Kris Bryant hit a home run to start the Chicago Cubs’ scoring in Game 5 of the World Series last month. In Game 6, Bryant did it again. In Game 7, with two outs in the bottom of the 10th inning, he fielded a grounder and lost his balance, but still made the throw that gave the Cubs their first championship in 108 years.
“It’s scary watching it,” Bryant said Thursday. “I’ve seen it a lot since then, and kind of seeing my foot slip, just the circumstances going into that play — it kind of gets your blood pressure up.”
Mike Trout would gladly endure the stress of reliving such a highlight. His last three postseason games — his only three, actually — were far less memorable. In 2014, Trout’s Los Angeles Angels were swept in the first round by Kansas City, with Trout going 1 for 12 and striking out to end the series. This season, the Angels sank to fourth place in the American League West.
Soon, though, Bryant and Trout will share a stage in New York to receive their trophies as most valuable players. One comes from a great team, the other from a bad team. Both are worthy winners.
Bryant, who hit .292 with 39 homers and started at four defensive positions, won the National League vote on Thursday, a year after being named rookie of the year. He collected 29 of 30 first-place votes from the baseball writers, easily beating Daniel Murphy of the Washington Nationals.
Trout won the A.L. honor with 19 first-place votes, becoming the first player from a losing team to win the M.V.P. since Alex Rodriguez, then of the Texas Rangers, in 2003. Trout has widely been considered the best player in baseball for five years, yet had previously won just once, for that 2014 season.
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Such sustained excellence is rare. Only one other player — Barry Bonds — has finished first or second in the M.V.P. race for five consecutive seasons. Maybe the voters were simply tired of making Trout an also-ran; he was the runner-up in 2012, 2013 and 2015.
“I’ve been fortunate enough to be here for the fifth time, and I know how it works,” Trout said in a conference call with reporters after getting the news at his parents’ home in New Jersey. “But it’s an unbelievable feeling. I was pretty surprised and happy. It was a surreal moment.”
Trout hit .315 with 29 homers, 100 runs batted in and 30 steals and led the majors in runs (123), walks (116) and on-base percentage (.441) while playing standout defense in center. Boston Red Sox right fielder Mookie Betts finished second, with nine first-place votes. He excelled in all parts of the game, but Trout was judged to be better.
Betts’s team won the A.L. East, too, yet Trout beat him easily. Maybe, after this vote, we can bury the notion that an M.V.P. must come from a contender. It is long past time.
The criteria for the award state explicitly that “the M.V.P. need not come from a division winner or other playoff qualifier.” Yet the impulse for voters has almost always been to emphasize the word “valuable” by dreaming up hypothetical scenarios.
We often hear logic like this: “If you take Player X off that team, they don’t make the playoffs.” But who, exactly, is removing Player X from that team? Let’s consider what did happen, not what might have happened in an alternate reality.
Let’s also respect the fact that the best players play hard every day, no matter the standings. It seems insulting to their effort to suggest that excelling for a good team is somehow more important than excelling for a bad team. If you bought a ticket for an Angels game last season, Trout gave you his best every day, long after his team was finished. That should matter.
“Your approach can’t change; my approach doesn’t,” Trout said. “It’s not a good feeling when you’re out of it in September and you’re just going out there to play. We’re going out there to win games; it doesn’t matter if we’re in it or not. Obviously, you want to be in it, but I can’t say that I’m going to play differently when we’re losing. I want to win every day.”
Yes, exactly. The point of the game is to win — and Trout brought extraordinary value to the Angels in their effort to do so.
They won only 74 games, but Trout alone must have been worth 10 or more. Wins are wins; why should those for a bad team matter less than those for a good team?
In “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” his famous New Yorker essay on Ted Williams’s final game in 1960, John Updike reflected on how much Williams cared. Such players, he wrote, keep us interested, and keep the game relevant, across the long grind of a season.
“For me,” Updike wrote, “Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill.”
In Williams’s last 11 seasons, the Red Sox never finished higher than third place. He continued to excel just the same; as Updike observed, “his rigorous pride of craftsmanship had become itself a kind of heroism.”
Williams won no M.V.P. Awards in those seasons and just two over all, the same total as Willie Mays, another member of baseball’s pantheon. Those oversights look silly now — but after Thursday’s vote, there is hope.
Trout, the game’s best player, is officially his league’s most valuable, despite his team’s losing record. Our perception of value is evolving at last.
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