Braves’ fans can vote for the winner, which could help to swing the award the award toward our favorite hugging slugger.
The Atlanta Braves‘ nominee for the MLB Hank Aaron award is Freddie Freeman – the most logical and obvious choice. But why the fans get to vote for a player having the best “most outstanding offensive performance” is a question that’s frankly bizarre.
For the record – and since this is the way MLB has chosen to operate – fans can vote at this link.
The award winners for each league will be selected by some combination of fan vote along with the decision of a blue ribbon panel of Hall of Famers – led by Aaron himself.
The latter part? The panel? That’s all good. But in this day and age of sabremetrics, if your aim is to deliver winners who are the ‘most outstanding’, surely a popularity contest (even it it’s limited) is well out of character with the purpose and intent of what MLB should be trying to accomplish.
Granted: because of the manner in which the league MVP’s are decided, it is probably important to come up with a thick demarcation between these honors… but there are other ways to make that happen.
As a minimum, as I peruse the nominees for each team, it’s fairly evident that some players shouldn’t even have a chance here. They are all players who had solid seasons for their teams, to be sure, but some of these are simply not like the others.
Yet like the All-Star game, everybody gets to put a name into the hat for representation purposes.
Enough Ranting
Okay, so at least this is an award without pretense: while even Gold Gloves seem to be decided partly on offensive impact, this award is (supposed to be) solely about the player’s offensive output. Forget value, forget whether your team made the playoffs.
So we’re talking OPS, WAR, wRC+, average, homers, RBI, and maybe steals if you get desperate for a tie-breaker. It’s the big bats.
This year, there’s a bit of a quandry that the panel will have to deal with: Mike Trout won the OPS battle in the AL (and the wRC+ and hit .306), but missed about 30% of the season.
Aaron Judge played 155 games, was first in WAR, first in AL homers, and second in wRC+, RBI, and OPS. I’d have to give him the nod in the AL.
In the NL, Freeman faded in September while playing on about half a wrist, still finishing 4th in OPS.
Joey Votto hit .320, was 1st in OPS and wRC+, 1st in the offensive component of WAR. But he played in Cincy’s tiny park.
Giancarlo Stanton? First in homers and RBI (overall), 2nd in wRC+, and 2nd in OPS. He was second to Votto in that War/Offense number.
Charlie Blackmon was the best hitter and the only other NL candidate with 1.000 OPS or better. He WAR component was 4th (Kris Bryant was third), but the “Coors Effect” was real: 1.239 OPS at home; a pedestrian .784 on the road.
My vote: Stanton. Votto’s home/away splits were not dramatic (1.096 vs. .973 OPS), but I can’t let go of the parks that the Marlins frequent vs. those of the Reds.
That said, it’s practically a coin-flip, and either result would be defensible.
Still – it’s a vote, so if you think Freeman should be the winner, then make your voice heard… and despite everything above, I might still do that!