I'm very happy that the baseball writers of America finally ran out of excuses to deny Alex Rodriguez an MVP award, despite illogical arguments about the meaning of "value" from those who don't know better (and those who should). Click here and here for rejoinders, and here for some fascinating tidbits on the voting.

From a selfish perspective, I would not have minded if Jorge Posada had won. But I had other rationalizations for that fall-back position besides team loyalty. Under the Win Shares system, A-Rod led the league with 32 win shares, and Posada was tied for fourth with 28 (technically, he was fifth on percentage points, but those differences are of minimal importance). That is fairly close (Bill James stated that differences of 3 or fewer Win Shares are not terribly meaningful). And this points up my personal favorite flaw in the system: how it rates catchers.

In rating catchers, the Win Shares system essentially has the following equation. I find it difficult to disagree with the first two parts and equally difficult to accept the result:

A+B=C, where:

A= It is virtually impossible for a catcher to contribute the most offensive value in the league (due to the physical demands of the position and the resulting absence from the lineup for 20-40 games per season);
B= It is also virtually impossible for the defensive value of even the best defensive catcher to make up the difference in offensive value between such catcher and the best offensive player, unless you: a) allot so much defensive value to the catcher that there is no defensive credit left over for the other positions on the team, and/or b) allot a disproportionate amount of value to defense generally, which throws off the values ascribed to pitching and hitting by any reasonable analysis;
C= It is therefore virtually impossible for a catcher to contribute the most value in the league.

And according to James' book, only Johnny Bench in 1970 and Mike Piazza in 1997 have pulled off the trick of leading their league in Win Shares, and thus contributing the most value to their team in the league in a given season - i.e., deserving an MVP award.

James is clearly not comfortable with that conclusion either; he basically exempts catchers from his discussion of "least deserving MVPs" for that reason. I am not quantitatively-skilled enough to propose a fix to the system to better recognize the value of catchers. But I do think that it may be appropriate to give a catcher the benefit of the doubt, or a little "off-budget" extra credit, in a Win Shares comparison. Therefore, while A-Rod clearly was the #1 choice, I thought that Posada, by coming so close in Win Shares as a catcher, was the clear #2 choice and would have made a reasonable alternative.

Maybe next year.