While in the NL we have a handful of worthy candidates for the MVP award in the AL, its clearly a two-horse race, but that doesnt make things any easier considering that both players present strong cases and that either one of them would win the award in the NL if participating in it. Now while the award its relatively up for grabs, you can get a sense that most analysts are pending towards Altuves side, the reasons for that are many, among them theres the huge slump Judge had in the middle of the season, in which is no cause for panic is just very hard to post 8 WAR seasons as they both did by baseball reference, Fangraphs has Altuve slightly below at 7.5, nevertheless if you look at their projections for next year Steamer has Altuve at 4.4 and Juh he broke the ML record for most consecutive games with a K, before that he was the clear favorite and after it he had no shot, that was the general consensus and in contrary to Judges rollercoaster, Altuve played at a steady nonetheless great pace, and finished the year as the best player on the best team, which bodes well for the old school voters, now I'm here to not only make the case for Judge but to prove he should win it. While both players are superstars with tremendous upside it wouldnt be hard to make an argument that they both just had career years, which is no cause for panic is just very hard to post 8 WAR seasons as they both did by baseball reference, Fangraphs has Altuve slightly below at 7.5, nevertheless if you look at their projections for next year, Steamer has Altuve at 4.4 and Judge at 4.0 WAR, with significant offensive decline, so this might be their best opportunity to ever win it, especially when theres a Mike Trout in your league. But moving on, those who defend Altuve will say that while Judges power numbers are ridiculous, they get overshadowed by the fact that Altuve had a batting average .62 percentage points better then Judge all while hitting for a .202 ISO which is considered premiere sluggers' level, if you add all this up the general consensus pick is Altuve, now I'll tell you why youre wrong. Who never heard the phrase a walk is as good as a hit, its a nice concept with its benefits, but ultimately its a flawed concept, the more accurate notion is, a walk is as good as a single with no runners in scoring position, but whos gonna say that, the thing is despite a .62 head start the free-swinging Altuve finished with a .410 OBP which falls shorts of Aarons .422, but thats a lot more Judges merit then you think for a guy with Altuves skillset a .8.8 Walk Rate is very good but Judges .18.7 is just plain ridiculous, along with that throwing aside the percentages on a matter of pure cumulative stats Jose has a total of 67 XBH, 12 less then Judges 79, all backed up by the advantages in SLG .627 to .547 and ISO .343 to .202, wOBA .430 to .405 and wRC+ .173 to .160, but despite all of this one may say well youre discounting the value of the singles, stat that Altuve has a huge lead in, 135 to 73, but as I said before a walk is as good as a single with no RISP, and in situations with runners in scoring positions Jose had 30 singles to Judges 16 and yet had only 1 more hit total, 40 to 39 thanks to Aarons 15 HR with men in scoring position and in the end Judge drove in 67 runs to Altuves 52, but then again with such a higher number of overall hits, Jose must have had a higher impact on games, no he didnt, if you look at WPA/LI which measures Wins Probably Added while factoring in the Leverage Index of the situation Aaron leads 6.23 to 4.59. So with all that in mind and the fact that Judge both scored and drove in more runs, 128 and 114 to 112 and 81 on a worse offense, Yankees 108 wRC+ to Astros 121, also last but not least neither truly has any positive nor negative defensive value that could be a factor in this decision and even in that Judge has 9 DRS to Altuves 3, so unless you wanna give Altuve the prize for his 32 Stolen Bases to Judges 9, you, my friend dont have a case. Considering all of this, theres really no way you can argue to me that Altuve is the MVP, but overall this is only a testament to how great Judge was and I doubt at this point any Houston fan will care.
