Is Manny Ramirez failing to ever win American League MVP the biggest award atrocity in the history of organized athletics? (Patreon)

by Alex Rubenstein

End-of-season award voting is a prototypical source of angst, controversy, and debate among the sports-following community.

There have been countless award-winning player-seasons that can be regarded as a decision that’s curious at best. In the NBA, some examples that spring to mind are 1973 Dave Cowens nagging NBA MVP over Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, 2011 Derrick Rose winning it over LeBron James or Dwight Howard and 2017 Russell Westbrook winning MVP over James Harden.

In the NFL, kicker Mark Moseley winning league MVP over Marcus Allen or Dan Fouts in 1982 was flat-out preposterous. And admittedly because he’s my all-time favorite athlete, I will fight to the death on the slam-dunk merit that Justin Smith should’ve been the runaway winner for Defensive Player of the Year in 2011 instead of Terrell Suggs.

In MLB, there was a fella in Toronto who was consistently snubbed for the Cy Young Award, plus five more winners jump off the screen as fraudulent. In no particular order:

John Smoltz over Kevin Brown in 1996 was a helluva head-scratcher and a classic example of overvaluing a pitcher’s win-loss record and team success. In 1980, Steve Stone somehow won it over Mike Norris and Rudy May, In 1971, Fergie Jenkins inexplicably won it over several guys, but Tom Seaver in particular was egregious. In 1967, Jim Lonborg’s team winning the pennant isn’t nearly enough to justify taking home AL Cy Young over Joe Horlen, especially with an ERA only slightly better than average. In 1990, Roger Clemens’ Wins Above Replacement was 10.4, to this day a top-10 mark of the live-ball era. The guy who beat him out? Bob Welch, who didn’t even reside in the top-20 … just in 1990: But alas, backed by awesome run support, Welch’s 27 wins made everyone drunk on stupidity.

Welch also was likely only the 3rd-best pitcher on his own team behind Dave Stewart and closer Dennis Eckersley -- and even that probably requires treading lightly in deference to Gene Nelson’s 75 brilliant innings out of the pen in a bizarro outlier season of his career. Speaking of not even stacking up well within the context of his own team, here is the OPS of every St. Louis Cardinal who got regular playing time in 1944:

The idea that that gentleman in 2nd-to-last place on his own team, Marty Marion, could even be considered MVP of just the Cardinals is outrageous, right? In reality, he was voted MVP of the entire National League. Marion was a lovely defensive shortstop, but with an OPS of .686, he came in south of the NL average of .689 -- a figure which even takes into account pitchers. It doesn’t matter if you field like Brennan Huff sings, we can’t be living in a society where literally below league-average hitters are running around winning MVPs.

That’s just one example of a robust inventory of irrational MVP voting throughout baseball history. One example worth citing to start is 2022, where Aaron Judge won AL MVP a little bit because the Yanks won their division, but a lot because his 62 homers edged 1961 Roger Maris by one for the single-season American League home run record. It was certainly a marvelous hitting campaign – he also batted .311 with an OPS over 90 points higher than AL runner-up whilst easily racking up by far the most walks and total bases in the league – but these awards are a function of your performance relative to your peers in that specific season. Breaking records oughta serve as a feather in a cap or perhaps a tiebreaker in an extremely close race, but I strongly believe they ought not be a driving force or primary argument. The happenings of past seasons should be considered mostly irrelevant here.

Afterall, if ‘61 Maris had hit 63 dingers instead of 61, that wouldn’t have somehow inherently rendered Judge’s ‘22 season to be less valuable because he would’ve fallen shy of the record by one as opposed to breaking it by one; ipso facto it follows that Maris having hit 61 homers instead of 63 doesn’t in a vacuum render Judge’s ‘22 season to be more valuable than the other way around.

His 2022 season relative to his peers was his 2022 season relative to his peers, regardless of any numbers anyone in the past did or didn’t post. A lot of years – even most – Judge’s numbers from that season would’ve been good enough relative to his brethren to win MVP. But in 2022 specifically, if Judge happened to have an American League peer, who, say, was some sort of unicorn who was somehow a top-5 bat and a top-5 arm, obviously that guy should have been MVP, even over someone who’d had as fantastic a (only) hitting season as Judge had. Oh wait, that unicorn existed:

Sorry, but that guy deserved MVP, even without making the playoffs. Being a top-5 pitcher provided a level of value that far surpassed even the sizable gap in value that existed between the two as hitters, to the point it’s a crime Ohtani didn’t take home the award. You could argue being merely an above-average relief pitcher should’ve been enough to win MVP given his exploits at the dish, let alone being a dominant high-innings starter. And vice versa.

I strongly, strongly, strongly suspect that if ‘61 Maris had indeed hit 63 homers instead of 61, Ohtani would’ve won ‘22 AL MVP – perhaps even in a landslide – over Judge. One could hold the belief that Judge was the deserving winner in 2022, but the only way that could be a rational stance is if said person would still think he was more deserving than Ohtani even if ‘61 Maris had happened to hit a couple more dingers.

So the siren song of the almighty round number was the reason for the identity of the 2017 NBA MVP recipient, and the home run total of someone over 60 years earlier seems a likely reason for the identity of the 2022 American League MVP recipient. There are some other gems as well:

In 1979, the player who was clearly the AL’s best hitter was also a Gold Glove-winning center fielder. Yet Fred Lynn didn’t get a single 1st-place vote, losing out to Don Baylor, whose OPS was over 150 points lower and who was a DH/mediocre corner outfielder. Far too much emphasis on Baylor’s Angels having parlayed their worse-than-Lynn’s-Red-Sox record into a division championship.

Similar story happened 15 years earlier in 1964 when Ken Boyer’s presence on a pennant-winning squad catapulted him -- not Willie Mays -- to NL MVP. The driving force of Mays’ argument is that he was a Gold Glove-winning, outstanding centerfielder whose league-leading OPS was over 130 points higher than Boyer’s and who hit over 42% more homers than any other National Leaguer. The feather in his cap is becoming just the 4th-ever NL position player (1908 Honus Wagner, 1924 Rogers Hornsby, and 1948 Stan Musial) with a single-season WAR that reached 11. Didn’t matter. Didn’t even finish in the top-5. Scientists for generations have been spending their entire lives studying how Johnny Callison got 1st-place votes (and a runner-up finish) and Mays didn’t.

Additionally, I don’t care how many bases he stole, Maury Wills winning NL MVP in 1962 over Frank Robinson, Hank Aaron, and especially the pennant-winning Willie Mays is hysterical.

Mays was flagrantly robbed again in 1960 when the Gold Glove-winning center fielder stole the 4th-most bases in the league whilst posting an OPS that was 170 points higher than the non-Gold Glove-winning, non-base-stealing Dick Groat, who also drove in less than half as many runs as Mays (decent cases for runner-up can be made for Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, and Frank Robinson; no decent case, however, can be made for Groat or actual runner-up Don Hoak from sniffing such lofty heights).

And Frank McCormick’s Reds winning the 1940 pennant doesn’t come close to justifying his landing MVP over Johnny Mize.

In 1937, the pennant-winning Yankees got incredible seasons from both Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio, yet Tigers second baseman Charlie Gehringer walked away with the league’s MVP. Though that’s not even Gehrig’s greatest snub -- three years earlier his OPS exceeded that of actual MVP Mickey Cochrane by over 330 points, with another two far inferior Tigers notoriously placing above Lou thanks to seven more team wins. Speaking of Cochrane, he committed even worse robbery in 1928 over a much more deserving player, like, say, Goose Goslin or Heinie Manush.

The good, good voting folks of 1925 apparently all had their cats walking on their typewriter, somehow resulting in Roger Peckinpaugh winning MVP instead of Harry Heilmann or Al Simmons. Awesome.

We then have the great Manny Ramirez. Who wasn’t awarded MVP ... ever.

Zooming out to examine entire careers is a different beast. Sure, while it can be pointed out that legendary athletes such as Drew Brees or Dwyane Wade never won a regular season MVP in their entire careers, there’s not really a specific season that they were more deserving than the guy who wound up winning. For instance, Wade’s top season was likely 2008-09, but it’s hard to say LeBron James’ dragging of Mo Williams and Andy Varejao to 66 wins wasn’t even more deserving.

A real egregious example that is worth shining a light on is that Tim Duncan never won NBA Defensive Player of the Year when he should probably have won at least 3-5 of those suckers. Making it exponentially more baffling: he never even finished 2nd in the voting. Yes it’s relative to that specific season, but Josh honest-to-goodness Smith has finished a season in the top-2 in DPOY voting. But Tim Duncan hasn’t? Cuckoo.

Yet Ramirez never winning an MVP is somehow on another level entirely. What makes it so incredible is that, while the NFL gives out not an NFC MVP and an AFC MVP, but rather a single overall MVP; while the NBA doles out not an Eastern Conference MVP and a Western Conference MVP, but rather a single overall MVP, that is not the case in MLB.

There is an American League MVP and a National League MVP, so one needs only to be the most valuable player of roughly half of MLB to ostensibly win the award. As a cherry on top, and the reason for the word ‘roughly’ in the previous sentence, for most of that 1995-06 window there were fewer teams in Ramirez’s American League than there were in the National League thanks to the Brewers switching from the AL to the NL following the 1997 season.

And at that time not only was he competing for the award in a league containing just 13 of the other 29 MLB squads, it was the league that didn’t have MVP magnets and two of the best all-time bats -- Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols -- as they resided in the National League.

As far as the ever-important team success component, Manny’s team had a winning record in all 12 of those seasons:

Eight of them resulted in playoff appearances -- and in two of the four that didn’t, they still won at least 90 games.

Also amazingly enough, just like Duncan with Defensive Player of the Year in the NBA, and further separating himself from many other MLB greats that never won Most Valuable Player, Ramirez was never even a runner-up for MVP of just the American League. It demands an investigation into relitigating each and every one of the seasons from his 12-year peak of 1995 through 2006 (the Dodgers portion of his ‘08 season – when he placed 4th in NL MVP voting despite spending less than a third of the season in the NL – excepted).

The core metric that will be used throughout to assess batting performance will be on-base percentage + slugging percentage, or OPS. Other batting elements and facets of the game will certainly be broached, explored, and discussed, but OPS’ll always be a focal point.

To generally underscore the brilliance of Manny Ramirez’s career, his OPS exceeded .950 in each and every one of those peak seasons. 12 straight years topping .950! Here is everyone in big league history that’s ever done that in even five consecutive seasons:

*I’d be remiss by not acknowledging that Bonds was a few plate appearances in ‘99 shy of a much more absurd streak, the lone asterisk with which he’s ever associated.

So that one feather in his cap pretty much single-handedly warrants Ramirez’s inclusion among names like Pujols, Aaron, Foxx, Mays, A-Rod when discussing the greatest right-handed bats ever. Yet somehow none of those 12 seasons came with an MVP award (or a runner-up) attached. 

Granted he didn’t excel on the margins -- he wasn’t exactly ever anything to write home about defensively as a corner outfielder and no opponent ever lost sleep over a fear of him swiping bags or otherwise wreaking havoc on the basepath. But it shouldn’t have mattered that he didn’t make noise in all facets of the game. His bat was beyond loud enough to justify joining the likes of Sammy Sosa, Giancarlo Stanton, Ryan Howard, Justin Morneau, and plenty others in winning MVP despite offering little other than their hitting proficiency.

Some more context on an OPS of .950: there were recently MVPs in back-to-back-to-back-to-back years (2013 Andrew McCutchen, 2014 Mike Trout, 2015 Josh Donaldson, 2016 Kris Bryant) without meeting the minimum threshold that Ramirez exceeded in each of those 12 straight seasons, usually by a lot.

It’s not even all that rare to see guys with an OPS south of .900 that have won it, such as 2008 Dustin Pedroia, 2007 Jimmy Rollins, and, oh, those aforementioned literally below-average-OPS seasons of Wills in 1962 and Marion in 1944.

For more context: Bryce Harper, who failed to record an OPS of even .900 in six of his first eight seasons, was still considered at a level so high that the Phillies gave him a contract rivaling the annual GDP of some small countries.

So for someone to have cleared .950 every year for 12 straight years -- seven of which came in above 1.000 with two north of 1.100 -- and not come away with a single MVP trophy (or runner-up!) is simply mystifying.

While the injury bug did take a good bite during two of those years (2000 & 2002), it wasn’t enough to stop him from topping 500 plate appearances in those, or any of the other 10 seasons, and his annual average was over 600 -- so his rate metrics were never aided by small samples. And though missing around a quarter of the season as he twice did is certainly a decent chunk, it’s not as though it would be unprecedented to still win MVP, as evidenced by the 45 games George Brett missed in 1980, the 36 missed by Willie Stargell the year before that, or the 39 missed by Mickey Mantle in 1962. So what the hell happened? And which years can we specifically identify, based on the production of both him and his American League brethren, where he got the rawest deals?

For those first three seasons of 1995-97, even though he was awesome in all of ‘em, there’s little to quibble with in terms of not having won (or been a runner-up for) AL MVP in any of ‘em, though he did somehow fail to receive any votes in ‘96 or ‘97 when some much, much, much inferior players did.

1995

As strong a season as Ramirez had, posting an OPS of .960 while driving in over 100 runs, there’s a pretty clear duo that should constitute the top-2 -- and neither player is Mo Vaughn, the actual winner. 

Ramirez’s teammate in Cleveland’s outfield, Albert Belle, reached 50 homers and 50 doubles. Though ‘01 Todd Helton came close, it remains the only 50/50 campaign to this day. Even in a strike-shortened season, he had 103 extra-base hits when no one else had had come within 10 of that in a season since Stan Musial nearly a half-century earlier:

To do so required him to record an extra-base hit on 18.9% of his at-bats, a single-season mark that only Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig had ever reached in the time prior, and that only Barry Bonds has in the time since.

Combined with playing for a team that was victorious 100 times in a season cut short by 18 games (thus constituting the best single-season winning percentage in over 40 years), Belle deserved a top-2 spot.

The other spot should have gone to Seattle’s Edgar Martinez, who somehow managed an even higher OPS than did Belle while leading the Mariners to their first-ever postseason appearance. That oughta be enough to overcome the fact that, being primarily a designated hitter, he only played 56 innings in the field. Which is always frowned upon. Unfortunately for him it’s just a regular season award, because if it also encapsulated that ALDS, they’d probably have to re-name the entire award after his ‘95 season.

Also deserving higher placement than Ramirez were first basemen Vaughn, Frank Thomas, and perhaps even Mark McGwire, who broke Babe Ruth’s 1920 record for single-season home run rate by going yard every 8.13 at-bats to go along with an outstanding .441 on-base percentage. But he missed 40 games in what wasn’t even considered a full season. Being out nearly 28% of the year for a losing A’s team while not being a defensive factor is a hell of a combo to overcome, especially given the strength of the field. Throw Angels right fielder Tim Salmon in there too.

So can’t really craft a case for Manny being atop the voting in 1995. But also the man shouldn’t have finished behind Gary Gaetti in it, either.

1996

Another great year from Manny, but another season where it’s tough to fashion too much of an argument against the players who finished with the top two spots (though this year’s MVP race was dripping in flexibility for how one wants to weigh the sliding scale of defense vs. team success): the Rangers’ Juan Gonzalez and the Mariners’ Alex Rodriguez. Although it is still a bit perplexing to grasp the rationale for Gonzalez finishing above Belle.

Gonzalez’s team won nine fewer games, he walked less than half as much (the main contributor to his OPS being lower than Belle’s), he tore a quad in May which cost him a fair amount of time (and meant less impressive placement on that scatter), and while his Rangers won 53.7% of the 134 games he played, they didn’t exactly miss him too much when he didn’t; they won 62.1% of the 29 games Juan was Gone. Neither corner outfielder offered much other than their abilities at the plate.

While A-Rod’s Mariners missed the playoffs which is always a big knock on a case, what he did with his bat alone was remarkable enough to finish where he did, let alone to have complemented it by being a slick-fielding shortstop who was a baserunning threat.

His Gold Glove center field teammate Ken Griffey, Jr. (defensive difference-maker, non-playoff team) and Cleveland third baseman Jim Thome (not a defensive difference-maker but had by far the best OPS of anyone to make the playoffs, yet somehow finished 15th) should have rounded out the top-5 ahead of Oriole center fielder Brady Anderson’s weirdo season.

McGwire (who again homered every 8.13 at-bats and maintained an even better OBP -- .467, tops in MLB -- across nearly 550 plate appearances; lest one think the smaller sample was the sole reason for his rate metrics of ‘95), Thomas, and Vaughn don’t get points for either great fielding or postseason qualification, though they too have stronger cases to occupy spots 7-9 than Manny (his presence on MLB’s top regular season team notwithstanding).

The 10-12 range, alongside Edgar Martinez and Orioles first baseman Rafael Palmeiro feels about right, but as previously mentioned, he didn’t even appear on the ballot. Wanna know who was one of the 21 players that did? Terry Steinbach.

1997

This was Ken Griffey Jr.’s year. While The Big Hurt did hold a 39-point OPS advantage over Junior, he was also a first baseman for a losing team. Griffey overcame that OPS deficit as a Gold Glove center fielder for a division champion while reaching a home run total (56) MLB hadn’t seen in any of the previous 35 years and standing out on that volume-based scatter chart.

Thomas probably deserved to finish 2nd, then compelling cases can be made for Martinezes Tino and Edgar, as well as a couple of Ramirez’s teammates – Jim Thome and new trade acquisition/Belle replacement David Justice – to be next in line ahead of Manny.

That’s six players that pretty objectively should’ve finished higher in MVP voting. Manny should have then likely placed somewhere in the 7-13 range alongside folks like Vaughn, Gonzalez, Salmon, Red Sox shortstop Nomar Garciaparra, and Yankee outfielders Bernie Williams and Paul O’Neill. Maybe 7-15 to account for the potential placement of pitchers like Randy Johnson and Roger Clemens.

But in reality Manny was also again somehow left completely off the 29-man ballot. In a goof for the ages, Deivi Cruz wasn’t.

1998

Ok, now it starts getting interesting. Manny was great each of the previous three seasons, but definitively shouldn’t have won MVP (or been runner-up) in any of ‘em. That’s not the case anymore. OPS leader Albert Belle’s White Sox were a losing team, which severely limits Belle’s case given his lack of non-hitting contributions.

Each of the American League’s three division winners had a player sporting an OPS of .997, but New York’s (Williams) and Cleveland’s (Thome), both missed over 30 games, which left them lacking in the volume department, and they didn’t quite separate themselves enough on a rate basis to make up for that in a meaningful way.

The third, Texas’ Juan Gonzalez, took home the award in a season well-known for him having had over 100 RBI by the All-Star break when no one else had driven in more than 91 runs by the Midsummer Classic since 1935 Hank Greenberg. It was a reasonable choice, though it also would’ve been reasonable for it to have gone to Manny, a fellow division winner.

Griffey, who played for a losing team but supplemented another 56-homer season with playing a Gold Glove center field and stealing 20 bases, had an equally strong case as well -- with guys like Belle, Vaughn, and Garciaparra just ever-so-slightly behind the Gonzalez/Ramirez/Griffey trio. The final verdict here is any order of that latter trio would’ve been reasonable to fill the 1-2-3 slots.

So while it’s not some tragedy that Manny didn’t win (or be runner-up), he also had what was probably no worse than the 2nd-best season at the plate of any American Leaguer who made the playoffs, and it would have been totally acceptable if he had. And he definitely shouldn’t have wound up placing 6th and looking up at Derek Jeter in the voting.

As it relates to winning AL MVP (or being the runner-up), 1998 was our first of many seasons where he happened to, at the very least, draw the short straw. In 1999, no such benefit-of-the-doubt-type hedge applies.

There should have only been one straw, and it should’ve been embroidered in the most permanent of ink with Manny’s name.

1999

This one’s inexcusable. Texas Rangers catcher Pudge Rodriguez won it, and there was clearly too much emphasis on his marvelous Gold Glove-winning season behind the plate in which he threw out 55% of baserunners trying to steal when no other regular AL catcher topped 40%. He also certainly had a lovely season with his bat, especially for a catcher, and even stole 25 bases. But, no. Still inexcusable. This one had to go to Manny.

While as a general rule of thumb it should be safe to figure that someone who is by far the best player on a division champ whilst leading the league in OPS by over 50 points (not to mention Pudge by nearly 200 points) and driving in over 160 runs -- something that to this day no one else has done since the 1930s -- is gonna take home MVP, Manny’s value really manifested itself in helping Cleveland to win that AL Central title.

In ’99, Cleveland had poor pitching, with a team ERA of 4.89, which is bad even for the steroid era. They still managed to win 97 games. Here you can see that teams that win so much don’t exactly have ERAs so high. In fact no one else had ever previously come within an entire half-run of their mark:

As you’d expect, for a baseball team to finish 32 games above .500 despite bad pitching had to mean lots and lots of success from their offense. And they did indeed have a very deep lineup, though they possessed just one true superstar: Manny. Yet Cleveland surged to near-unprecedented heights in the scoring department; the ‘99 Tribe remain the only team in the last 74 years whose run total requires the usage of a comma.

They did get an outlier season from ace shortstop Omar Vizquel’s bat, and while guys like Jim Thome and Roberto Alomar were quite good, they likely weren’t among the top-15 or so bats in baseball that season, and certainly weren’t at a level you’d expect from the “Robin” of a team that executed the most destruction at the plate since before I Love Lucy premiered.

It was Manny who carried that historic offense on his shoulders and it’s a crime he didn’t win AL MVP in 1999. He got a hit in a third of his at-bats with 44 of ’em clearing the outfield wall. That’d only been done thrice across the preceding half-century: once by 1956 Mickey Mantle, who won MVP; once by 1993 Barry Bonds, who won MVP; and once by 1997 Larry Walker, who won MVP.

The only other person that can maybe, possibly, potentially legitimately even be in the picture in ’99 was Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez. But things get messy when blurring the lines of position players and pitchers, and regardless, it’d still be flabbergasting that Ramirez wasn’t in the top-2.

2000

In 2000, Manny reigned yet again as the OPS king, only to see AL MVP go to Oakland A’s first baseman Jason Giambi. There were two obvious elements working against Manny here. One was that for the first time we encounter a season where his team missed the playoffs. But slighting him in the team success department is mitigated by the fact that Cleveland still won 90 games and was in the hunt with Seattle for the Wild Card spot until the very last day of the regular season.

The other, likely bigger factor, was the month-and-a-half he missed in the middle of the season with a hamstring injury, which put a serious dent in his volume stuff even though he still mashed nearly 40 dingers and drove in over 120 runs despite missing over 27% of the year.

Also, a silver lining to missing a chunk of the season is that it provides a pure, authentic opportunity to assess how one’s presence in ballgames correlates to winning. Well, Cleveland was 18 games above .500 with him (68-50), but during that aforementioned time when he was out nursing a hammy, the club was under .500 (19-20). Pretty significant difference in pretty meaningful samples!

That said, despite there being plenty of precedent of players missing similar amounts of a season and still winning MVP, it’s admittedly tough to say it’s outrageous that someone who missed that kind of time didn’t win MVP. Especially with some bad luck in the form of being a year that happened to feature a whopping four AL sluggers -- Blue Jays first baseman Carlos Delgado, Giambi, Thomas, and A-Rod (the latter three of which helped their teams reach the playoffs) -- who each batted over .315 with 100+ walks, blasted over 40 homers, and drove in over 130 runs.

With negligible missed time among that quartet, they all fared significantly better on that scatter than did Manny. Plus you got the utterly preternatural season on the mound delivered by Pedro Martinez, who was playing a different game entirely than the rest of the league’s pitching. Seriously, this is just stupid:

So the fact that in actuality Ramirez finished behind those five players and tied with Edgar Martinez for 6th place is our first instance of not seeing him inexplicably lower in the voting than far less-deserving players. And you can still even say that, while by no means a travesty that he didn’t win (or finish 2nd), nobody should’ve batted an eye if he’d placed higher than he did, with that OPS serving as a rock-solid justification.

2001

Upon entering free agency following the 2000 season, Ramirez inked a $160 million contract with the Boston Red Sox. His first season in Beantown didn’t lend itself to a very strong MVP case, despite another outstanding season at the dish. The Sox finished well out of the playoff picture (but did still at least have a winning record), and over 60% of Manny’s starts came as their designated hitter.

Actual winner Ichiro Suzuki is not on the top-20 OPS list, but he lived at the extremes of everything else immediately upon arriving in America -- he stole an MLB-high 56 bases, won a Gold Glove, and had the most hits in a season in over 70 years, setting the table for a team that tied the near-century old MLB record of 116 wins in a season.

Then Giambi, Thome, and A-Rod had pretty indisputable cases to place above Manny as well, who ultimately wound up behind them, in addition to Ichiro’s teammate Bret Boone, and the also-playoff-bound Gonzalez and Alomar. All relatively fair, even if Manny’s OPS did exceed each of that latter trio’s by over 50 points. Lovely season, as usual, but no real argument for Manny to have placed at the top of the list in 2001.

2002

Oakland’s Miguel Tejada won AL MVP. With an OPS of .861 -- certainly nice, especially for a shortstop (though not necessarily a good defensive shortstop). But it’s quite difficult to reconcile winning MVP with being 17th in your league in OPS and not even supplementing it with stuff like outstanding defense or baserunning.

It was a poor choice, and likely a product of fluffy, feel-good storylines. This was the heart of the ‘Moneyball’ era, and the A’s had just been priced out of retaining their leadoff hitter (Johnny Damon), closer (Jason Isringhausen), and their top player (Giambi).

But starting in mid-August, trailing the Mariners in the AL West by 4.5 games, they ripped off MLB’s first 20-game winning streak since the 1935 Cubs. Each of the final three wins came in thrilling walk-off fashion, two of which stemmed from the bat of Tejada. The streak catapulted them to a 3.5-game lead en route to their unlikely AL West title.

That’s all very impressive and good, but Tejada shouldn’t have sniffed MVP. It was seemingly an effort to reward someone from a team that massively overachieved with storylines fun enough to become the focal point of a movie. It just feels like a forced effort. 

Interestingly enough, even if playing for the A’s during that magical year carried with it MVP pixie dust, Tejada’s season also happened to be quite similar to that of his partner on the left side of Oakland’s infield, Eric Chavez … yet Tejada wound up with more than 25 times as many points in the MVP voting.

Besides, the reality is their pitching staff, fronted by Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder, was the overwhelming reason for the A’s defying all odds in their stunning ’02 season anyway. Should it have been Manny though? Well, he had the same two things working against him as he did in 2000: his team missed the playoffs and he missed a bunch of games.

The missing the playoffs part is particularly excruciating given how strong a club the 2002 Red Sox fielded. They won 93 games (since the 1995 advent of the LDS, only the ‘99 Reds have ever won more games while missing the playoffs), but with having scored nearly 200 more runs than the 665 they allowed, they had MLB’s 2nd-best Pythagorean win total, trailing only the eventual World Series champion Angels:

Manny still led a very, very good team. And frankly, the four playoff teams (Yankees, Twins, A’s, Angels) combined to really only produce one strong candidate (all due respect to Tejada): Jason Giambi. So if there ever were a year to overlook missing the playoffs, it’d be this one.

As for the missed time, like 2000, Manny sat out 39 games in the middle of the season, this time with a broken finger. The Red Sox went 21-18 in those games. Not bad. But in the 120 games he played? They went 71-49. Much better.

Combined with his excelling in rate metrics (led by his near-1.100 OPS) and the dearth of candidates from playoff teams, Manny wouldn’t have been a horrible choice. But Thome’s superior OPS across nearly 100 more plate appearances leaves him looking more deserving. It’s also pretty easy to build the case for both Giambi and A-Rod ahead of Manny in terms of who should have been runner-up.

Like 2000, no issues arising with Ramirez not placing first or second in 2002 AL MVP voting, but given his OPS and the strength of the correlation with his presence in his team’s lineup and victory, it wouldn’t exactly have been wildly unreasonable if he had.

2003

Three players had roughly similarly strong cases to win MVP.

A-Rod: Gold Glove-winning shortstop with a near-1.000 OPS who hit a league-high 47 homers and finished 2nd in both total bases and RBI

Delgado: OPS king who drove in 145 runs when no one else in the league drove in even 120

Manny: OPS just slightly behind Delgado’s but, unlike the other two, led his team to the playoffs

A-Rod won, Delgado was the runner-up. Very reminiscent of 1998 where Manny was one of three or so players with cases of relatively equal strength to finish at the top of the voting, only to draw the short straw of being the one left out of finishing first or second … and in fact winding up sixth instead. We have to talk about the three other players who finished ahead of him.

One was Yankee catcher Jorge Posada. Ramirez had an objectively stronger season at the plate than Posada, and any case for Posada really begins and ends with the fact that he provided his batting production while playing a premium defensive position. Seems dubious to give it that much weight given the degree of Manny’s batting superiority, but at least it’s an element that certainly favors Posada.

Another of the players who finished ahead of him was Ramirez’s teammate, David Ortiz. I do not understand a single iota of rationale for this. Ortiz had a great season, but Manny wound up with higher counting stats pretty much across the board. Ortiz also sat out 34 games (an obviously significant reason for Manny’s counting stats being higher). But, as depicted by an OPS that was over 50 points higher, Ramirez was also better on a rate basis. Which he maintained across 170 more plate appearances.

And, whereas we’ve seen Manny suffer in the voting thanks to his missed games in 2000 and 2002, even with the introduction of evidence both years that his presence in the lineup equated to much more team success, that inexplicably did not hurt Ortiz here. Making it even funnier? The opposite was the case in terms of effect on team performance -- the Red Sox won 57.0% of the 128 games Big Papi played against 64.7% of the 34 games he didn’t. And he was primarily a designated hitter.

So to recap: between two teammates, one played a full season and had greater batting metrics (in both the volume and rate department) while also playing a position in the field. That one finished lower in the MVP race than the other who generally didn’t play in the field, had worse batting metrics all around, missed a bunch of time, and saw his team play a fair amount better in that missed time. It is seemingly impossible to identify any aspect whatsoever to lean on in support of a case for Ortiz finishing above Ramirez. Still makes way more sense than the last remaining player to finish ahead of Manny in 2003 AL MVP voting though…

...Shannon Stewart. Stewart spent most of the season on a Blue Jays team that was going nowhere in their division. In the back half of the season, when they were nine games out in the AL East, Toronto flipped him to Minnesota for the immortal Bobby Kielty.

For some reason it doesn’t explicitly say in the official MLB rulebook that you’re automatically ineligible to appear on an MVP ballot if you’re ever traded deep into a season and all you fetch in return is Bobby Kielty (which it should), but this was beyond asinine.

You can squint and sorta see what folks found captivating: after acquiring Stewart, the Twins went on a run down the stretch and dug out of a big hole of their own to capture the AL Central title. But as it relates to Stewart and MVP candidacy, without any sort of compelling individual production, that’s not nearly enough. Not even cloooooose.

Like Manny, Stewart was a poor defensive left fielder who wasn’t a baserunning threat, so he didn’t even provide value in the areas where Manny was lacking to make up ground. He offered basically no redeeming attributes other than whatever damage he could inflict with his bat. And his bat did not inflict anywhere near enough damage to justify being the sole basis for entering the MVP conversation.

Stewart’s OPS in Minnesota was just .854, and for the season as a whole it was .823 -- good for 32nd in the American League, just behind Jody Gerut and nearly 200 points behind Ramirez. And remember, he didn’t even make up any of that discrepancy in other facets of the game. He could’ve been a Gold Glove shortstop who stole 50 bases without getting caught once and he still shouldn’t have finished higher than Manny, let alone to have been a subpar left fielder who was thrown out on six of his 10 steal attempts.

2004

Manny should have been AL MVP in 2004. Plain and simple. There are only two other players -- Ortiz and Angels right fielder Vladimir Guerrero -- who should have even been in the discussion. Travis Hafner’s right there with them on the OPS chart, but his MVP case can be quickly dismissed as a DH for a losing team who doesn’t stack up well with the big boys on the scatter chart. Tejada’s right there with them on the scatter chart, but his case too can be quickly dismissed with his sub-.900 OPS for a losing team.

As for Ramirez vs. Ortiz, not being a DH while posting a league-high OPS and keeping the counting stats relatively even is enough to safely regard Manny’s MVP case as stronger than Big Papi’s.

Guerrero was the actual winner. Why...? It’s quite difficult to lean strongly one way or the other as to whether he or Ramirez had the better overall season in terms of the entire spectrum of volume stuff (Manny held a big edge in walks, Vlad stole a pretty solid 15 bases, and they’re real close in just about everything else). They’re generally washes when it comes to the departments of team success and both being underwhelming corner outfielders. But Manny held a relatively noteworthy advantage in OPS, enough to make it so he should’ve comfortably been the choice to win AL MVP in the absence of a similar advantage elsewhere by Vlad. There was no real good thing to point to for Guerrero’s case being stronger than Ramirez’s. The vice is not versa.

Granted it’s not like it was egregious that it went to Guerrero (though his 21-1 advantage in 1st place votes was incomprehensible). But it should have gone to Manny. Wanna know what makes things so, so, so hysterical and turns the crazy dial up to a 10 though? As has been alluded to often, Manny never in his career wound up securing even a runner-up spot. Guess who wound up taking that honor in 2004?

Gary Sheffield.

Go look at Sheffield and Ramirez on both of those charts. Know that Gary Sheffield was a member of the Manny archetype of being a playoff-bound flawed corner outfielder whose only contribution came with his bat. What in blue hell could the logic have possibly been for a belief that the contributions flowing from Sheff’s bat were in any way, shape, or form better or more valuable? Let alone to have received five 1st place votes to Manny’s one, which is completely impossible to reconcile.

It’s utterly dumbfounding. With all the voting results/shenanigans always seeming to conspire against Ramirez for the past nine years, and here in this season where he absolutely should’ve won it, he doesn’t even get his runner-up spot despite an unequivocally significantly better season than Sheffield. Mystifying. We’re now a decade in. Manny right about now, probably.

2005

A-Rod led the league in OPS and homers while playing third base well for a playoff team. He was, and should have been, the 2005 AL MVP. Ortiz and Manny pretty clearly had the two strongest cases to be runner-up.

It’s fair to say Big Papi had a better season at the plate than Manny, but by a pretty small margin. Whether it’s by enough to offset being a DH is a judgment call. But yet again, in what therefore appeared to be more-or-less a coin flip, and after all we’ve already seen, that coin couldn’t throw Manny a bone.

This despite the existence of another fun nugget about Manny’s 2005 season: that being just how serendipitously-timed he hit his boatload of dingers. See in MLB, typically only about 41-43% of homers occur with any baserunners aboard. But that year, of the 45 homers mashed by Manny, 32 (71.1%) of them resulted in a plurality of runs being scored. That’s only seven fewer than the Washington Nationals hit, and they’re an entire MLB organization!

It was definitely only the second time in the 37 years since the start of the ‘69 season (the year going back the furthest for which it can be said with certainty, as some pre-’69 seasons have some games lacking play-by-play data) that any big leaguer had hit more than 30 multi-run homers in a season, joining 1998 Mark McGwire.

But really it can be said with north of 99% confidence that no one but ‘98 Big Mac had topped 30 in the 75 years since 1930 Hack Wilson notched 33 (if you scroll down to “Bases Occupied” on ‘30 Wilson’s splits page here, his ‘Men On’ HR total says 32, but you’ll notice summing that with his ‘bases-empty’ HR total of 22 only adds up to 54, not the total of 56 he actually hit. That’s because PBP from a few of ‘30 Wilson’s games are missing. However, we know it’s actually 33 thanks to his home run log page filling in the gaps, showing there was a runner on 3rd base for one of his two homers on May 18th, the lone game in which ‘30 Wilson homered for which there lacks PBP). Before ‘30 Wilson, just ‘21 Babe. In the near-two decades since 2005, no one but ‘07 A-Rod’s pulled it off. And that’s it, that’s the quintet of guys with more than 30 multi-run homers in a big league season.

As for ‘05 Manny’s astounding multi-homer percentage of 71.1, that occupies its own territory atop all 45-homer seasons in big league history, with barely anyone else even at 60%:

At long last, after over four decades of nobly wearing the crown, ‘61 Jim Gentile’s reign as multi-homer king had ended, usurped by nearly six full percentage points by the new multi-homer monarch: ‘05 Manny. In fact, going back over a half-century, you won’t find anyone with even 30 dingers in a season who had as high of a multi-homer percentage, let alone 45.

Whatever, Ortiz was the 2005 AL MVP runner-up. Fine (though him getting 11 1st place votes with Manny getting zero is not so fine). But it’s a helluva challenge to figure out how in the world Vlad Guerrero also finished above Manny in the voting. The prior year he shouldn’t have either, but at least it was close. This year, with both corner outfielders playing for 95-win playoff teams, again it essentially just comes down to an assessment of their batting production. And the difference wasn’t really close. Manny had a significant leg up. Jiminy Christmas.

2006

Manny’s Red Sox missed the playoffs in 2006, but like 2002, most of the league’s top bats also did. Thus it doesn’t seem like as scathing an indictment to his MVP candidacy as it might otherwise be.

But that also applies to Ortiz, and complementing his OPS with a full season of a bunch of ‘mosts’ certainly oughta be enough to overcome his warts of being a DH who missed the postseason. He should have won it. Instead, it went to Minnesota’s Justin Morneau. The case for Morneau is that he had the next-most impressive season on a volume basis and made the playoffs. However if you’re a first baseman (and a poor one at that) who had a .934 OPS in a climate where five guys were up over 1.000, it’s a struggle to connect the dots from that to MVP.

Also just throwing it out there, imagine how infuriating that must have been to Joe Mauer, his teammate who played catcher (and threw out 38% of attempted base-stealers while maintaining a .996 fielding percentage) and had a better OPS, albeit without approaching Morneau’s volume.

Despite Manny’s OPS, he shouldn’t have been the runner-up here either. At the very least, Travis Hafner and probably Thome and Jermaine Dye had stronger credentials. But in what was seemingly one last middle finger to Manny in the final full season of his prime, the OPS runner-up placed eighteenth (18th) – and behind the likes of Johnny Damon – in AL MVP voting. Because it’s not really an MVP vote unless Manny finishes behind a ho-hum fielder who had an OPS over 200 points lower. Or something. He also finished lower than fellas like Grady Sizemore and Carlos Guillen. Cool.

Of the 336 1st place votes doled out in the American League across the entirety of that 12-year stretch, Manny received a grand total of six -- four in 1999 and one apiece in 2003 and 2004. Shannon Stewart got three in that 2003 travesty alone. Pudge got seven in 1999 alone when Ramirez was criminally robbed. Again, Manny got six, cumulatively, across the entire dozen years:

And even that chart doesn’t take into account that most of those guys weren’t even relevant for more than a few years of that window; Manny was relevant -- nay, awesome -- in all 12 seasons. Which, by the way, manifests itself in a significantly greater Wins Above Replacement (WAR) across this period, 58.7, than any other American Leaguer except A-Rod.

Wrapping it all up

So the 12 years were constituted by:

• two years (1999, 2004) in which it can simply be said Manny should have won AL MVP -- and not only did he not, he inexplicably wasn’t even runner-up

• two years (1998 and 2003) in which Manny and two other players (Gonzalez and Junior in ’98, A-Rod and Delgado in ’03) had roughly equally strong cases to form any 1-2-3 permutation, and just happened to finish behind both (and, somehow, others) in both seasons

• one year (2005) in which Manny should not have been MVP, but had just as strong a case as Ortiz to finish second and just happened to finish behind him (and, somehow, Guerrero)

• two years (2000, 2002) in which Manny maintained standout rate metrics (first and second in OPS, respectively) and the biggest knock that can be cited to justify the lack of a top-2 finish was having been unavailable for a chunk of the season (even though it hadn’t hurt other past winners in the same way, and said missed time opened the door to test the correlation between him playing and his team winning games -- a test he passed with flying colors both years … in other words such a finish would not have been unreasonable or elicited raised eyebrows)

• four years (1995-97, 2006) in which he should not have won or been runner-up, but also featured him faring worse in the voting than some far inferior players; and in 2006 specifically, he still was his league’s OPS silver medalist which was juxtaposed against an 18th-place finish

• one year (2001) in which he should not have won or been runner-up, also serving as the lone year in which where he finished in the voting was actually reasonable (though even then, with the 4th-best OPS, he still at least has a case to have finished higher than 9th).

It’s a grand total of seven years where it would’ve been beyond reasonable for him to have finished in the top-2, six years where it would’ve been beyond reasonable for him to have won, and two years in which he absolutely, positively, unequivocally should’ve won. That résumé ultimately yielded zero AL MVP wins … and zero AL MVP runner-ups. Good work, voters.