I’d like to reprint a portion of that short essay here, because people keep asking me how on earth Morneau could have won the award, and I’m afraid that James’ words are still, today, far too applicable…

My little boy has just turned two, and he is trying to figure out a music box. It is a baseball music box, on which a small figure pivots with a tiny bat, swinging at a white cloth marble while the tinny sounds of “Take me out to the ball game” leak from below.

The music box has two operating mechanisms, an on/off switch which one pushes and pulls, but also a handle which must be wound to provide power. This is too much for a two-year-old boy to deal with at first. He pulls the switch and the music starts; he pushes it and the music stops -- but then, when the tension winds down, he pulls the switch and nothing happens. Isaac is frustrated. “Broke,” he says, handing me the worthless machine. “Ball payer broke.”

He will, of course, soon figure out the concept of two switches. But I am struck by this: that ideas are harder things than machines, and many people will never master the two-switch concept as it applies to a logical inference...

 Indeed, the entire intellectual life of many sportswriters is a search for master switches. Baseball is 90% pitching, sportswriters argue, not because this makes any sense or because there is any evidence to support it, but because it reduces the terrifying complexity of the sport to a single switch...

I know that it’s only sports. The MVP trophy is little but a footnote to what promises to be Morneau’s excellent career. But the world is an incredibly complex place. Here in America, we find ourselves in the middle of a terribly wasteful war because our leaders convinced themselves -- and too many of us -- that they could secure our safety by toppling one murderous despot (single switch). All over this planet, we’re driving our land and our water and ourselves over a cliff because we believe happiness relies on wealth and material possessions. The more things you have, the happier you will be (single switch). 

It’s only sports. But since most of us flip to the sports pages first, why not start with sports? Frankly, it’s too late for the MVP voters. They’re always going to look for the single switch, because nobody ever taught them differently and they’re too old to learn the other way. You and me, though? We’re young. We can look for the other switches, maybe even figure out how to use some of them. And once we figure out sports? Maybe then we can work on the other stuff.