The Stats Geek keeps on truckin'

Jason Bay for MVP? Well, maybe not quite. But if Andruw Jones is the MVP (which I don't see happening, but it is a possibility), well, Bay certainly measures up. Yeah, Jones hit a ton of homers and had more RBIs, but those don't tell the whole story. The Stats Geek goes through a detailed statistical analysis looking at things like run production (RBIs+runs-homers, Bay has a 179-172 lead), the 41 fewer runners Bay saw on base than Jones this year, the 42 more runners Jones saw in scoring position this year, Bay's higher batting average with RISP (he hit .346, can we please stop complaining about how Bay isn't the "clutch" guy we need in the middle of the lineup?), and the park factor, the massive left-center field which is death to a righty like Bay at PNC. Then there's stolen bases, the fact that Bay was 6 runs better than the average left fielder this year while Jones was 4 runs better than the average center fielder (those numbers might be flipped if they switched positions). The easiest stat to look at is probably VORP (which measures difference in runs over the average replacement or AAA player at the given player's position). Bay was fourth in the bigs at 85.0, behind only Lee, Rodriguez, and Pujols.

Is the Stats Geek saying Bay should win an MVP? No, and neither am I. No one deserves an MVP on a 67-95 team, easy as that. We should just keep things like this in mind when Smizik and Cook write off the Pirates for next year around January with one of their reasons being that we "don't have a big league 3 or 4 hitter in the entire organization."