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MLB awards: Cody Bellinger Mike Trout capture MVP honors
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Nov
Nov
MLB awards: Cody Bellinger Mike Trout capture MVP honors
Cody Bellinger entered 2019 as a glorified platoon player, regularly benched by the Los Angeles Dodgers against left-handed pitchers down the stretch the previous season. Mike Trout, meanwhile entered 2019 as the best overall player in the game, the greatest player of his generation and among the most prolific hitters in history.
On Thursday night, their divergent trajectories intersected when Bellinger and Trout were named the 2019 most valuable players of the National and American Leagues, respectively.
Bellinger, 24, received 19 of a possible 30 first-place votes in balloting by members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America to beat out Milwaukee Brewers right fielder Christian Yelich. Yelich, the 2018 NL MVP, received 10 first-place votes and finished second, while Washington Nationals third baseman Anthony Rendon received the remaining first-place vote and finished third.
In the AL race, Trout, the 28-year-old center fielder of the Los Angeles Angels, received 17 of 30 first-place votes to earn a narrow victory over Houston Astros third baseman Alex Bregman, who received the remaining 13 first-place votes and finished second. Oakland A’s shortstop Marcus Semien finished third.
For Trout, the MVP was the third of his career, placing him in a 10-way tie for second-most in history, along with Jimmy Foxx, Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Yogi Berra, Roy Campanella, Mickey Mantle, Mike Schmidt, Alex Rodriguez and Albert Pujols. Only Barry Bonds, with seven, has won more.
Trout has finished first or second in MVP voting in an unprecedented seven of his first eight big league seasons — the only exception being his injury-shortened 2017 season, when he finished fourth.
“It’s pretty incredible,” Trout said on MLB Network’s telecast of the awards announcement. “My career so far has gone by so fast, and it’s been unbelievable.”
In a span of three days this September, Trout and Yelich both saw their seasons end prematurely with injuries. For Yelich, those lost three weeks appear to have cost him a second MVP award, as he led the NL in most key statistics, including batting average (.329), on-base percentage (.429) and slugging percentage (.671), but fell behind Bellinger in counting categories such as homers and RBI. Bellinger and Yelich tied in wins above replacement (WAR), as calculated by Fangraphs, at 7.8.
“It was hard not to see what he was doing on a nightly basis, especially with all the social media,” Bellinger said of his season-long duel with Yelich, immortalized in MLB’s “Belli vs. Yeli” ad campaign. “It made me a better player, for sure.”
Bellinger’s case was also helped by his defensive prowess — he played stellar defense at three positions in 2019, making 102 starts in right field, 28 at first base and 21 in center field — while Yelich may have been hurt by the fact the Brewers went 13-6 and surged to a playoff spot in his absence.
Rendon, 29, seemed to have inserted himself into the Belli-vs.-Yeli narrative with a sizzling August, during which he hit .394/.450/.712 and blasted eight homers. But he fell back some in September (.239/.400/.420), and voting was completed before the start of the postseason, which means Rendon’s exceptional October (.328/.413/.590, three homers, 15 RBI) in leading the Nationals to the World Series title had no bearing on the outcome.
Rendon, however, was one of four Nationals receiving MVP votes. Left fielder Juan Soto was named on 20 ballots (one sixth-place vote, six eighth-place, nine ninth-place and four 10th-place) and finished ninth; right-hander Stephen Strasburg received one eighth-place and one 10th-place vote and finished tied for 15th; and right-hander Max Scherzer received a single 10th-place vote and finished tied for 22nd.
In the AL, meantime, voters decided 134 games’ worth of Trout’s production — which included an AL-best 1.083 OPS (on-base plus slugging) and major-league-leading 8.6 WAR before his foot injury — was better than 156 games of Bregman’s.
Having long since earned the mantle of best player in the game, Trout is still unearthing new facets and improving in ways small and large. In 2019, he boosted his power, setting career marks in home runs (45) and slugging percentage (.645) and posting the highest line-drive rate (26.6 percent of all his batted balls) of his career.
“The power surge, being able to square up baseballs, knowing my swing — sometimes it takes a minute, or two minutes in the [batting] cage, [and] sometimes it takes an hour,” Trout said. “[But] I know when I’m right, and when I’m going right I think I can hit anything.”
