The oddsmakers — and the people who bet on such things — gave Shohei Ohtani the National League MVP award months ago. You get it. Shohei Ohtani has won the MVP three of the last four years, he’s the best player in baseball, and he’s doing typically awe-inspiring Shohei things — he might hit 50 home runs and score 150 runs in the same year, something nobody’s done since Jimmie Foxx in 1932.
And on the side, he’s thrown 38 effective innings.
We all get it. Years ago, I suggested they break off Shohei from the rest of the pack and simply create the Shohei Ohtani Award, which would be bigger than the MVP.
BUT … I’m not sure Shohei Ohtani will actually win the award this year.
I‘m wondering now if Trea Turner might win it.
Those oddsmakers aren’t buying this at all. They have Ohtani as the overwhelming, nobody-even-close odds-on favorite, and in a distant second, they have Kyle Schwarber.* Turner is not even in the picture. I saw one oddsmaker put Paul Skenes ahead of Trea Turner. Spoiler alert: If you ran the MVP voting one billion times, Paul Skenes would win exactly zero of them (unless in the billion-universe scenario, Shohei Ohatani changed his name to Paul Skenes as a lark).
*It’s kind of funny that after years and years of designated hitters NEVER being seriously considered for MVP (David Ortiz, Edgar Martinez, Paul Molitor never won one), being a DH now appears to be a prerequisite.
Trea Turner makes an old-fashioned, “he does everything well” case for MVP — one that the oddsmakers/bettors couldn’t be less excited about. He’s the only .300 hitter in the National League. He leads the league in hits. He will steal 40 bases, score 100 runs, and, perhaps most significantly, he’s playing Gold Glove shortstop.
Add it all up, and Fangraphs now has him leading all National League batters in WAR, a half-win ahead of Shohei. Yes, if you add in Shohei’s pitching WAR, he moves back into the lead, but it’s super close, and there’s an argument to be made that Turner’s brilliant shortstop defense (the one thing he offers that no other MVP candidate does) more than counters Ohtani’s pitching innings.
I don’t have a National League MVP vote (I do have an AL MVP vote, so I’ll keep my thoughts on that race to myself), but I can tell you that if I did, I’d be super torn on this race. I see Ohtani and Turner in a dead heat, and I would watch the last few weeks of the season very closely. The Dodgers have been playing uninspiring baseball for a good while now, and Ohtani has fallen into a nasty slump over the last couple of weeks. Meanwhile, the Phillies are ascendant and Turner is playing fantastic baseball (he’s hitting .398 and slugging .602 over the last month).
This race feels wide open to me, no matter what the oddsmakers say.
📓 This is Joe’s Notebook.
Half-formed thoughts, instant reactions, and nonsense (usually baseball) in real time.
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