About seven or eight years ago, there was an established adage/joke among baseball fans, and it went something like this: the MLB season doesn’t officially start until Mike Trout leads the league in Wins Above Replacement. At the time, Trout was the undisputed best player in the league, and eventually other players’ hot starts would fade—leaving Trout standing alone at the top of the leaderboard.
It’s 2026 now, so maybe it’s time to give it a good ol’ update. Let’s say, oh, something along the lines
of: the MLB season doesn’t officially start until Bobby Witt Jr. leads the league in Wins Above Replacement. In any case, the season has officially started, because if you go look at the Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference version of WAR, you’ll find that Witt has indeed accrued more WAR than any other American League player.
Over on Bluesky, Kevin O’Brien of Royals Keep posted Witt’s season batting percentiles and wondered if this could be the year that Witt wins the MVP. Yes, it’s just May, but again, Witt is already leading the league in WAR. Is it his to lose? Is it finally his time?
But something Kevin said in the post also stuck with me: “[Witt] doesn’t have the home runs (yet),” Kevin wrote. And while it’s very clear that Witt is an excellent and extremely valuable baseball player, I think that idea deserves a little more exploration as it pertains to Witt’s MVP chances.
There have been arguments about MVP forever, with some of them semantic and some of them philosophical. It’s the “most valuable player” award, but are we talking overall value or value to the team? To what extent do we reward individual accomplishment or positional difficulty? Do past MVPs factor into it? What about pitchers? Are there certain kinds of player who are rewarded more often?
These are all interesting arguments, but the reality is that the Baseball Writers’ Association of America—the MVP voters—essentially consider the MVP to be a “best player” award, and they generally only award a pitcher if that player is clearly the best player. But there are some other things at play, too, and I have a chart to illustrate them: the position player winners of the AL and NL MVP award dating back a dozen years, with 2020 and Shohei Ohtani’s awards thrown out for obvious reasons.
First, the best way to get an MVP award is by being the best player, but the thing about that is that there are other great players also trying to be the best player. Kris Bryant’s 2016 is a prime example here: a 7.5 fWAR season is, in the context of other MVPs, just ok. But no one else in the NL was as good, and so that 7.5 fWAR cleared. Witt, on the other hand, has had to content with Aaron Judge and Cal Raleigh the last two years, both of whom put together historically great campaigns. Just no fighting that.
Second, MVP award winners clear a gigantic offensive bar. The average position player MVP winner since 2014 has had a batting average of .314 and has swatted 42 home runs en route to a wRC+ of 176. That’s the average hitter. In Witt’s best season (so far) in 2024, he was double-digit home runs away and seven points of wRC+ away from both figures.
Third, there is simply a bias towards offense in MVP award voting. Most votes go how the WAR total goes, with nearly all winners on this list ranking as the top or second-best WAR in both Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference versions. There were only three players who won
MVP and ranked below second place in either fWAR or bWAR: Mike Trout in 2019, Bryce Harper in 2021, and Paul Goldschmidt in 2022. In all three situations, the voters prioritized bat over glove, overlooking WAR to do so. In 2019, it was Alex Bregman and Marcus Semien who lost out. In 2021, it was Trea Turner and Fernando Tatis Jr. who lost out. And in 2022, it was Nolan Arenado and Manny Machado who lost out.
Witt’s game particularly vulnerable to the biases of MVP voters. Witt is a very good hitter who also happens to be the best defensive player in baseball and also one of the deadliest basestealers in the league. But Witt is not going to hit 50 home runs. He’s not going to walk at a 15% clip. He’s probably never going to hit a 169 wRC+ again. There’s a reason that none of the platinum glove winners have ever won an MVP; Arenado came the closest, but again, even though he accrued more WAR than Paul Goldschmidt, voters thought Goldschmidt’s offense was more important than Arenado’s defense.
So, is it Witt’s year to win MVP? I doubt it. That’s not because I don’t think Witt is good; on the contrary, I think Witt is clearly the best player in baseball because how he can impact the game every second he’s on the field. I’m just jaded about the process and about what voters value. I hope it is Witt’s year to win MVP, because he certainly deserves it for how good he’s been over the last two plus seasons.
