Mookie Betts needed a career year to beat the redoubtable Mike Trout as the American League's Most Valuable Player this year. And, he got it.By Yours Truly
Mookie Betts during the World Series didn’t hit much but he made his hits count. Especially the one-out bomb he hit off Clayton Kershaw to put Game Five out of the Dodgers' reach and the rings closer to the Red Sox's reach. If charm was in the eye of the beholder during the Series no matter how likeable this year’s winning Red Sox proved, Betts charmed the nation even more after Game Two.
The lad whose parents chose his full name to give him the initials MLB took a cousin and, outside Fenway Park following Game Two of the World Series, they fed steak tips and chicken to any homeless they found around that immediate area.
“It’s not the first time I’ve done it,†Betts said. “It wasn’t supposed to get (the notices) it got.†He and his cousin dressed in ordinary hoodies to do the good deed. Apparently, someone recognized Betts anyway and tipped a local radio station where former Red Sox infielder Lou Merloni mentioned it on social media. So much for just doing good.
The deed even caught the eye and ear of Hall of Famer Hank Aaron, who happened to have hit Los Angeles where the Series continued (and ended) to give his namesake award to Betts’s slugging teammate J.D. Martinez and the National League’s ultimate Most Valuable Player, Christian Yelich.
“No question about it,†Aaron said. “[Betts] is a role model. When you thinkg about who he is, where he is, he certainly is a role model.â€
But you don’t win a Most Valuable Player award by being a role model. You win it by being a player of real, tangible value to your team on the field. And that’s how Betts beat out the redoubtable Angel, Mike Trout, to win this year’s American League MVP. That and perhaps his American League batting championship and league-leading slugging percentage.
It isn’t every season when you get two MVP candidates who happen to be a) the best player in the league this year, arguably, versus b) the best player in the game, period, for eight years running and counting, and c) nice, likeable young men while they’re at it. If you measure Betts and Trout according to wins above a replacement level player, it says plenty for both that Betts beat Trout by a sliver in that metric.
He beat Trout almost as overwhelmingly for the AL MVP as Jacob deGrom beat Max Scherzer for the NL’s Cy Young Award. Out of 29 possible first place votes, Betts nailed 28 and Trout, one; out of the same number of second place votes, Trout bagged 24 to Betts’s 2. Betts didn’t get lower than second place votes; Trout got two third place, one fourth place, and two fifth place votes.
Betts finished with 10.9 WAR to Trout’s 10.2. They were
that close. By WAR Trout was the better player at the plate and on the bases (9.2 to Betts’s 8.7) and Betts the better player in the outfield (1.8 for the right fielder against center fielder Trout’s 1.2). The differences between them were about as thick as a sheet of paper.
But Betts had to have a career year to beat a Trout who had the best season of a career to date in which just about every season he’s played has been a career year. Trout has to settle for having led his league in reaching base (.460 on-base percentage plus 279 times on base; Betts was fourth in the latter with 269), OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage: 1.088), OPS+ (adjusted to your parks, about which more anon: 199), walks (122), and intentional walks (25).
Betts worked out 91 walks and was walked intentionally eight times. Even allowing that Trout’s team, unfortunately, wasn’t (and hasn’t been, for just about his entire career) even close to being as good as its best player, pitchers generally still fear his destruction more. With lesser men to do the clutch hitting behind him of course they’re going to walk Trout where they can get away with it. Betts was able to tie (with the Indians’ Francisco Lindor) for the league lead in runs scored (129) because he had a lineup better able to get him home.
And the lone voting writer to hand Trout a first-place MVP vote, Jeff Wilson of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram, isn’t exactly shy about
saying why.
Wilson observes that Betts was one third of baseball’s arguable best defensive outfield in 2018 even as he thinks it’s silly for Trout never to have won a Gold Glove despite his own stellar enough defense. “He catches everything,†Wilson writes about Trout. “Every. Thing. His arm is not the strongest around and is one teams feel they can run against, but Trout throws accurately and makes up for his lack of arm strength with route running and the speed with which he gets to balls.â€
And if you’re one of those people who look at it this way, Trout plays a more demanding outfield position than Betts. Center fielders have usually been thought to have the tougher job than right fielders because they have far more ground to cover even with swift, agile, rangy, and soft handed men flanking them on either or both sides.
Betts is a gazelle in right field. There are few at his position who hold their ground and turn the right field line and corner into such a personal playpen as he does. And he’s swift and agile enough that Red Sox manager Alex Cora thought nothing of playing musical outfielders when need be to get the better gloves where they needed enemy hitters to hit them in the postseason, with Betts usually being shifted to center field in those switches.
And Betts is swift enough. He had an .833 stolen base percentage, making the grand theft thirty out of thirty-six times. Trout tried 26 times and was put under arrest only twice, a .923 stolen base percentage. They both turned up among the league’s ten most wanted (nobody got too close to the Royals’ Whit Merrifield for American League basepath crime this year), but even finishing ninth Trout was a tougher Road Runner for the league’s Wile E. Coyotes to bag.
Wilson also made note of something else. Trout plays in a tougher home ballpark in which to hit than Betts does. They’re both righthanded hitters but Trout’s Angel Stadium isn’t exactly the hitter’s paradise Betts’s Fenway Park is, and that’s allowing for Betts and Trout have just about equivalent ability to hit the opposite way. And when it comes to that OPS+, which adjusts for the park effect, Trout’s 199 beat Betts’s 186 and everyone else in the American League.
“(B)eing dubious of defensive metrics and a big fan of adjusted OPS+,†Wilson writes, “is how Trout, the best player in baseball who had the best season of his career, reached the top of my ballot.â€
Fair enough. And that’s a damn sight more valid a reason to favour Trout over Betts than a writer named Ken Gurnick exercised when he refused publicly to vote for Greg Maddux for the Hall of Fame. Gurnick said he wouldn’t vote for anyone whose career in any portion fell during the era of actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances. The fact that Maddux was never a suspect for using them made no difference to a writer who’d also voted rather hypocritically for Jack Morris—whose final seven seasons entered that era and who was likewise never suspected.
But it tells you something about the impression Betts made this year that he had to beat a player who dealt for the second straight season with an injury that took him out of action for a decent period. And it should tell you just how great Trout is that he could miss two thirds of August and still give Betts a run for his money, finishing with only a sheet of paper between them for earning WAR.
In case you were curious, four players across the board this year earned 10.0 WAR or better and two of them were pitchers: Jacob deGrom, the National League’s Cy Young Award winner, and the Phillies’ Aaron Nola. (Nola’s misfortune was to come out great in a 2018 in which deGrom came out leaving the charts about three planets behind.)
Think about that: Mookie Betts had to have a career year, which is
exactly what he did, on baseball’s best team this year, to beat out a Mike Trout who had the best season to date, despite missing time on the disabled list, in a career in which every full season he’s played has been a career year for a team that plays too often as though they don’t deserve him.
Betts looked special enough from the moment he came up with the Red Sox until the Red Sox finally found a permanent field position for him. (He arose as a second baseman who just wasn’t going to unseat Dustin Pedroia before injuries started making Pedroia’s baseball life miserable.) Once they did, the performances began to equal the talent. This year, Betts was better than his formidable talent.
Yes, Martinez looked like a Triple Crown threat this season and produced more runs than Betts. But Betts, the leadoff hitter, looked like Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson without the glandular stolen base totals or the ego.
Betts might not have looked quite as good in the postseason as he did on the regular season, but they vote the MVP before the postseason, and Betts was easily the number one reason among a shipload of them why the Red Sox ran away with the AL East and got to the postseason in the first place. If the Red Sox are thinking ahead toward locking him down long term, before he meets his first eligible free agency date at 27 after 2020, it would not be unreasonable thinking.
Betts has one less MVP award than Trout, but he has one other thing over the Angel boy. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, Trout has never bowled a perfect game.
Betts did that last November. If God forbid something knocks him out of baseball, he could have a career on the professional bowlers’ tour if he wants it. Not as much glamour as earning more than enough to feed the homeless around Fenway Park, but at least enough to keep him and his family living well.
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