BBA: Stan Musial Award

What, exactly, makes a player valuable? This isn’t a unique observation, but that’s the obviously problem with picking the “Most Valuable Player” award. 

Take, for example, Matt Kemp and Ryan Braun. Kemp and Braun were pretty identical in almost every way in 2011. They hit for average and power and got on base a ton and played bad but not awful defense and ran the bases well. Kemp hit a few more homers, Braun a few more doubles and triples. Braun’s OPS was a smidge higher, but Kemp played in a tougher park. We could go on forever. Some people will vote for Braun solely because his team made the playoffs and Kemp’s didn’t, but I’m not one of those people. 

Kemp has a noticeably higher WAR than Braun at both FanGraphs and Baseball Reference. Why, when their stats are almost indistinguishable? It’s because he’s a center fielder; center field is a premium defensive position and left field isn’t, which means that offense is harder to find in center field and therefore it’s more valuable there. The reason that Ronny Cedeno had a WAR of 1.4 this year despite being worth -16 runs at the plate and Garrett Jones had a 0.9 despite being worth 5.3 runs at the plate isn’t because Cedeno’s defense was 25 runs better than Jones’s; it’s because his defense was eight runs better than Jones, but Jones played corner outfield and Cedeno played shortstop. 

This is a roundabout way of saying that if you have two players who seem and feel almost identical but one is a centerfielder and one is a left fielder, it’s the centerfielder that’s more valuable. 

I won’t walk you through every pick, but I used WAR (both versions) as a loose guideline here, keeping in mind that the number might well be flawed for guys with extreme numbers for things like fielding and base-running. With that said, here’s my ballot for the BBA’s 2011 Stan Musial Award.

1. Matt Kemp
2. Ryan Braun
3. Clayton Kershaw
4. Roy Halladay
5. Troy Tulowitzki
6. Joey Votto
7. Justin Upton
8. Jose Reyes
9. Prince Fielder
10. Andrew McCutchen