As the pennant race heats up, we use an aggregate formula of rankings across various traditional and newer statistics to determine who the voters will decide is worthy of both league’s Most Valuable Player and Cy Young awards.
How are Max Scherzer and Bryce Harper faring in the National League awards races? Read below to see our methodology for how we rank the contenders, then click ahead to find out how they stack up.
(AP Photo)
AP Photo
NL MVP
Paul Goldschmidt (ARI) – 70
Bryce Harper (WAS) – 68
Buster Posey (SF) – 49
Anthony Rizzo (CHC) – 37
Nolan Arenado (COL) – 36
Harper has been the seeming front-runner all season and leads the league in home runs, on-base percentage and slugging percentage. His second-place ranking has more to do with Goldschmidt’s tremendous all-around season which sees him atop the league leaderboard in RBI with a chance to win a batting title and possibly even baseball’s first 30-30 season since Mike Trout and Ryan Braun in 2012. Of course, both those players still finished second in the MVP race, so consider this race still wide open and very fluid.
(AP Photo/Ralph Freso)
AP Photo/Ralph Freso
AL MVP
Josh Donaldson – 64
Mike Trout – 54
Nelson Cruz – 49
Lorenzo Cain – 42
Mark Teixeira – 35
Donaldson and Trout are essentially in a dead heat. But the “V” in MVP is one of the great points of contention among baseball writers. Whether you believe it, should or not, a team’s performance often factors into whether or not its star player wins this award. That’s what’s giving Donaldson the edge right now. If the Angels rally to make the postseason, it won’t take much for Trout to overtake him. Don’t count out dark horse Lorenzo Cain just yet, though. He ranks second only to Trout among AL position players with 6.4 WAR in his breakout season.
(AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)
AP Photo/Julie Jacobson
NL Cy Young
Clayton Kershaw – 76
Zack Greinke – 71
Max Scherzer – 66
Jacob deGrom – 58
Jake Arrieta – 58
This might surprise some people, who may have the other Dodger starter as the front-runner. But Kershaw has come on incredibly strong and leads the league in strikeouts, strikeouts per nine innings and FIP, while ranking in the top four in every major category except wins. The rest of August and September will have plenty to say about which boy in blue will stake claim to the award, or if one of the outsiders can finish strong enough to swipe it away. This is a very strong class of pitchers, several of whom would probably have had a good enough season to win in other years.
(AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill
AL Cy Young
Dallas Keuchel – 67
Corey Kluber – 59
Chris Sale – 59
David Price – 58
Sonny Gray – 58
This race is wide open. The top five could be completely flipped upside down within another turn of the rotation. That being said, Keuchel has the strongest numbers across the board, really in every area except strikeouts. That’s where Sale leads the way, which has helped him post the lowest FIP in the league as well. There aren’t likely to be any MVP candidates out of this group, but it should be an excellent race to the finish line.
(AP Photo/Colin E. Braley)
WASHINGTON — With fewer than 50 regular season games remaining, Major League Baseball is in the thick of its pennant race. That means the front-runners for the awards are starting to take shape, and those front-runners include a pair of Nationals.
Baseball is a game full of numbers, and the various writers who vote on the awards use different metrics to come to their final decisions. The point of these predictions is not to try to value who deserves these awards the most, but rather to use an aggregate formula of rankings across various traditional and newer statistics to determine who the voters themselves will decide is worthy of both league’s Most Valuable Player and Cy Young awards.
I haven’t listed the specifics of the formula within, simply the composite score that each player has achieved up to this point of the season. But before we get into which players are in line for this year’s awards, let’s look at how the methodology has fared going back over the past few seasons.
Counting 2015, I’ve applied the same aggregate formula to the past five seasons to determine an accurate model. The Cy Young model correctly predicted the National League winner each year, and the American League Cy Young in three of the previous four (in 2012, it predicted Justin Verlander, who finished second).
The MVP model was a bit more volatile, especially as it only considered position players, while two of the past eight awards between the leagues were won by starting pitchers. For the purpose of this exercise, no pitchers are being considered for MVP, although a case could be made for a number of National League pitchers to finish in the top three. Among the six position player MVP’s won, the model correctly predicted four of them, narrowly missing the other two (picking Paul Goldschmidt instead of Andrew McCutchen in 2013 and Matt Kemp over Ryan Braun in 2011).
So with no further ado, take a look at the slides above to see where the model puts the four major award races. All numbers are updated through Monday, August 18, but obviously have the potential to change daily. We will update the rankings as the season draws closer to October.
