Big Papi Squares Off With Big Money

In the last column I wrote, I defended a Minnesota product for a post-season award over a big market, big money mercenary who has led his team to a division lead. Today, though, I’m going to do the exact opposite, furthering the blasphemy by picking a Yankee. After writing on behalf of Randy Johnson last week, I should probably wait to make Alex Rodriguez’s MVP case, but I won’t.

On Friday, Jim Rome summed up the irrational hype surrounding Ortiz, asking, “Has he ever not got a hit in a big situation?” Now, obviously that’s not true. Ortiz has had a penchant for the dramatic, and has certainly come up big on a timely stage. Even stats bear out his clutch hitting, as he’s been the second most clutch player in the American League this year, according to a new Baseball Prospectus statistic that adjusts performance based on game state. The question is whether that clutch performance makes up for a deficit in overall performance, which we can also look at using stats.

Looking at the stats by which most voters will vote, A-Rod seems like the natural choice. Any time a position player finishes in the top three in BA, HR and RBI, it makes a pretty good case for awards. He is currently second in AVG, first in HR and fourth in RBI, while Ortiz goes two out of the three, leading in RBI, sitting one HR behind A-Rod’s pace and checking in with a sub-.300 BA. Obviously, his value is not tied up in his ability to slap singles, but in his ability to take and rake, which he does extremely well. He mashes XBHs on 49% of his hits and obliterating his personal best in free passes (100 compared to last year’s 75). A-Rod, though, mash pretty well for himself, actually out SLG’ing Ortiz .618 to .603, but with less XBH, meaning he hits for singles better. While it may seem like luck, A-Rod hits more singles than Ortiz year after year, because he’s much faster, and perhaps a more talented overall hitter. Further evidence of A-Rod’s speed advantage comes in stealing 21 of 27 SBs and hitting into a career low 8 DPs, while Ortiz has 1 SB and 13 GIDPs despite having a much lower ground ball rate.

It is difficult to weigh these stats against each other, although it does look as though A-Rod has a meaningful edge looking just at raw stats, excluding defense. Other sources provide a more holistic look, though, which puts them all together for us. In terms of raw offense, BP has EqA and VORP, measuring total hitting as an expression of average and through a cumulative approach. In EqA, Ortiz isn’t even the best DH, checking in at .335, ten points behind Travis Hafner. A-Rod, though, leads the league with a .348 EqA, one point ahead of teammate Jason Giambi, and doing so through a huge amount of PAs. Ortiz fares better in terms of the cumulative VORP, placing second with 82.5 runs above replacement. A-Rod is much stronger here as well, recently passing Albert Pujols for second in all of baseball with 102.7, or more than 17 runs more than Ortiz.

And we still have not considered defense.

Some of the Baseball Tonight idiots (Reynods, Brantley, I’m looking at you) have said that they would almost never vote for a DH as the MVP of the league, but that Ortiz is a special case. Really? The special case is when a DH has probably been the second best offensive player behind an infielder, and by a pretty wide margin? A-Rod has actually come back down to Earth in his second year at the hot corner, playing the position below league average. Ortiz has been dead on league average defensively as a DH, which has absolutely no value by definition. A-Rod’s rate2 at 3B is 94, costing six runs against average every 100 games, and totaling a 9 run deficit for the season. For the sake of comparison, it would be more useful to look at A-Rod compared to replacement level defense, as Ortiz at 3B would be pretty much exactly replacement level. If the two had exactly equal offensive production and A-Rod was below replacement level on defense, it would be more valuable to have the DH in the lineup, but in reality, A-Rod has been worth 11 runs above replacement (Ortiz) in the field, adding to the 17 offensive runs he has over Ortiz.

Putting them together to make up wins, A-Rod has been an 11 win player (10.9 WARP), compared to Ortiz’s 8.0. Three full wins is tremendous. Even conceding that Ortiz has been remarkably clutch, does the timing of the hits (which are already accounted for) make him 37.5% move valuable? Not unless a huge number of his hits are “clutch,” and A-Rod has no clutch ability at all.

Ortiz has always been one of my favorite players, but I am admittedly ambivalent about his breakout in Boston. I always felt that he was a stud in Minnesota, and I feel like Red Sox fans take too much credit for him being a star. Theo did not discover Ortiz; he merely picked him up when the Twins couldn’t afford two starting first basemen. I don’t like the Big Papi alter ego, and I still harbor some ridiculous hope that he will one day come back home to fulfill his potential as a Twin. Perhaps I’m biased, perhaps it gives me the distance to make a fair comparison. Either way, I’m certain that A-Rod has been more valuable than Ortiz in 2005.