I think he should have used position adjusted OPS

Interesting article.

Gehrig, Ted Williams and Willie Stargell wuz robbed.

Baseball has always celebrated the five-tool star and MVP voting has always been biased in favor of versatile multitool players over pure sluggers.

Although the author talks about the intangibles that helped some players' MVP candidacies, he glosses over the even more significant intangibles that hurt other players' MVP chances.  Baseball writers are notorious for being self-anointed stewards of baseball's image and have always placed great emphasis on the need for baseball players to serve as role models, and I'm sure this took away votes from many of the offensive leaders cited in his blog, including Williams (relationship with fans and media), Dick Allen (conduct and personality), Manny Ramirez (attitude), Barry Bonds (attitude, suspicion of drug use), Mark McGwire (suspicion of drug use), Jason Giambi (suspicion of drug use) and Milton Bradlery (all around bad behavior), to name a few.  Other players like Chuck Klein, Kiner, Mize and Thome were simply seen as too one-dimensional.

Got a good chuckle out of this one...

Comment: Rose was such a force of nature that people seemed perfectly willing to overlook his sudden, and rather shocking, decline in power. From 1965 through ’71 — a time for pitchers — Rose hit double-figure homers every year and slugged a rather robust .460. Starting in 1972, though, he became a different hitter, a slasher who cut down on his strikeouts and hit a lot of ground balls and line drives. He led the league in doubles five times, but only once more hit double-figure homers (and only 10 at that). In 1973 he led the league in hitting (.338) and punched out 230 hits. It was, unquestionably, a terrific year. But it was limited, too. It seems almost certain that Joe Morgan, who hit 21 more homers, stole 57 more bases, walked 45 more times , had a better year despite hitting only .290. But nobody was going to see that in 1973 — Joe Morgan the announcer wouldn’t have voted for Joe Morgan the player (“Wait, he hit only .290?”).

Good stuff... thanks for posting!

There were awards prior to the formal MVP awards

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_Most_Valuable_Player_Award

It is very hard to go back 70 or 80 years & perfectly understand what voters were thinking. But to say they were wrong when we only look at hitting data is short sighted in my opinion