The great issue of our time
By Has, somewhat surprisingly, not yet been addressed by LGM.
I have a couple of biases to declare, namely that I root for the Tigers and against stupidity, which naturally leaves me feeling torn on the Cabrera-Trout issue. (A friend of mine points out to me that exactly the same people who were arguing for Ichiro as the 2001 MVP because fielding and baserunning are so important are the same people arguing for Cabrera today because those things are too hard to quantify).
A couple of notes:
(1) It’s important not to exaggerate the scientific precision of a stat like WAR — the levels of uncertainty involved in the calculation mean that, for example, if I had a vote I would pay almost no attention to the fact that at least one version of WAR concludes that Cabrera isn’t even the most valuable player on his team this year (Verlander, by the way, has had an almost identical season to his MVP-winning 2011 year, minus the gaudy W-L record). But the gap here is enormous — basically according to advanced stats the gap between Trout and Cabrera is equal to the gap between Cabrera and an average-quality major league regular.
(2) Trout’s WAR numbers would be even higher except he missed the first 10% of the season getting into playing shape in Triple AAA after missing most of spring training with an illness. As it is he’s still having one of the best half dozen or so post WW-II seasons by a position player per this metric. And it’s certainly the greatest rookie season ever.