Mike Trout (Getty Images)
Ryan Braun (AP)
(
)
Casting a ballot these days has become quite an arduous endeavor, and we are not talking about voting on the Obama-Romney level.
No, this is the real important stuff, like the Hall of Fame and annual awards. My baseball writing forefathers had it so much easier. You won 300 games or hit 500 homers, automatic ticket to Cooperstown. You won 20 or hit 40 homers, you instantly were of Cy Young and MVP caliber.
A steroid generation later and you see the Cooperstown conundrum. Players tied to steroids, like Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro, can’t get in; nor can someone with just strong suspicions, such as Jeff Bagwell. Now, here comes a new class this December that will include Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Roger Clemens (assuming he does not pitch for the Astros in the next week), and also a player like Bagwell, in Mike Piazza, who there has been long-running suspicion about.
Tainted stars have been getting more than the 5 percent of the vote necessary to stay on the ballot, but well less than the 75 percent for induction. So it’s possible the number of candidates on the ballot will continue to swell while it becomes harder for anyone less than the no-brainers (Greg Maddux, Ken Griffey Jr., etc.) to get in.
We could be facing a greater frequency of years when no one is elected. The Hall monitors will then have a pickle. They cannot tolerate too many years without their flagship event — an induction ceremony in July. But they also cannot encourage voting for drug-tied players because of: a) the bad publicity that could engender; and b) the fact so many Hall of Famers have vowed to boycott ceremonies of any inductee tied to illegal performance enhancers.
The Hall simply cannot have its most prestigious members debasing its most important event.
But that is a storm for another — albeit rapidly advancing — day.
In 10 days, however, the season will end, award ballots will be due and voters will face an MVP — Most Vexing Problem.
There will be issues in both leagues with which the fedora-and-typewriter set did not have to face.
But first full disclosure: I am one of the 32 voters for the NL Most Valuable Player. Also, I don’t mind the mounting debate/controversy. It brings attention to the awards. Plus, I like that voters are forced, more than ever, to think out their ballots and be able to defend them. If you can’t handle that responsibility, then turn in your ballots.
The MVP, more than any other award, evokes angst annually anyway as voters grapple with the “V.” What does Valuable mean? There is not unanimity. Some vote for the best player. Others weigh the meaning to contenders as they fill out the 1-to-10 ballot.
It is a devilish word. For example, has anyone been more valuable to a contender than Kris Medlen (the Braves have won his past 21 starts) or Rafael Soriano (the Yankees have thrived in the absence of the seemingly irreplaceable Mariano Rivera)? Yet neither has a chance to win.
Each voter has to process his definition through a personal V-Chip. And, this year, NL voters also must make a Ryan Braun determination. In a vacuum, the Milwaukee slugger is among the handful who can win the MVP along with San Francisco’s Buster Posey, Pittsburgh’s Andrew McCutchen and, perhaps, St. Louis’ Yadier Molina. Braun is having a great season for a contender.
Of course, we are not in a vacuum. We know last year, after Braun was elected the NL MVP, but before he picked up the actual hardware, he failed a test for an illegal performance enhancer. He challenged the findings and became the first player ever to have the outcome overturned. But many saw this as a victory of technicality, not cleanliness.
Now here is Braun leading the NL in homers, RBIs, slugging, OPS and doubters. Will enough voters have a fool-me-once-shame-on-you attitude or feel they have been deputized to punish Braun when the system failed? I have no idea if Braun is clean. Heck, if we have learned nothing else these past two decades, we should know not to assume that.
But as problematic as it might be, without evidence of cheating this year, Braun’s 2012 must stand independent of his past. For example, San Francisco’s Melky Cabrera would have been a legit candidate, but failed a test this season and will receive zero votes. Or take this hypothetical: A player gets off from a serious crime in a court of law on a technicality. He then goes on to have an MVP-worthy campaign. Would it be fair to not vote for him based on his legal history? I do not think so. If that is how I feel in an extreme case, then I believe Braun should be judged just on 2012, not a potentially unpunished baseball crime.
As for the AL, Miguel Cabrera is having a season — challenging for the Triple Crown — that even 10 years ago would have won him the MVP with little argument. But there has been a statistical revolution over the past decade, in particular.
As part of that assault, wins for pitchers, and batting average and RBIs for hitters have been downgraded in value — wins and RBIs because they are so tethered to the work of teammates, and batting average because it pales in importance to on-base percentage. We saw the impact two years ago when Seattle’s Felix Hernandez won the AL Cy despite just a 13-12 record because of his dominance in areas he had more control — strikeouts, innings pitched, baserunners per nine innings, etc.
Now, baserunning and defensive metrics have come such a long way that — beyond the obvious with eyesight — we can better compute the overall impact of the Angels’ Mike Trout, especially in comparison to Cabrera, a poor defender and baserunner. Both play for disappointing teams that might not make the playoffs, so perhaps that elevates Texas’ Adrian Beltre or Josh Hamilton, or the Yankees’ Robinson Cano.
But this does appear to be Cabrera vs. Trout, especially because they have been so vital to whatever chances their underachieving squads have. In fact, I believe some of the defensive criticism of Cabrera should be mitigated by how rancor-free he embraced moving across the diamond when Detroit signed Prince Fielder. He could have wrecked the team by insisting he stay at first. Instead, he made it a more comfortable work space for Fielder and everyone else.
Cabrera is leading the AL in average and RBIs and, after hitting his 42nd homer last night, is tied with Josh Hamilton for the AL lead, positioning Cabrera to be the first Triple Crown winner since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967. Now, four Triple Crown winners — Ted Williams in 1947 and ’42, Lou Gehrig in 1934 and Chuck Klein in 1933 — did not win the MVP, although the writers did not pick the winner based on defensive zone rating or VORP.
My brethren who made those decisions more than a half century ago at least had this advantage — they were not called idiots on endless loop on talk radio and the Internet.
joel.sherman@nypost.com