2. Here we have some issues still. See, as I said before, no one is saying the MVP is about who has the highest WAR. People who like WAR use it as a good starting point for discussion, but it's much better to look at more individual statistics than the conglomerate that is WAR. WAR is just an estimate of player contribution anyway. No one argues otherwise. But it's a complete fallacy to say 'well, you're just saying look at this statistic, not that statistic, you can't say which is better.' That's very very wrong. Some statistics ARE better than others. on base percentage is better at judging what a player did than batting average. wOBA is better at judging performance than RBI.
I'm not arguing about which statistic is better. I'm saying that you can't say a historically great season in *any* statistic, no matter how great it is at whatever it's judging, necessarily means you win the MVP.
3. OK, here's where you go off the rails. First, fantasy baseball doesn't care about defense at all. So the entire fantasy baseball/fantasy world argument is nonsense. Miggy and Trout were both fantasy superstars for their counting stats. So lets look purely at offense. Miggy was very VERY slightly better than Trout on overall hitting ability. But they are close enough that you can almost call it a tie. This is completely discounting fielding and baserunning. So I guess if you want to argue that fielding and baserunning are meaningless, ok, you have an argument for Cabrera.
Okay. Here the problem is I was addressing 2 things at once. There are two fallacious notions of being "all-around" that are relatively common:
1. People who think defense is remotely as important as pitching and hitting.
2. People who play fantasy baseball and think rare categories like steals and triples are more valuable that other categories where everyone has non-zero stats.
The stuff about defense is addressed at the first set of people.
But, how on earth can you say that defense is easy and all players are about the same? Thats...I don't even know what to say to that. I hate to pull out this logical fallacy but have you ever watched a game of baseball? No, it's probably not as big a deal as hitting or pitching, but it's still a huge component of run prevention. To discount it is...just crazy.
And finally, even if you discount fielding metrics, the scouting 'eye test' gives Trout a ridiculous advantage over miggy. At the most generous, scouts call Cabrera average defensively.
I never said "all players are about the same". I said it's like NFL special teams. Clearly some teams are much better on special teams, and this makes a big difference in terms of field position in a football game. But no one talks about kick coverage in the MVP discussion, and there are no punters in the NFL hall of fame. Defense in baseball can make the difference in games, no question. But it is by far secondary to what happens between pitcher and hitter. Not even close.
And I don't doubt Trout wins the 'eye test' handily, but my point is that it's not important. If it were a closer contest, then you could talk about Trout's defense. But as is it, I don't think it's even worth putting the in MVP discussion.
The discussion probably goes more something like this:
Make a short list of players with good WAR/OPS/RC27/whatever.
Ok, which of these players are "way better" than the others in some obvious intuitive sense.
Okay, whose team did best?
If it's still close, talk about things like defense and intangibles.
This current debate should end at the "whose team did better" stage.
Trout will eventually win multiple MVPs in the not-too-distant future, but Cabrera deserved it this year.