The 2024 Baseball Awards

New stats: Bases Gained and Bases Allowed

Photo credit: Tage Olsin

If you’re reading this on the publishing date or shortly after, Happy Thanksgiving! Otherwise, have a happy day anyway!

This came a few weeks later than I had planned, but I hope you will find this enlightening.

IN THIS ISSUE

• World Series MVP
• NL and AL MVPs
• CY Young Winners

WORLD SERIES MVP

The MVP Chase would have voted for Freddie Freeman of the Dodgers as the World Series MVP, using the same criteria I used for the regular-season MVPs below. Freeman, of course, did win.

NL AND AL MVPS

As selected by the Baseball Writers Association of America (BWAA), Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge were unanimous choices for NL and AL MVP, respectively. While the buzz was about their home runs and (in Ohtani’s case) stolen bases, the reason they would have earned their first-place votes from me was because of Bases Gained, a concept I introduced last month:

Bases Gained is Total Bases plus Bases on Balls (walks) plus Stolen Bases. It measures a player’s productivity on offense independent of the batting production of teammates; it’s what he does…