Written By: Greg Arnold
Staff Writer
With the Major League Baseball season coming to an end, the talk for this year’s Most Valuable Player has an interesting twist. In the American League, one of the favorites is former Old Dominion student and now ace pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, Justin Verlander. A starting pitcher has not won MVP since 1986. Also in the race are Adrian Gonzalez from the Boston Red Sox and Curtis Granderson from the New York Yankees.
The Red Sox are holding as tight as they can to their wildcard playoff spot, and Gonzalez has been a big part of that. As of this writing, he leads the league with a .338 batting average and is tied for first with 111 RBIs. He is also batting .405 with runners on base, which is third in the league.
Granderson is having a great season as well tied for the league lead with 111 RBIs and is second with 39 home runs. The Yankees are on the edge of locking up a playoff spot and have been as much of a surprise as the Yankees can be. They have been leading their division for much of the season when the Red Sox were heavily favored in the beginning of the league year.
Although these two have played great so far this year, there has been plenty of good hitting this season. Teams like the Red Sox, the Yankees, and the Texas Rangers have been hitting the ball well. The Red Sox have six players batting over .290, the Rangers have five. The Rangers have five players with over 20 home runs and 80 RBIs, the Yankees have four. It is hard to say the two players mentioned the most outside of Verlander for MVP have raised that much above the rest of the pack.
Verlander, however, has had an epic season this year. He leads the entire American League in wins, ERA, and strikeouts. These three stats are considered the essentials for the pitching Triple Crown. He also leads in innings pitched, walks and hits per inning (WHIP) and opposing batting average. He has led his Tigers to a double-digit game lead over the Chicago White Sox.
One of the biggest arguments against picking a pitcher for MVP is that a pitcher does not affect enough games to be the most valuable person on the diamond. Going through the Yankees schedule this year, if Granderson’s runs and the runs he batted in were removed the Yankees would have either lost or tied in 23 games they won. The Red Sox would have only 20 games in which the results would have changed if the same synopsis was done for Gonzalez. Verlander has 23 wins on his own so far this year, and one game in which his Tigers won after he was removed from it.
Verlander has also helped his team by pitching late into games allowing the bullpen to rest and be ready for their next game. He has pitched eight or nine innings 13 times this year. Of those 13 times, the Tigers won seven times, and five times the starter in that game only went seven innings or less.
While playing for ODU, Verlander became the all-time strikeout leader in ODU, the CAA and Virginia Division I history. Although many are blindly saying that a pitcher cannot win the MVP, it is clear he has as much affect on the Tigers this season as any position player. He is a clear win for the American League CY Young award, and should be the best choice for the MVP award.
