Steve Webb
LOS ANGELES, CA — It’s the first week in September, and it’s not only the weather in LA that is heating up. All around the baseball-sphere, the latest hot take is that it should be the Mets’ shortstop Francisco Lindor who should be winning the National League MVP, and not the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani. Indeed, Lindor’s strong second half has put him squarely in the MVP conversation. An injury to the D-back’s great infielder Ketel Marte has more or less shipwrecked his chances, and really only Matt Chapman has received any other notice as a possible MVP candidate in the National League this year.
Chapman, who just signed a tasty extension with the Giants, might be my vote for most improved player this year, but he’s not really in the running for MVP. And with Marte out until later this week, it would have to take an absolute monster finish to get him back into contention. So, let’s concentrate on the two big dogs at the top: Lindor and Ohtani.
Offensively, there is really not much of an argument to be made for Lindor. Shohei has been better than him in almost every offensive category. Other than a handful of at-bats more for Lindor, it’s basically a clean sweep for Shohei, and in some categories, it’s not even close. At this point in the season (I’m writing this on Friday, September 6), Ohtani has a batting average 16 points higher, 14 more home runs, 20 more stolen bases, and an OPS over 100 points higher than Lindor. If the award was for the best offensive player in the league, there would be no contest.
However, the award says “Most VALUABLE Player” on the plaque, and part of value is defense. Lindor’s backers point to the fact that Frankie is out there at a premium position, playing shortstop in every single one of the Mets’ 140 games so far this year. And as a defender, Lindor is not, say, Trea Turner or Corey Seager, who also play short, but are most valuable as an offensive weapon. Lindor does bring value to the table for his skills with the leather. Both he and Dansby Swanson of the Cubs sit atop the National League leaderboard at Baseball Savant in both Defensive Runs Saved (12) and Outs Above Average (16). Only Bobby Witt Jr. of Kansas City ranks higher than Lindor at the shortstop position this season.
In addition, history is working against Ohtani. In the more than 50 years of the Designated Hitter being a thing in Major League baseball, so far a grand total of ZERO have been named MVP. When Angel Don Baylor won the award in 1979, he logged in 65 games at DH, but played other positions in way more than half of his games. The closest a full-time DH ever came to winning DH was second, which has happened four times, including 2005, when the Red Sox David Ortiz narrowly lost to Alex Rodriguez for AL MVP. That year, Big Papi garnered eleven first place votes and was edged out by the sixteen votes that A-Rod received.
Totally, there have been six DH’s who have finished in the top three in MVP voting:
1993: Paul Molitor (TOR), 2nd
1995: Edgar Martinez (SEA), 3rd
2000: Frank Thomas (CWS), 2nd
2005: David Ortiz (BOS), 2nd
2006: Ortiz, 3rd
2014: Victor Martinez (DET), 2nd
If you ask Shohei’s teammates about it, they are in agreement. What Shohei’s doing in 2024 is DIFFERENT.
“I think as baseball people it’s hard to view a DH as winning MVP. But you look up and he has a chance to do something no one’s done before,” teammate (and fellow MVP-winer) Freddie Freeman said recently. “I’ve always thought it would be hard for a DH to win. He’s only out there for four or five at-bats (per game). But when you can potentially go 50-50, we might have to re-think that.”
Indeed, it would seem that Ohtani’s chances of winning in 2024 hinge on that one milestone: getting to fifty home runs and fifty stolen bases in the same season. Mookie Betts was asked about Ortiz’s season had the same thing to say: “If he stole 50 bags, he probably would have won it,” he said of ‘Big Papi’s’ near-miss (quoted in the OC Register).
Certainly, Betts knows first hand how a milestone like that can propel a player into MVP frontrunner status. His 2023 campaign, brilliant in so many ways, was overshadowed by Ronald Acuna Jr.‘s accomplishment of the never-before-seen 40/70 season. So Acuna won the MVP even though Betts’s WAR for the year was higher than Acuna’s according to Baseball Reference. Last season, Betts was ranked as the Number One player in the National League, compiling a WAR of 8.3, which nudged out Acuna’s 8.2 for best in the league.
Of course, this is all predicated on the fact that Shohei isn’t pitching this year. If he were a two-way player, as he was in his MVP years with the Angels, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. You could easily add another three or four points of WAR to the ledger and it would just be a blowout. Perhaps, the voters will use the “NO DH” excuse to give the trophy to Lindor this year, knowing that when Shohei is back on the mound in 2025, he’s going to be a winner again. Of course, this is no way to think. You can’t NOT give an award to somebody just because he’s likely to have even better years in the future. The question on the table is who is having the best year in 2024. And Ohtani has a very strong case for that.
Another thing that might work against Lindor is that he is not even the best shortstop in baseball this year. The only reason he’s getting any attention at all is that Bobby Witt Jr. and Gunnar Henderson both play in the American League. Of course, if we play THAT game, we know that every guy I mentioned today (including Shohei) would lose to Aaron Judge, who is having the best year of his Cooperstown-bound career this year, which is saying something.
So if we limit ourselves to the National League, it’s clearly a two-horse race. But what happens these last few weeks could make all the difference. If the Mets continue their push for the postseason and Lindor leads them into October after they had been given up for dead earlier in the year, the guy has an argument to make for MVP, and a pretty good one at that. Similarly, if Shohei cracks that 50/50 plateau, the award will probably be on his mantle come the fall.
In the end, these are two great years put together by two great players, and two great ambassadors for the game. Watching these two slugging it out down the stretch will be a highlight for baseball fans throughout the country, not just in LA and New York.
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