The Lud: First an All-Star, now … MVP?
TOWER GROVE — Several innings before Ryan Ludwick launched his fourth home run in three games and even before he extended his hitting streak to seven games, the resemblance between him and the early-season favorite for MVP leapt off the page.
Before each game, the Cardinals’ media relations staff puts out the two teams’ starting lineups on one sheet of paper. By each position player’s name is his triple-crown stats. On Sunday night, these two sets of three numbers were strikingly similar:
.293, 27, 76
.303, 26, 77
The first set belonged to Philadelphia second baseman Chase Utley, whose dash to the league lead in homers and substantial RBI total (76) have the pundits pegging him as the third different Phillie to win the MVP in three seasons. The second belongs to All-Star Ludwick, who … well hasn’t found those three little initials attached to his name all that often — except when talking about this team’s MVP.
Ludwick was an All-Star before he was an everyday player. Now that he’s an everyday player — and thriving in the cleanup spot — is he an MVP?
The Cardinals’ breakout outfielder hit four homers in the three-game series against Philadelphia, going 7-for-11 with a 1.818 slugging percentage. He won the NL Player of the Week award Monday. Since the All-Star break, he’s hit .387 with six home runs, a .694 slugging percentage and 13 RBIs. The surge has erased the taste from a .228 average in June, and it has put him squarely among the league leaders in categories used to define Most Valuable Player.
“I had a rough June,” Ludwick said. “I felt like I made some adjustments. It’s going to be a constant grind. They’ve got guys out there scouting you day in and day out, trying to find ways to get you out. They might find a hole. You have to find a way to cover it up. It’s part of the game.”
Ludwick leads the National League in slugging entering play today (.614) and is top 10 in batting average (.306), on-base-plus-slugging (.998, OPS), home runs (27) and RBIs (78). Pull out the “Advanced Placement” stats and Ludwick is top 20 in Win Shares (15) and top 15 in Runs Created (81.5). By now, you probably know where I’m going with this.
The last several years, this blog has fiddled around various ways to define the V in MVP. One of the exercises that I think works well to focus the MVP discussion is an MVP Aggregate approach (MVPag), or The Musial Theorem, as we called it. The process is simple: Settle on the statistics that best define an MVP, mostly offensively, and then add individual player’s rank within those stats. The lower the score the better.
It reveals who has excelled in many areas — from slugging to scoring — and reveals the most well-lopsided hitter in the league.
Previous examples are available here:
Always trying to refine and improve on the framework of the MVPag, but it’s useful in this discussion, too. Does Ludwick belong in the MVP conversation?
For the sake of simplicity, I selected seven statistics: batting average (BA), slugging percentage (SLG), on-base percentage plus slugging (OPS), runs created (RC), home runs (HR), RBIs (RBI) and Win Shares (WS). Rifling through those numbers, the same 15 names started coming up consistently, with a couple others — Atlanta’s Brian McCann and Philadelphia’s Pat Burrell — mixed in. I mapped where they ranked and added up their MVPag.
A few examples (rank):
PLAYER: BA … SLG … OPS … RC … HR … RBI … WS
Ludwick: .306 (10)/.614 (1)/.998 (5)/81.5 (12)/27 (5t)/78 (6t)/15 (19t)
Utley: .292 (23)/.575 (8)/.947 (8)/91.0 (4)/28 (4)/77 (8)/18 (7)
Albert Pujols: .344 (3)/.597 (3)/1.051 (2)/93.7 (2)/21 (19t)/67 (19t)/19 (4t)
Ryan Howard: .242 (76)/.502 (22)/.832 (30)/69.9 (28)/31 (2)/96 (1)/12 (50t)
Lance Berkman: .337 (4)/.609 (2)/1.047 (3)/99.4 (1)/22 (14t)/76 (9)/24 (1)
It’s a rough, incomplete look, to be sure. But it offers a snapshot of the MVP discussion. The aggregate rank — the sum of the hitter’s rankings — separates the hitters who excel in one category (say, home runs) while rewarding the hitter that has the Musial Effect — quality performance in a variety of categories. (Note: If a hitter ranked 50 or higher in any one category, the rank was considered 50.)
And, when tallied, these numbers make a few things clear: The usual suspect is near the top of the MVPag — and should his team remain in contention probably the MVP sweepstakes, too — and Ludwick belongs. At least to the same extent that Utley does.
The MVPag for the 15 players selected:
- Lance Berkman, HOU … 36.0
- Albert Pujols, STL … 54.5
- Ryan Ludwick, STL … 62.0
- Chase Utley, PHI … 62.0
- Ryan Braun, MIL … 64.0
- Matt Holliday, COL … 69.5
- Carlos Lee, HOU … 80.0
- Chipper Jones, ATL … 95.0
- Adam Dunn, CIN … 111.0
- David Wright, NYM … 114.5
- Hanley Ramirez, FLA … 118.0
- Dan Uggla, FLA … 129.5
- Nate McLouth, PIT … 130.0
- Ryan Howard, PHI … 209.0
Offer your take, your criticism, your suggestions below in the comment sections.
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For the Farmniks out there, P-D contributor Nate Latsch has this update on Jacob Turner, a local prep pitcher who is climbing into the national draft picture in the same way Holt’s Tim Melville and Highland’s Jake Odorizzi last year. Turner, about to be a senior at Westminster, went 5-2 with a 1.45 ERA last spring.
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Derrick Goold said he was going to Mizzou for capital-J journalism, but after growing up in the Time Zone Baseball Forgot he was really drawn to MU sitting between two major-league cities. Goold joined the Post-Dispatch in 2001 after working for The Times-Picayune and Rocky Mountain News, covering sports from LSU to NHL and every level of baseball in between. 
The MVP debate should begin and end with Albert Pujols. He’s already been intentionally walked more than any other previous season, and that isn’t including the 4 pitches like Madson pitched around him last night, among many others. Pujols is what drives this lineup. Ludwick is having a nice season, yes. But he’s no MVP.
Also, if the Phillies get another MVP, having three different players be selected three straight seasons, none of which leading to a playoff series win. Shouldn’t that wake the voters up on what the value of a player really is? I never argued that Albert deserved it over Bonds when Bonds was getting on base two thirds of the time, and by himself creating more runs for the Giants than any other player in the league. But I wonder what Albert might be able to do if he were in a lineup surrounded by Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins and Ryan Howard.
My feeling is that he would still be walked as much, and Utley and Howard would be garnering the same attention. Isn’t it time we stopped overlooking the best player in baseball?