The recipients of 2023’s Most Valuable Player Awards will be revealed later this month.
It will be surprising — perhaps even shocking — if Shohei Ohtani and Ronald Acuna Jr. don’t win the MVP trophies in their respective leagues. But that doesn’t mean the announcements on November 16 will be devoid of suspense.
Reporters and fans will comb through the voting results to see if Ohtani is chosen unanimously by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America for the American League award, just as he was in 2021. They’ll be equally interested to see if Acuna is seriously challenged on the National League side.
The list of runners-up will also draw considerable interest. Forty-two players received MVP votes in the two leagues last year, which essentially marked them as baseball’s best performers in 2022. This year’s vote-getters will deserve similar respect.
My only complaint is that 42 — or 46 (the number of MVP candidates in 2021) or 44 (2020) — is simply too small a number. So I’ve decided to generate my own list of the 100 best players in 2023.
I’ll release 10 names at a time on successive Tuesdays and Fridays, beginning on November 7 with the players who occupy 91st through 100th place. The rundown will culminate with the top 10 on December 8.
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The rankings of 2023’s top 100 will be based on overall base values (OBV), which measure the relative effectiveness of batters and pitchers. A positive OBV indicates one of two things:
A particular batter reached more bases than the average big leaguer would have attained under identical circumstances.
A given pitcher surrendered fewer bases than his typical counterpart would have yielded under the same conditions.
Let me cite a couple of examples from 2022 to show how OBV is calculated.
Example No. 1: First baseman Paul Goldschmidt of the St. Louis Cardinals reached 419 bases a year ago through hits, walks, hit batters, stolen bases, and sacrifices. He also made 394 outs, giving him a ratio of 1.063 bases per out (BPO).
The BPO for all major-league batters in 2022 was .660. If we multiply that rate by Goldschmidt’s number of outs — .660 times 394 — we find that the average batter would have reached 260 bases in the same circumstances. Goldschmidt exceeded that total by 159 bases, giving him an OBV of plus-159.
Example No. 2: Pitcher Max Fried of the Atlanta Braves surrendered 265 bases to opposing hitters in 2022, while inducing them to make 560 outs. His ratio of bases allowed per out was .473.
If Fried had merely matched the average BPO of .660, he would have yielded 370 bases a year ago. He finished 105 below that total, giving him an OBV of plus-105.
OBV, as you can see, allows us to make direct comparisons of batters and pitchers. The higher the positive number, the better the performance.
I have calculated the overall base values for all major-league players in 2023, isolating the 100 with the best scores. Those are the batters and pitchers that we’ll be discussing over the next five weeks.
One technical note: If two or more players are tied with identical OBV totals, I have broken the tie by matching their BPOs against 2023’s big-league average of .704. Preference is given to the player who surpassed the norm by the largest percentage, either above .704 for a batter or below the same mark for a pitcher.
Every installment will feature profiles of 10 players. Each will be listed with his rank, OBV, primary position (the one he played more than any other in 2023), BPO, and a variety of related statistics — batting average, plate appearances, home runs, and runs batted in for hitters, earned run average, innings pitched, win-loss record, saves, and strikeouts for pitchers.
We’ll start the rundown on Tuesday.