Ladies and gentleman, I give you your MVP runnerup: Adrian Beltre

Yes, A-Rod won it when the Rangers were 60 games out. The Giants are 4 out of 1st in the West and leading the wild card race.

NL MVP as of now:
Bonds
Rolen
Beltre

JD Drew has had a great season. Probably not a true MVP canidate as he isn't putting up nearly the killer numbers of these other people, but he has definitely been important to the Braves.

Having Shawn Green return to the living and adding Finley to the Dodger's lineup definitely helps Beltre. Green has been red hot since the break.

edmonds might have drawn even with rolen at this point, but he doesn't have the lofty RISP numbers. beltre's been only so-so w/ RISP but has some unbelievable clutch (close and late) which have helped his case in a huge way.

here's an article gygax is sure to love:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=neel/040826

i love how there's this perception that bonds has just always been this good and what he's doing now is nothing special for him. i mean yeah, he was possibly the best player of the 90s but he was but a shadow of what he is now and has been the last 3 years.

Saturday's line: W 4-2 over the Mets
5-5 1HR 2RBI 2Runs

Criminy.

Barry Bonds 113.4
Albert Pujols 77.2
Adrian Beltre 77.2
Todd Helton 74.6
Jim Edmonds 73.8
Mark Loretta 68.2
Scott Rolen 67.4

NL VORP thru Saturday:
Barry Bonds 113.4
Albert Pujols 77.2
Adrian Beltre 77.2
Todd Helton 74.6
Jim Edmonds 73.8
******Mark Loretta 68.2******
Scott Rolen 67.4

contrast that attitude with sheffield or pujols, who have won i don't know how many games for their teams this year playing through pain. oh, and then there was that whole missing 5 games with a cold thing.

(ie still plenty of reason not to like the guy folks)

i love that man.

Not to mention he is at least 10 years older than Pujols (who knows for sure?) and is quite a different player than Sheffield is.

are you kidding me??

"is quite a different player than Sheffield is."

no, he's not at all. unless you mean what you probably mean, which doesn't actually have anything to do with what i'm talking about. please, don't even try to argue that bonds is half as tough as gary is. barry can (and does) have all the talent in the world, but at the end of the day he's still a pussy.

giants lose 7-6. bonds makes an out in his PH AB.

Hi John,

I've been watching Bonds for almost his entire career. While his hamstring isn't going to tear in half, i would imagine that it has never healed completely based on first hand observation. For a guy who has had only 2 substantial stays on the DL in a 19 year career and has played in less than 140 games only 1 time since 1987, your definition of "pussy" shows either a very poor or creative understanding of it.

And while your attempt to credit Bonds with the loss with his PH AB (the Giants had the lead at the time) is charming, if you'd actually watched the game you'd have seen Dustin Hermanson gave up 3 hits and a walk (2 Runs) in the bottom of the 9th while failing to retire a batter.

Well, yeah, there's plenty on-record of The Pain of The Bonds (mostly because, since I'm not in the SF area, the only non-stat noise I hear about Bonds is about his aches & pains & BB's attitude re: the aches & pains & the media's slanting of BB's attitude re: the aches & pains), but if there's a player nowadays that can deservedly get away w/ some diva histrionics, it is he, and I don't recall any outright grandstanding re: his aches & pains (which, from what I've heard, are pretty severe - I heard it takes 10 man hours for his hammies to get prepped before gametime?)

he didn't cost them the game by making a lousy out, he cost them the game by NOT PLAYING.

for a roided-up 40 year old man with a shot hammy, he still runs the bases and plays the field pretty well. so i thought, in a deadlocked wildcard race with only a month remaining in the season, where a single loss could certainly cost the giants a playoff berth, and with two days off in the coming week, he might take a risk, make an exception, and play this game. sacrifice his body a little bit, for the good of the team, like some of those other mvp candidates are. y'know, that corny old-school unselfish "white" bullshit.

(i'm just kidding of course, i never thought that. i know the guy too well)

regards

john

beltre, 3B
g - 125
eqa - .340

pujols, 1B
g - 124
eqa - .341

seems to me like beltre should have the higher VORP.

Well, it would figure to be. Even if most MVP winners are from one of the 8 playoff teams, odds of the player's team going on to get the trophy is roughly 1 in 8, given that most postseason series are a coin flip (or "fucking luck" as Mr Beane put it).

>seems to me like beltre should have the higher VORP

Pujols has nearly 40 more plate appearances.

no one will agree with me on this and he won't win, but it's gotta be sheffield in the AL.

Through Sunday, Shefffield is third in the AL in Adjusted Runs Above Position, trailing only Guillen and Mora (neither of whom will get support) and just ahead of Vlad.

Another way to look at it is that teams who rely on one player for most their offense rarely win it all.

edmonds .311/.426/.672, neutral park
beltre .338/.386/.652, pitcher's park

gotta figure defense is a wash/edge to edmonds. but jimmy doesn't have great clutch/risp numbers.

the trouble of course is that rolen and pujols still loom VERY large...but i'm moving back to undecided.

Edmonds would likely be my #2 at the moment.

VORP, Sept 1

Bonds 118.9
Pujols 82.2
Edmonds 78.5

"* In terms of EqA, the gap between Bonds and Beltre is bigger than the gap between Beltre and Cody Ransom. Hell, the gap between Bonds and Beltre about as big as the gap between Beltre and Neifarious."

If the Yanks win the division despite all those pitching injuries, I think Sheff will win (although Rivera probably deserved equal credit. In a way, they're the Bonds-Schmidt combo of the AL, or at least, that is how they will be perceived).

Bill James predictor tool has Cano with 59% chance of making it to 3000.

I think Cano will make it. There are a lot of middle infielders like Castro who look like decent bets mid-career--they start young and pile up a lot of hits by the time they're 30--but they're just not good enough to play regularly into their late 30s. My guess is Castro's one of those guys, Elvis Andrus too. Altuve's obviously qualitatively different.

castro has no chance, he's not good enough to play for as long as he'd have to

Robbie Alomar looked to be a guy to maybe go way over 3000 hits as he had been so dependable and then he was not anymore.

I got to give Castro a bit of props for coming out of the garbage bin to even be good again, he looked maybe washed up a couple years ago.

Robbie Alomar looked to be a guy to maybe go way over 3000 hits as he had been so dependable and then he was not anymore.

― earlnash, Monday, July 31, 2017 11:39 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Alomar's fall was rather sharp: 193 hits at age 33, then 157, then 133, then 45.

Cano's contract basically guarantees that he'll get enough PT to Biggio his way to 3000 hits.

538 had a 3,000-hit roundup the other day:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/who-will-join-the-3000-hit-club-after-adrian-beltre/

Trout, Machado, and Harper all 200-300 hits ahead of the average 3,000-hit guy.

Alomar's drop-off still mystifies me. I had a theory at the time that I've since discarded. Coming off his near-MVP season in 2001, he was just shy of 2,400 hits and not yet 34. I thought at the time he was headed for the Top 10, maybe even 3,500 hits.

(xpost)

big-gi-o

/ bij-ˈjē-ō/

transitive verb

1. to hang around unproductively for the sake of specious awards and milestones

“Martin Scorsese finally biggioed his first Academy Award for The Departed.”

Finally you and Morbs can agree on something. Glad I could help (the assist goes to Biggio for inspiring this feel good moment by, uh, biggioing the last three years of his career).

http://mlb.nbcsports.com/2017/08/08/report-umpire-joe-west-suspended-three-games-for-bashing-adrian-beltre-publicly/

In keeping with the general feeling that umpires are a touch sensitive these days.

joe west is a confrontational dick, but that is lame

i mean in the seven weeks since that happened, MLB had him ump home plate in the all-star game

yeah, that seems silly. didn't west say they were on good terms, and beltre said he thought it was a joke?

nah fuck joe west

In best promotion ever, #Rangers giving away miniature on-deck circles to honor Adrian Beltre: https://t.co/9pzL8ZfRI9

— Evan Grant (@Evan_P_Grant) August 11, 2017

hahaha

love it

out at least four weeks ;_;

Awful! He's having a partial season that ranks with all his other second-greatest seasons.

Adrian Beltre got to meet Beltre the Giraffe at the @FortWorthZoo today. https://t.co/Isr4ahfM88 pic.twitter.com/Bk3lwq3VaQ

— Cut4 (@Cut4) March 30, 2018

Adrian Beltre Becomes the Latin American Hit King https://t.co/I4ZNwtnCUe

— FanGraphs Baseball (@fangraphs) April 5, 2018

That is just amazing. This guy has blossomed into an All-Timer.

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/adrian-beltre-is-now-the-international-hit-king/

I never get tired of these two guys:

http://www.mlb.com/cut4/felix-hernandez-laughed-at-adrian-beltre-after-striking-him-out/c-289319882

(Extra credit to Beltre--as the announcers point out, he knows when not to joke around.)

I hope Ade comes back for a final season. He’s been injured and his statline is a touch below recent years but still, he has been playing out of his mind the past couple weeks and his bWAR is a very nice 2.3 (in approx 2/3 of a season.)

Hope so too. Otherwise (and it makes no actual difference in his stature), the two partial seasons will end up costing him 500 HR and 100 WAR.

In honor of Adrián Beltré retiring here’s a thread of all of his best, goofiest and most wonderful moments.

The dude was such a vehicle of baseball joy and we’ll all miss his antics.

— Cespedes Family BBQ (@CespedesBBQ) November 20, 2018

not complete without:
http://i.imgur.com/vv7x8lf.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DtR9eU2U8AA8ck-.jpg:small

@GrantBrisbee Hello Grant, long time reader here. I just wanted to share this very important video with you where Adrian Beltre was shopping at JC Penny with his family and randomly appeared in a commercial where the person had no idea who he was. https://t.co/nkmxaMNHig

— Mark Sandritter (@MarkSandritter) January 24, 2019

Damn, he didn't even get a chryon