MVP MISDIRECTION: BATTING LEADERS JULY 2012-JULY 2013

OK, so why this now?? Well, we love misdirection, particularly when it's right in front of awards season. Tomorrow we'll post the Ptolemaic MVP data for 2013, and we expect that only one of the leaders there will actually win the award (as was the case last season).

What we might get from the chart below (top 40 hitters by OPS from July 1, 2012 to July 1, 2013) is the concept (admittedly brittle...) of "MVP carryover." As you'll see in the data below, the two 2012 MVP winners (Miguel Cabrera and Buster Posey) were also the leading hitters by OPS for their respective leagues in the July-to-July "follow-up" period.

Now playing 2B for the
D-backs...Mr. Teenage Heartthrob??

Our selection criteria (July 1 through July 1) affords the opportunity for more than 162 games in the sample, and we see that happen occasionally here (five of the forty were "super-durable"). Our qualifying figure here was 400 PA (thanks to some friendly "persuasion" applied by the creator of the oh-so-outré "Luann" comic strip, Greg Evans, who was inexplicably eager to see his namesake player, Aaron Hill, show up on the leader boards. (No, we don't know why: the character hasn't shown up in the strip in years...)

How much this list differs from its more conventional "cousin" might be worth knowing, too, if only to have a sense of the variability of in-season data.

Sometime during the hot stove season, when we're not swamped with more pressing matters, we'll take a look at this info over past seasons. It's probably going to be a 50-50 proposition, since there is some demonstrable bias in MVP awards given for hot second half performances (covered in an earlier entry).

Thanks to David Pinto and his Day-by-Day Database for the above data.