Educating Twitter: No One "Robbed" Aaron Judge

Sep 12, 2023

I am but a mortal man. Like everyone, I have weaknesses. I eat food that isn’t good for me. I don’t floss as much as I should. I unfairly judge people based solely on their driving skills.

Among my many limitations is that I find it very hard to say nice things about the New York Yankees and the people who cheer for them. So, when someone who happens to be a Yankee fan decides to be wrong on the internet, it takes more willpower than I possess to turn down the chance to demonstrate they are wrong. And when that person names their Twitter account “@Evil_Empire27”, well, let’s just say they’ve removed any obligation I may have felt to be nice as I tell them that they lack basic reasoning skills.

With that in mind, let’s see which dumb Yankee fan was wrong on Twitter recently:

“Robbed.” He said Aaron Judge was “robbed” of the 2017 American League MVP award. And the only evidence provided is a side-by-side comparison from baseball-reference.com of Judge and Jose Altuve, who actually won the award. That’s it, nothing else.

Ok, so let’s just use the evidence presented to us, as Evil Empire apparently wants us to.

Superficially, it looks like Aaron Judge was a better overall hitter than Jose Altuve in 2017. He had a more homers and RBI and a better on-base percentage and slugging percentage and OPS. He also walked more, and scored more runs. Altuve’s only significant offensive advantages were that he had a much higher batting average, and more hits and stolen bases.

But… (If there wasn’t a “but”, I wouldn’t be writing this.)

Altuve played in a pretty difficult park for hitters. Minute Maid Park in Houston suppressed offense by about 6% that year, while Yankee Stadium inflated offense by 4%. Once that difference is accounted for, we find that Altuve created 49 runs with his hitting another 4 with his base running, and had -1 from double plays, for a total of 52 runs. Judge had 58 runs from hitting, and -1 each from base running and double plays, for a total of 56.

Sorry, but a gap of 4 runs simply isn’t enough to warrant accusations of robbery. And while Judge played very good defense, and Altuve’s was sort of middling, we have to account for the fact that second base, Altuve’s position, is a harder position to play than Judge’s right field.

What we get as a result of all these numbers is a Wins Above Replacement (WAR) difference of just 0.3; which is 8.0 for Judge and 7.7 for Altuve. That’s basically no difference at all. That is particularly no difference when the guy with the slightly lower score did that for the team with the best record in the league, the one that went on to win the World Series.

MVP voting is based on a narrative. It’s become more numbers-based than it was in the past, and that’s a good thing, but the voters still haven’t completely broken from the notion that the number should be placed in the context of the season, and that the stories of the players being considered are a critical part of the evaluation.

For instance, Mike Trout was a better baseball player than Miguel Cabrera in 2012. He just was. Using ol’ Evil Empire’s favorite form of evidence, we can see that:

Once you account for defense and baserunning, not to mention the fact that Trout’s numbers were artificially suppressed by the Angels purposely leaving him in the minor leagues for the season’s first 20 games in order to manipulate his service time clock, and the gap between their overall performance is immense, more than 10 times as large as the gap between Judge and Altuve in 2017.

But Cabrera won the MVP, and while some stat-minded folks disagreed with that, everyone understood it because of the contexts involved. Trout was a rookie, on a decent team that missed the playoffs, while Cabrera was the first Triple Crown winner in 45 years, for a division winner that went to the World Series. Of course Cabrera was going to get the award.

And that’s what happened in 2017 as well. Altuve was a better story.* Judge had a wonderful year, won the Rookie of the Year Award (just like Trout did), and finished second in the MVP voting (just like Trout did). But Altuve’s performance was essentially of equal value, and he had a better story, on a better team, so we won the MVP.

That’s not “robbery,” in any way.

(*The Astros trash-can cheating scandal was not known at the time of the MVP voting. But that’s a whole other story.)