MVP balloting across the three major U.S. sports should stand for Mystifying Voting Process.
There are no industry standards for making selections, and many pundits, talking heads, and observers have trended toward making up their own reasons why a player should receive these honors. In fact, highly paid TV personalities often use the Most Valuable Player debate to show off their own self-anointed all-knowingness by pointing out some argument-supporting stat they often reel in from a sea of minutia.
The National Basketball Association, which concluded its regular season on Sunday, is a prime example as the playoffs are set to get underway.
Westbrook went on to post three more triple-double seasons, including one for the lowly Washington Wizards in 2020–2021, but voters ditched him like they were running their own fastbreak.
Throw in Denver Nuggets super center Nikola Jokic, whose team is 50–32, with him this season becoming just the third player in NBA history to average a triple-double. The Serbian sensation, though, isn’t among the top candidates for the MVP this season, barely breaking into the conversation despite his impact on wins and losses and his dominance of the game. But this was the best statistical season of the three-time MVP’s career.
The history books of the top U.S. sports are littered with fickle MVP balloting over many decades, with voters floating wishy-washy reasons for selecting one player over another, or even skipping the obvious top contributor simply because the player has already won the honor.
“I always took voting very seriously and had an official ballot for many years, and just tried to be as consistent as possible,” longtime NBA writer Marc Stein told The Epoch Times in an email. “MVP, to me, has always meant: Who had the best season? Individual statistics, team success, leadership, and intangibles ... all of it factored into my votes,” wrote Stein, who said he hasn’t voted for an MVP since 2017.
“Also: From Moses Malone’s MVP season in 1981-82 to Russell Westbrook’s in 2016-17, [almost no MVPs] in the NBA came from a team that failed to win 50 games. So that was something else to factor in. My approach always was: Judge this individual season as its own individual entity.”
So it’s more than just statistics, it’s more than being on a team with a great roster, and it’s more than leading the league in scoring. But the NFL and MLB have also been trapped in a massive pool of “gray area.”
Baseball had two of its giants battling for MVP honors in Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees and Los Angeles two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers.
Ohtani was the runaway MVP because of his unprecedented 50-home run, 50-stolen base campaign, and Judge put up all the sexy numbers that make voters drip drool on the ballots. But there are seasons that aren’t as easy, and voters throw out vague reasons for making choices that normally involve a player they simply prefer.
Retired baseball writer Jerry Crasnick, associate director of player, agent, and media affairs for the Major League Baseball Players Association, said the current climate in MLB produces the best candidates.
“Since the ballots are public and everyone on social media has an opinion, writers are in a position now where they have to defend their choices,” said Crasnick, a voter for about 30 years.
“I guess that’s good, in a way, because they have to put the requisite time into the process and be accountable.
“The analytics now are incredibly detailed and paint an exhaustive picture of each player’s contribution. People always like to complain about the writers voting, whether it’s for [the Hall of Fame in] Cooperstown or postseason awards.
“But I don’t think you’re going to find many [if any] egregiously bad choices—for MVP or any of the other awards. The new wave of voters is more numbers-driven and less swayed by emotional appeals.”
Still, if the honor is for the player who performed the best and led a successful run, let’s make it a full-season award—including the postseason—and hand the honor to the top champagne-drenched player on championship night.
That makes things clear. It removes the ill-defined standards for voting. And it gives fans an unfiltered view of the process.
Scrap the regular-season MVP and include the part of the process that’s most important and memorable. Let’s take the mystery out of the voting.
