Here’s the good news for the Oakland Athletics—two of their players are in serious contention for an MVP award. The bad news? The two players now play on other teams.
Josh Donaldson is favored as the American League MVP after putting the Toronto Blue Jays in position to go to the promised land of the playoffs for the first time since 1993. He currently leads the league in RBI (the favorite MVP predictor for no good reason), is third in home runs, and tenth in batting average. If you don’t like olde timey stats, he leads the league in Runs Created with 113.8, leads in WAR with 8.0, and in extra base hits with 77. Given that the Blue Jays seem well placed to win their division (as a long-time Yankee hater, I assume the Yanks will not make up the 1.5 game difference between the teams) while the Mike trout-led Angels are not, his candidacy appears to be a fait accompli.
In the National League, the candidacy of Yoenis Cespedes is heating up. In addition to individual acts of bravado, the Mets offense has been scoring three runs a game more (3.54 to 6.14) since Cepedes joined the team at the trade deadline. Compare this to what happened to the A’s—they had the best record in the league last August 1st, they sent Cespedes to Boston in exchange for two months of John Lackey, and now they have the worst record in the American League after their offense fell into a pit. Aside from personal achievement, Cespedes appears to be a piece that makes the pieces around him significantly better.
Cespedes is a long shot, given that he joined the Mets at the trade deadline. But as the linked article points out, Manny Ramierez came in fourth in the MVP voting in 2008 when he joined the Dodgers at the trade deadline and proceeded to hit nearly .400. With most of the NL’s best players on sub-.500 teams (Bryce Harper [okay, the Nats are barely above .500], Paul Goldschmidt, Joey Votto) the door might be open for a player from a division winning team who clearly made a difference. (as an aside, I stand firm that no one from a team that didn't make the playoffs should get a vote for MVP; to be valuable you have to make a difference, and going home after 162 games isn't making a difference).
The most common phrase emanating from the lips of the ESPN cognoscenti regarding Donaldson has been, “What were the A’s thinking trading him away?” I understand the A’s perspective; they are a small market team. Yes, Donaldson was under arbitration for three more years, but that was Marvin Miller’s little joke on the baseball club owners; he knew that arbitration-determined salaries would be set by the free market salaries negotiated by players no longer under arbitration, and therefore would come close to matching free agency salaries. Better to trade Donaldson before his price went up.
But here’s the thing—let’s say the A’s got value in the trade. Let’s say that one of the prospects they acquired turns out to be another Josh Donaldson only cheaper because he can’t yet go to arbitration. What will the A’s do in that case? Why, trade him away to another team for more prospects. And the A’s will keep trading prospects away until they get one far less talented than Donaldson, and him they will keep. As the lyrics to “Smuggler’s Blues” say, “It’s a losing proposition/but one you can’t refuse.”
Billy Beane went all in last year to win the World Series, trading away Cespedes for two months of John Lester, who the A’s couldn’t afford to re-sign. Lester was supposed to be the last piece they needed to make a deep playoff push. And all he did was post a 7.36 ERA in his first (and last) start in the post-season. Cespedes had not only won two All-Star Game Home Run derbies, but on June 10, 2014 made one of the greatest throws in baseball history, something he has replicated with the Mets.
After trading away Cespedes the A’s offense went on hiatus, and the A’s went from leading the division comfortably to barely squeaking in with the Wild Card. They scored 466 runs in the first half of the season, but only 263 in the second half, a 43.5% drop off. The A’s averaged 5 runs a game with Cespedes on the team, slightly over 3.5 after he was traded. Cespedes did not single-handedly account for that difference; his removal from the line-up must have triggered something that caused the team’s offense to fade away.
His impact with the Mets has been the converse; now that he’s joined the team, previously struggling hitters are smacking the ball and the team has started pulling away from the Nationals, who were supposed to be a lock to win the World Series when the season started. Maybe he’s only been with the team for less than half a season, but maybe that just proves how valuable his addition has been.
So, Josh Donaldson and Yoenis Cespedes make pitches for MVP votes, and the A’s languish at the bottom of the American League. Will Aaron Sorkin write a sequel to Moneyball about that? Probably not.
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