SI's Frank Deford makes his case for McGwire as National League MVP
Posted: Monday November 23, 1998 02:53 PM
Thursday, almost surely, Sammy Sosa will be declared an
easy winner as the Most Valuable Player in the National
League.
And why not? He had a simply glorious season: not only the
66 home runs, but he also led the majors in RBIs, with a
batting average over .300. Second, he's a terrific guy.
None of the sportswriters who vote are going to begrudge
marking their ballot
for the personable Señor Sosa. Besides, there was a
certain amount of overblown talk that the dark-skinned
Dominican suffered racism relative to his home-run rival,
the All-American redhead, Mark McGwire. The MVP for Sosa
would counter that scurrilous
charge.
But, all that aside, the main reason why it's so easy to
pick Sosa over McGwire is because Sosa played for a better
team. The Cubs made the playoffs. Just barely. But they
were a contendah. And, ironically, for what is supposed
to be the supreme
individual award, a rationale has developed that the MVP
should only properly be granted to the best player on a
challenging team. Only when there is no outstanding
candidate on a better club do the voters deign to pick
someone with a fantastically better
individual year on a loser.
The expressed thinking is:
Hey, it's easy to put up good personal statistics when
there's no pennant pressure on
you.
Moreover, Sosa is helped in that the two categories that
always seduce MVP voters are RBIs and saves. But all good
baseball purists better take a seat now, because I know
they'll swoon when I say that, to my mind, RBIs and saves
are the most overrated
personal indices in the game. Rather, they're dependent
statistics. You can't knock people in unless they get on
base for you.. And you can't save games unless starting
pitchers give you a lead. Pitchers who start games,
batters who hit for average
or who hit home runs, always seem to me to be more
personally creative in their contribution, but it's
subversive to even suggest that. No, it's become gospel
that players who get lots of RBIs or saves are
ipso facto
more
valuable.
But special times demand original thinking -- especially
when no one has ever specified what the
"Valuable" in Most Valuable Player really means.
In most normal seasons, sure, when it's a close call, give
the edge to the guy who played on the
contending team. Even Tony LaRussa, McGwire's manager at St. Louis,
says because Chicago made the playoffs, Sosa had to be more
valuable to his
team.
But wait a minute. Nowhere is it inscribed that the MVP
must be
team-valuable. In the year 1998, Mark McGwire was,
indisputably, most valuable to baseball, to his whole
sport. Didn't you keep hearing that he saved baseball?
Doesn't that count for more?
Sure, Sosa helped in that salvation, but he was strictly
the junior partner. And pressure? McGwire was under the
most excruciating pressure every time he strode to bat, not
only in a pennant race -- but from Opening Day
on.
None of this is meant to diminish what Sosa did. His was
an absolutely incredible season. But most valuable? The
fact is that Mark McGwire was more valuable to baseball.
In fact, I think it's possible to argue that McGwire has
been more valuable to
his sport this year than any athlete in any sport -- maybe
going back to the 1950s, when Arnold Palmer virtually
invented golf as a game for the
masses.
Sosa will almost certainly win the MVP because it's hard to
change the conventional wisdom. And hail to him. But in
the National League, in baseball, in all sports in 1998,
there's only one MVP -- Mark
McGwire.
These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.
|
