BBWAA awards 2017

Clutch hitting was a big part of why I thought Votto should have won the MVP this year

there are flukes in hockey, but not enough to win mvp. rob brown scoring 49 goals with an incredible 29% shooting percentage in 1989 comes to mind -- but he did that because he was on lemieux's line. and lemieux himself went 85-114-199. the great ones can give average/mediocre players a huge boost, but the latter will never overtake them

pitching and goaltending seem to be more prone to flukes. feel for the slider comes and goes, i guess

More evidence of the changing mindset of voters: this year's NL CY Young was only the second time a pitcher who led his league in both wins and ERA did not win (and the other time it went to Willie Hernandez during the we-love-closers era, so in a sense 2017 was the first time):

http://www.billjamesonline.com/2017_nl_cy_young_award/

Marks attributes the key to being IP; if Kershaw had won he would have also set a precedent, the lowest IP for a non-closer, non-strike-year winner ever. He also suggests H/9, but I don't know how much attention voters pay to that these days; I'd say the strikeouts were much more important (Marks mentions those too). There's a little bit on Scherzer and the HOF at the end, where he says pretty much what most of us have been saying here.

Posnanski's response to James's piece:

http://joeposnanski.com/more-on-war/

(I believe they're friends, and Posnanski always writes favorably about James.)

Doddering old guy makes the case for Charlie Blackmon (and, by implication, Arenado):

http://www.billjamesonline.com/mvp_followup/

cameron: https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/putting-war-in-context-a-response-to-bill-james

I hardly think the consideration of Pythagorean win-loss in James' article was being suggested as a "simple proposed fix." It was just illustrating a point.

Players have flukey great seasons all the time, for example, because of a high BABIP that never levels out, even though it should, probabilistically speaking.

Are we also allowing for the possibility that a high BABIP over the course of a season is not always flukey, though, in the way that Joey Votto's high lifetime BABIP is presumably not flukey? (I know this post was from three days ago...)