This will be the last “traditional” Gameday Thread for a bit. Mrs. S and I are flying out to Spain early tomorrow morning. There’s a nine-hour time difference, so I’m likely to be tucked up in bed before line-ups get announced. I’ll be cellphone only so clipping the bullpen chart will also be problematic. There will be Gameday Threads. They just might be devoid of meaningful information. Well, about the D-backs, anyway. I may end up copy/pasting parts of semi-random Wikipedia articles for the hell
of it. Or there may be holiday updates – we’re planning to hang out with DbacksEurope at some point, so that’ll be awesome.
That Geraldo Perdomo will get some MVP votes seems very likely. He has been totally amazing this season, on and off the field. But is there a shot he could be one of the three finalists in the National League? Let’s look at the numbers. Below you’ll find the bWAR, fWAR and average WAR, of the position players who are in the top ten by either metric. Eight were in the top ten on both: two (Hoerner and Turang) were bWAR only, while Marte and Lindor were fWAR only. That gives us a dozen players who would appear to be the best that the National League has to offer.
It’s strikingly close at the top, with just 0.2 in average WAR separating the top four. Right now, Perdomo would be just on the outside, but many more games like last night would soon close the gap. He is also very consistent in the metrics, with the smallest gap between bWAR and fWAR of the top six. If the figures remain as they are, it will be interesting to see how the votes line up, with Trea Turner comfortably ahead in fWAR. but Pete Crow-Armstrong with an even bigger lead by bWAR. Which metric will the voters prefer? And of course, there’s always the hype pick of Ohtani: should we be adding his pitching value in? Finally, when was the last time the D-backs had three players in the top twelve?
