This was far easier than I thought it would be. I had my coffee(s), opened 20 tabs on Baseball-Reference, Fangraphs, Baseball Prospectus and Baseball Savant and prepared to dig into bWAR, fWAR, wRC+, OPS+, BWARP, DRC+, xFIP, K%-BB%, SIERA in addition to games played, innings pitched and a few others. Two stats I did not look at, with the exception of considering managers, were wins and losses. How good a player’s teammates performed this season has nothing – repeat, nothing – to do with an individual’s value and contributions to winning.
But none of these decisions took more than a cursory glance at a few numbers – each of the following choices was clear as a sunny fall day. So without further ado – by the shine off of the MVP award of Willie Hernandez, here are your 2019 MLB award winners:
AL MVP: Trout
Bregman and Semien would have cases in some seasons – not this one.
NL MVP: Yelich
Bellinger, Marte and Rendon were great this season and deserve recognition – but Yelich was just better than all of them.
AL ROY: Alvarez
No commentary necessary.
NL ROY: Alonso
No commentary necessary.
AL Cy Young: Cole
Verlander had an insane season and he wasn’t even the best on his own team. Cole is scary…
NL Cy Young: Scherzer
Sorry Mets fans – Max was better than Jake this season, and it really wasn’t as close as I thought it would be.
Managers of the year:
Given the number of things we don’t see and don’t know, there’s no way we can determine who the best manager was. That being said, in the AL Hinch and Melvin were great as usual and you certainly would be OK with Boone or Baldelli getting the award. In the NL it’d be tough to argue against Dave Roberts.
Did I get something wrong? Let me know
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