Posted by The Taint on 8/10/2013 12:00:00 AM (view original):
Posted by raucous on 8/9/2013 5:40:00 PM (view original):
...and nobody is valuable if they are playing golf on October 1st.
this bears repeating. I can't believe a real baseball fan, that wasn't an Angels homer, would think that Trout was more valuable than Cabrera. The dude won the triple crown and his team made the playoffs. Case closed....save your DWAR and FIP and BABBBbip/ops+3.14/2.3. case closed cubicle nerd.
That's just dumb, Taint. Cabrera had a great year but he isn't magically more valuable because he won the triple crown. It's a cool thing but Cabrera wouldn't have been less valuable if Josh Hamilton had hit 2 more home runs.
Trout's team won one more game than Detroit. Detroit only made the playoffs because they play in a weaker division. As dumb as it is to base individual awards on team performance, it's way dumber to base an individual award on the performance of other teams in the division.
Individual awards should be decided by individual performance. If you think Cabrera's offensive performance was so much better than Trout's that it overcomes Trout's advantages in the field and on the bases, I'll disagree but it's a reasonable argument.