Pedro Martinez Should Be AL MVP
I'm Really Very, Very Convinced of This
Now it comes down to Pedro winning the MVP, which he deserves, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Simply put, he had one of a handful of the best performances by a pitcher in the history of baseball last year. And that's not hyperbole, that's based on the facts:
Normally, if a pitcher allows fewer hits than innings, he's a solid starter. Most teams have one or two guys like that. In 217 innings, Pedro allowed 128 hits. This computes to 5.31 hits per nine innings, the third-best mark all-time.
Pedro's closest competitors in this statistic all-time are Nolan Ryan and Luis Tiant. Both may have shut down their opponents hits-wise, but made up for it partially by giving up more walks. In Ryan's record-setting season of 1972, he allowed 157 walks in 284 innings. In 1991, Ryan allowed 5.31 hits per nine innings, just like Pedro, but he allowed 72 walks in 173 innings.
In Tiant's stunning, underappreciated 1968 campaign, he allowed only 73 walks in 258 innings. Now we're getting to where Pedro leaves these guys in the dust. Pedro allowed only 32 walks in 217 innings. Pedro's computes to 1.33 walks per game, at a level that typically leads the league but doesn't break into the all-time rankings. Tiant's is a respectable but unspectacular 2.55.
Here's the point of all this: Martinez held opponents to a .213 OBP. Mike Mussina was second in the AL, at .291. Since 1900, Pedro's is the single greatest mark in history, exceeding Walter Johnson's 1913 mark of .217. All this in a 2000 season of offenisve explosion in which the AL as a whole, with Pedro's victims included, got on base at a .351 clip. In 1913, the AL had a .325 OBP.
This gets us into the full story -- once you take historical trends into perspective, it gets better for Pedro, if you can believe it. Walter Johnson and most of the rest of the all-time leaders in keeping men off base pitched in the run-starved dead-ball era.
In case you hadn't noticed, we are currently in an extremely lively-ball era, one in which you can have an ERA above five and still be considered a good starter. Meanwhile, Pedro Martinez is stacking up numbers that compete with probably the best year of the man many consider the best in history, Walter Johnson. And Walter has a large unfair advantage in the comparison because of the era in which he pitched!
I don't have the know-how or time to normalize all these stats to conditions of time and park effects, but suffice to say that, if I did, Pedro would come out head and shoulders above everyone else in baseball history.
But there's more to pitching than keeping baserunners off the bases. You also have to keep the few baserunners you get from scoring. In this department, Pedro is still the man, of course. His ERA, 1.74 (best in the AL since Ron Guidry in 1978), is a full two runs better than the runner-up, Roger Clemens, who logged a 3.70. And it's not like the few hits that Pedro's opponents did manage were terribly big ones -- Pedro held hitters to a .259 slugging percentage; second-best in the AL was Bartolo Colon at .371.
Historically, Pedro's ERA does not stack up, on first glance, to the likes of Johnson -- Pedro had a 1.74 ERA and allowed 17 home runs. In 1913 Johnson logged a 1.14 with nine HR (in 346 innings).
But this is mostly meaningless because this time we're really comparing apples and oranges. In 1913, the Philadelphia Athletics, led by Frank "Home Run" Baker, had 33 home runs as a team, and that mark led the American League. The New York Giants -- as a team, mind you -- had eight home runs the whole year.
In 2000, of course, the story is quite different: The Blue Jays led the AL with 244 HR, and Minnesota was dead, dead last with 116. Fifteen American Leaguers by themselves had more home runs than 1913's most powerful club did all year.
In 1913, the American League as a whole had a 2.93 ERA. In 2000, it was 4.91. Again, if I had the resources and time to put these statistics on a level playing field, I'm confident that Pedro's 2000 would look more impressive than Johnson's best year.
I'm straying far afield of my main point here, but I hope that all theses dazzling statistics prove my point. It's debatable, I admit, as to whether Pedro Martinez just finished the greatest pitching performance in major league history. What's not debatable is whether or not Pedro deserves this year's AL MVP. When you start comparing someone's season favorably to Walter Johnson's best year, an MVP should become a foregone conclusion. The MVP should be renamed in Pedro's honor.
Unless, of course, some other player had one of history's greatest seasons in 2000. And yes, Carlos Delgado, Frank Thomas, Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi had a bunch of great years. But I think we can all think of comparable or better ones in just the past few years (Jeff Bagwell in 1994, Mark McGwire's 1998, any of Barry Bonds' seasons this decade, etc.) Let's not even get into Ted Williams and Babe Ruth. I simply don't see any AL hitter who dominated the way Pedro did.
Rebutting the Counterarguments
There are a number of fallacies that will keep Pedro from the award, however.
Number 1: The first is that pitchers shouldn't get the MVP in the first place; that it should be reserved for hitters. Nice idea, but it's not how it works. The rules for the selection of the MVP specifically make pitchers eligible. Many pitchers have won the award in the past. Until the rule is changed, a pitcher is eligible, and everyone should abide by these rules.
Look what happened last year when a few muddle-headed writers logged a self-righteous protest vote and banned Pedro from their ballots completely. Ivan Rodriguez is a great player, no doubt about that. But he was as deserving of the MVP as I was deserving of People Magazine's Sexiest Man of the Year award.
In 1999, Pedro had a year that compares only to his 2000 campaign in terms of sheer dominance. Rodriguez had a great year offensively and defensively, with one major hole in his game -- he can't get on base like he should. His on-base percentage in 1999 was .356, which was stunningly mediocre.
I sympathize with the idea that there should be separate awards for hitters and pitchers. I think that most of the time it's too difficult to compare them. And it's not entirely fair that pitchers get their own separate award, the Cy Young, and also can get the MVP, while the hitters don't have a comparable award all their own.
I'd be willing to support a Cy Young-esque award for hitters only. I'd be even willing to change the rules of the MVP to bar pitchers from the running, even though it skews against history and unfairly lofts hitters above pitchers, since the MVP remains a bit more prestigious than the Cy Young Award.
But I can't support making a complete laughingstock of the MVP voting by having some writers include pitchers and some exclude them. When the rules for selection are not followed uniformly, the MVP award quickly becomes completely chaotic and meaningless.
Number 2: Pedro's team didn't win anything. Oh, please, don't give me this one. Pedro's team couldn't hit a lick. How was Pedro supposed to affect that? Baseball is a team game like no other -- no one player, no matter who he is, can go anywhere without a surrounding cast of world-beaters. Pedro certainly did not have that. For more on this whole issue, see this previous column, beginning where it says "Next Topic:". (Or look below to the argument for number 4, and ask yourself whether it's fair to award MVP trophies on the basis of team performance when one player's actions can never comprise more than 8 percent of a team's total efforts.)
Number 3: Pedro's win-loss record is unspectacular. True, it is -- it's 18-6. Now ask me if I care. At fault is, again, the Red Sox hitters, who gave him only 4.73 runs per nine innings to work with. Out of the 40 American League starters that qualified for the ERA title, that figure ranks 32nd.
Let's look at Martinez' six losses:
Date IP H R ER BB SO
May 6 9 6 1 1 1 17
May 23 8 7 3 3 3 7
June 20 8 5 3 3 1 9
Aug. 8 8 3 2 2 0 9
Sep. 9 7 4 3 3 2 9
Sep. 20 8 5 1 1 1 9
A 2.44 ERA in his losses. And not a dud in the bunch. Not one true off day -- not one single, solitary loss that he actually deserved. I admit, I haven't checked all his wins and no-decisions -- there are probably a few starts in there that weren't up to par. But still, those are some amazing losses. Not in my whole career as a baseball nerd have I seen a pitcher whose every single loss deserved to be a win.
I think everyone in baseball is slowly starting to discover that win-loss records, more than any statistic, need to be taken with heavy grains of salt.
Number 4: A starting pitcher only plays in one-fifth of his teams' games, and therefore can never be as valuable as a position player. This is another one of those preposterous arguments that still persists in people's minds, somehow. Yes, a starter only appears in one-fifith of his teams' games. But in those games, he has a much, much higher stake in whether the team wins or loses than any other player on the team.
This gets really mathematical and hairy, so feel free to skip down to where it says ANYWAY if you don't need convincing on this issue.
OK, there are two halves to winning a baseball game: Scoring runs and preventing the opposition from scoring runs. So half of your value is in your hitters, and half is in your pitchers and defense. Mind you, all we're measuring here is time spent playing, not any measurement of effectiveness in that time.
Those are the only precise numbers from here on out -- the rest are in the "fuzzy math" category, to borrow a phrase. But they actually will help, in their indefinite way, in shedding some light on this issue.
Each individual hitter comprises somewhere around one-ninth of the offense, depending on where he bats in the lineup. So a DH's stake in the entire game is about one-half times one-ninth, or one-eighteenth. That's about 5.56 percent. And that's the entire DH position -- only a day-in-day-out guy like Edgar Martinez would reach that height.
Every other hitter has a larger stake in the game, because he also plays the field. How much more? Well, we'll have to divvy up the runs-preventing side to find out. Let's put the non-DH hitters on hold.
The run-preventing half is harder to quantify. If I had some complicated statistical metrics on hand, I might be able. But I would estimate that the contributions of the pitchers comprise about four-fifths of the run-preventing half, and the defense about one-fifth of the half.
Where is this estimate coming from? My butt, mostly. But also from baseball historian Bill James, who gave the same number, warily, in a past article. And Bill James is much smarter than me, so I usually trust what he says.
In terms of the whole game, that's four fifths times one half. So the pitching staff as a whole has a stake in two-fifths of the game. Now, how much for each individual pitcher?
Depends on the pitcher's role. The more innings the pitcher has, the higher of a stake he has in the game. The maximum humanly possible would be a starter who completed all his games and went out there every fifth day. That's one fifth of the pitching, and since pitching is two-fifths of the whole game, that's one-fifth times two-fifths. That makes the all the actions made by Joe "Iron Man" Rubberarm a full 8 percent of the team's total efforts.
How close is Pedro to that 8 percent ceiling? He pitched 217 of Boston pitchers' 1452 innings, which computes to 15 percent. It's less than the 20 percent that would come from a freakishly hardy starter, but it's not bad.
So for Pedro, we'll do 15 percent of two-fifths. That means Pedro is accountable for six percent of Boston's total attack. His stake is higher than the sum of all of Boston's DHs, though by a miniscule amount.
Now we have to divvy up the defense -- Good God, we've been through enough already. But we have to finish this.
Suffice to say, we're splitting one-fifth of one-half (i.e., one tenth) of the game among nine players, and not evenly. The shortstop makes more plays than the right fielder, and thus has a higher stake and should get a higher percentage.
What's the maximum that one player might have in the defense? Say, one-fifth, by the shortstop? Heck, that sounds right (again, I apologize for the impreciseness of these numbers. But for a rough conclusion, rough numbers should get the point across). And again, keep in mind that that's a shortstop who plays every inning, a Cal Ripken.
That's one fifth of one-tenth, or one-fiftieth, aka two percent. So we'll be nice and give Nomar Garciaparra that two percent, which we add to the 5.56 percent -- actually, hold on, before we do that, we can precisely compute Nomar's stake in the offense, just like we computed Pedro's stake in the pitching.
Boston hitters had 6283 plate appearances last year. Nomar had 592 of those. That's 9.4 percent of the offense. He did a lot with that 9.4 percent, granted, but it's still only 9.4 percent of the at-bats, and therefore 9.4 percent of the total offense (which goes a long way towards explaining why Boston had such a terrible offense despite owning Nomar and his wonderous bat).
Offense is only half, though, so you have to multiply 9.4 percent times one-half. That gives you 4.7 percent. Add that to that two percent for his defense, and you get 6.7 percent.
And what about Pedro's defense? Out of all the players on the field, the pitchers are responsible for the fewest fielding plays. If the shortstop gets two percent, I'd give the pitcher one-tenth of one percent.
So what do we have at the end? Pedro's stake in the game is 6.1 percent. Nomar's is 6.7 percent. It's a miniscule difference, made all the more insignificant by the fact that the numbers above are very imprecise.
But you get the general idea. The point is that, when comparing the relative value of pitchers and hitters, it doesn't matter if you play every day, it matters how much you play when you do play, and therefore how much your play can affect the outcome of the game. And starters have so much more effect on the games that they do play, that they make themselves just as valuable as those who bat five times and play a tough defensive position every day.
ANYWAY
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I have a little humility. There may be things I've overlooked or just not discovered. I haven't closed my mind completely to a non-Pedro winning the AL MVP. Hey, just a month ago, I was convinced that Carlos Delgado deserved it -- I was young and foolish then. If you have an argument, or a comment of any stripe, e-mail me.
Previous Diatribes ? I Mean, Columns:
- More Yankees Talk, Jim Rice A HOFer?
- Clemens, Yankees Deserve Each Other
- Tony La Russa Must Go
- Yankees Have The Edge, Plus More MVP Talk
- The NL MVP, Cy Young, And ROY Are ...
- Who Would You Put In The Hall of Fame?
- Why The Cubs Stink: Too Much Love
- Baseball's Public Enemies
- What Kind Of Baseball Expert Are You?
