Baseball’s award season officially culminated in the MVP Awards tonight, and for the second time in three years, Andrew McCutchen finished third in the balloting. Of course, he won the award in the season he didn’t finish third, so he’s on a pretty solid run. Clayton Kershaw won the award, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise, and Giancarlo Stanton finished second. Josh Harrison finished in ninth place and showed up on 17 ballots (out of 30), mostly in ninth and tenth place but reaching as high as fourth. Russell Martin was 13th.
I don’t really have a huge problem with Kershaw winning the award — he was pretty clearly the best baseball player in the National League this year and the MVP award nominally doesn’t have any sort of position restriction in its guidelines. I do have a problem with the seemingly arbitrary way that the award is given to pitchers; it’s not hugly uncommon for a pitcher to have the highest WAR in the AL or NL but I feel like recently pitchers are given an MVP Award as a sort of career achievement award that comes coupled with an incredible win/loss record. Kershaw’s been great the last four years and he was especially great this year; I just wish that there was a little more consistency with the way that pitchers are considered for the award.
The honest truth is that I think the voters were just a little bored with McCutchen this year. By a lot of standards, his 2014 season could have been pure MVP bait. The Pirates finished May with a 25-30 record. McCutchen hit .421/.492/.947 with seven homers and nine doubles in his next 14 games (let that sink in for a second) and the Pirates went 9-5 in those games. In the 26 games after that, McCutchen technically cooled off some, but still hit .311/.368/.612 with 7 doubles, 3, triples, and 6 homers, and the Pirates rolled into the All-Star Break as contenders in the NL. On August 2nd, McCutchen got hit in the spine because of chickenshit Diamondback baseball. He played the next day, then missed two weeks with a rib injury. The Pirates lost the last six games that he missed, dropping from the first wild card spot to fourth place in the wild card race. He returned and despite clearly not being 100% at times, still hit .325/.409/.559 in his last 37 games. The Pirates went 24-13 and coasted into their second straight wild card spot. The Pirates were one of the best teams in the National League, and Andrew McCutchen is unquestionably their best player; maybe he didn’t single-handedly drag them out of the doldrums in June (he had help from Josh Harrison) or after his injury (Francisco Liriano, Gerrit Cole, and Starling Marte all had supporting roles), but the Pirates can only be the Pirates because of Andrew McCutchen.
Let’s take one second to sit back and appreciate this: in Andrew McCutchen’s first three years, he hit .276/.365/.458. He was a solid player, an All-Star, and he was playing about how everyone expected him to play. In the last three years, he’s been an MVP finalist three times. He’s hit .320/.405/.534. The only player that you can say has been better than Andrew McCutchen with any certainty from 2012-2014 is Mike Trout. Andrew McCutchen isn’t just a star or even a superstar, he’s been one of THE superstars in baseball the last three seasons, and he somehow seems to get a little bit better at the plate every single year. Seeing him put another MVP Award on his shelf would’ve been nice, but the award is just hardware; nothing can change the fact that Andrew McCutchen has been the on-field engine that’s driven the Pirates’ resurrection these last two years. He’s signed through 2018, so here’s to four more.
