Ryan Howard, MVP

So Ryan Howard is the NL MVP, despite the fact that he clearly doesn't deserve it. I may have mentioned this before. Anyway, I was extremely surprised to hear Howard won (despite having a fantastic season, don't get me wrong) because it seemed to me that there were at least two much more deserving candidates in the NL; one of whom plays a premier defensive position at the Gold Glove level, while the other is a former NL MVP who led his desperately mediocre team to a World Series title.

Frankly I thought that Pujols would run away with the MVP. He's pretty obviously the best player on the Cardinals. There's no way the Cards make the playoffs, even in the craptacular NL Central, without him. So he satisfies the two criteria for an MVP of both having a good season (49 HR, 119 R, 137 RBI) and playing on a winner (the sale of gritty World Series MVP David Eckstein’s soul to the Devil turned the 83-78 Cardinals into Champs).

Personally, I think that Carlos Beltran would have been a better choice for MVP. There’s no way he was gonna win it, though, despite hitting almost as well as Pujols (41 HR, 127 R, 116 RBI) while playing stellar defense at a much more difficult position. Since the Mets cruised through the NL East, Beltran was able to sit out a couple of weeks at the end of the season, and that hurt his candidacy. The Mets actually had too much talent on the 2006 squad for any one of them to make a case for being the single most valuable, at least according to the clever fellows at the BBWAA, who vote on this award.

Which brings us to Howard. Granted, he had a great year (58 HR, 104 R, 149 RBI) but as Pujols pointed out, the Phillies didn’t even make the playoffs. How can Howard be the MVP if you could replace him with John Flowers*, and not have it impact the playoffs at all? That’s true, I suppose; but the Phillies did win 85 games, more than the Cardinals, and the Phillies were in contention to make the playoffs as a wildcard almost to the end of the season.

And this is part of the problem with the MVP award – it isn’t always clear what criteria we should use to judge the award. Which is why there’s always some controversy over who should or shouldn’t have won it, because the 38 douchebags who vote for this thing are all using 38 different scoring systems. Allow me to share mine.

Which, frankly, I'll have to do tomorrow, since writing the absurdly wordy introduction to this thing has taken a whole Gravity's Rainbow.

* Hot Johnny is a Keith Hernandez-type of first baseman, in that he smokes a lot and likes to drink after the game.