Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Who's the MVP? (A detour from real life)

About a year ago I began a solo Strat-O-Matic league with cards from their Hall of Fame and Negro League stars sets — 10 teams, 44 games each. I have now finished the regular season — still have the championship series to play, but the project is essentially complete.

On the basis that little is more boring than somebody else's fantasy league, I won't delve into the details. If you are really interested, I chronicled the ins and outs here.

What I'm after is opinion on the league MVPs — Most Valuable Player and Most Valuable Pitcher. (I won't call the latter Cy Young because Cy Young was in this league — and wasn't all that good.)

I offer three candidates for each, alphabetically, using only traditional stats because (a) most of these guys never heard of on-base percentage and (b) I kept the stats by hand and opted to avoid extra computation:

Players

Josh Gibson, c/1b: His team, Homestead, finished second in its division, two games out. Gibson was first in batting average (.423), second in home runs (18), second in runs scored (48), ninth in RBIs (38).

Babe Ruth, lf: His team, Franklins, lost a one-game playoff for its division. Ruth led the league in home runs (22), runs (52) and walks (45). He was fourth in RBIs (43).  His .347 batting average did not make the leader board.

Tris Speaker, cf: His team, Teddys, won that one-game playoff. Speaker was second in batting average (.420), RBIs (47) and hits (74). He led the league in doubles (17).

Pitchers

Three-Finger Brown: 8-2, 3.01 for the Teddys. His 89.6 innings were second most in the league. The wins tied for the league lead. The ERA was third best. Not on the leader board in strikeouts.


Carl Hubbell: 8-1, 3.47 for the Franklins. Led league in innings (93.3), tied for sixth in strikeouts (60), was fifth in ERA.

Slim Jones: 6-1, 2.48 for the X-Giants. Led league in ERA. Relatively light workload (72.6 innings), but was still fourth in strikeouts (62).

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