The Best Of 2006

EITHER RYAN HOWARD or Albert Pujols will look back someday on his monstrous 2006 season and wonder how the heck he wasn't the National League's MVP, not unlike Ted Williams did after his .406 season in 1941 wasn't good enough to beat out Joe DiMaggio for American League MVP. The baseball writers' voting for all the major awards is a cold, cruel business, but it's particularly so when a classic MVP profile--a slugger with huge numbers for a contender--must be denied. � How would you like to tell the 6'4", 252-pound Howard of the Phillies that his .313 batting average, 58 homers and 149 RBIs for a team that was eliminated on the penultimate day of the season weren't enough to win the MVP? (Suggestion: ship to shore radio.)

And how could the Cardinals ' Pujols (.331, 49, 137 for a division champion) lose for a fifth time in six seasons despite having no worse than a .314 average, 34 homers and 123 RBIs in any of those years?

Both deserve to win, but the player who deserves to win slightly more is the one who produced more consistently, was more reliable in key situations and, though barely so, pulled his team by the scruff of its neck into the postseason. It is Pujols.

Likewise, the AL MVP race is razor close and should send another slugging first baseman with huge numbers to a head-scratching defeat. Like Howard, the Twins' Justin Morneau (.321, 34, 130) loses out to the more consistent hitter who was slightly better in key situations: shortstop Derek Jeter of the Yankees , who gets extra credit for doing so while capably manning a more important position.

It's an unusually intriguing year for MVPs, which are typically more obvious. Of the 24 MVPs since the six-division format began in 1994, 15 of them received more than 60% of the first-place votes. Only twice (in '95 and 2005) were both races won without such a large majority.

Howard most certainly was the MVP of the second half of the season, becoming such a threat down the stretch that managers intentionally walked him 16 times in September. But at the All-Star break Howard was hitting .278 and ranked 12th in the league in OPS while playing for a team 12 games out of first.

Pujols was the more consistent producer, his average dropping below .300 only four days all year. His biggest edge on Howard was that he clearly outperformed the Philadelphia slugger in situations that called for a key hit--while his weak St. Louis supporting cast made such moments more critical. For instance, Howard batted with 509 runners on, which was 82 more than Pujols and the second most in baseball. (The Yankees ' Alex Rodriguez came to the plate with 534 runners on.) Pujols blew away Howard in batting average with runners in scoring position (.397 to .256) and RISP with two outs (.435 to .237), as well as average in the late innings of close games (.319 to .286). Bottom line: Hitting .256 with runners in scoring position for a team that didn't make the playoffs isn't good enough to take the MVP away from a playoffs-bound clutch hitter with better on-base (.431 to .425) and slugging percentages (.671 to .659), and a better VORP (value over replacement player), the sabermetric stat that measures a hitter against the average backup player at his position (84.6 to 80.6).

Like Howard, Morneau was nowhere to be seen on the MVP radar for much of the season. On June 8 he was hitting .235 with 38 RBIs. An even greater obstacle to his candidacy was that he wasn't even the MVP of the Twins. That would be catcher Joe Mauer , the batting champion (.347) who had the better OPS than Morneau (.936 to .934) and better VORP (65.4 to 51.6) while playing the more critical position. Mauer , however, cooled just when Minnesota took off (he hit .284 in July and August) and has fewer hits, runs, home runs, RBIs and stolen bases and a worse VORP than his chief competition, Jeter .

Moreover, if his team needed to get runners in from scoring position or a hit in the late innings of close games, Jeter did so at better rates than Mauer or Morneau . While Rodriguez slumped through the summer and injuries took Hideki Matsui , Gary Sheffield and Robinson Cano out of the New York lineup for large chunks of time, Jeter was at his reliable best. He never let his average drop below .333 or his OBP below .411 after the first two weeks, and he reached base in all but nine of the 148 games he was in the starting lineup.

Should Jeter get the most AL votes, he would become only the fourth positional player in the past 30 years to win an MVP with a slugging percentage lower than .500, joining the Dodgers ' Kirk Gibson (1988), the Reds' Barry Larkin ('95) and the Mariners' Ichiro Suzuki (2001). He may be a less traditional choice, but as the clutch-hitting shortstop and pillar of reliability for the best team in the league, despite its injuries, Jeter is every bit the MVP that Pujols is.