I Have Several Questions About the 1995 NL MVP Award
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Y'all know how the internet goes sometimes. One second you're watching a video of a cat playing piano and three clicks later you're on a JFK conspiracy bender. Well I don't even remember how I got here, but I ended up on the 1995 National League MVP voting page today and somebody owes me a few explanations.
Let's start at the top of the list and work our way down, I guess. How in the actual fuck did Barry Larkin win this award? Hitting .319/.394/.492 with 15 HR and 66 RBI is certainly a great season for a contact hitter, but when you look at the two guys who finished behind him, I truly have no idea how anybody cast a first place vote for Larkin. It's criminal, honestly.
Finishing in second place was Dante Bichette, who absolutely murdered the baseball to the tune of a league-leading 197 hits, 40 HR and 128 RBI — all in a 144-game season. If he had won the award, it would have been hard to have a gripe with it. But my question here is with his 1.2 WAR. How is that even possible with those numbers? Was he the worst defensive outfielder in the history of baseball? For reference, Fernando Tatis Jr. — a player also not known for playing great defense — has amassed 5.6 WAR this season while hitting .280 with 37 HR and 85 RBI. Bichette's number there makes absolutely no sense to me.
But then we get to the kicker. Greg Maddux, smack dab in the middle of the steroid era, went 19-2 with a 1.63 ERA on a team that won the World Series and finished third. Am I taking crazy pills? Jacob deGrom had a 1.08 ERA through 15 starts this season against hitters who (presumably) aren't cheating and everyone was ready to crown him the MVP at the All-Star break. Maddux threw 118 more innings and kept his ERA well under 2.00 and the MVP was a guy with 15 homers.
Maddux should have won this award fairly easily with Bichette in second place and Larkin somewhere in the 8-10 range behind Mike Piazza and the other several guys down the list who had much better seasons than he did.
This award was fraudulent.