Un-valuable Logic

I love Miguel Cabrera as a baseball player. Love him. Hate him because he plays for the Tigers, a rival of my team, the Royals, but I love him. He’s so strong, but he doesn’t try to do too much. Still, I’m mad that he won a certain award this year.

This is why I’m angry. The type of thinking that we try to train out of mental health clients, the type that we try to teach children in schools and young adults in colleges, is given complete credence by so many people when it comes to column-writing and story reporting. Bob Dutton, who is the Royals beat writer, voted for Miguel Cabrera for MVP when he should have voted for Mike Trout. He was going to vote for Mike Trout, and then changed his mind because players said that Miguel Cabrera was better, was, to use Dutton’s words, more “valuable.” Dutton is a beat reporter for the Kansas City Star. I write on a free blog site. Dutton keeps me abreast of goings-on within the world of the Royals. I appreciate his work, especially since he’s been following a terrible team for a long time. While I disagree with Dutton, I suppose that that this an argument that can be made: people who do a job know how hard a job it is. I disagree with Mr. Dutton, and even Tweeted him an argument against his logic, but that’s not my focus today.

My focus is on the logic of people who voted for Cabrera over Mike Trout because of very bad logic. It is against this type of logic that athletes are coached and mental health clients are counseled.

In life, people have stress issues if they worry about things that they can’t control. They have performance issues, as well. I work as an academic coach. I can’t sit and stress about what kind of day the young man had before he came to me. I can only do my best within the 45 minutes that I get to work with him. Lack of focus creates shoddy work. The same is true of athletes, and it’s especially true in baseball. The Royals had a pitcher named Zack Greinke who lives with social anxiety disorder. The Royals, at the time that Greinke was with them, had a very bad defense. Very bad. Zack was taught to only control what he can control, that is, how and where he throws the baseball, and how he plays defense if the ball is hit somewhere in his domain of responsibility. Zack is a freak athlete, anyway, but the increased focus that he found from not stressing about what would happen if the ball were hit to a bad defender who made a bad play, combined with his plan to focus on one pitch at t a time, resulted in an historic season, and he was justly awarded with the Cy Young Award, the award presented to the best pitcher in his league. Greinke was already capable of doing what he did. … The potential was always there. What changed was his focus. In order to focus, he had to clear his mind of negative thoughts.

Now, in baseball, we have three traditional stats that tell us if a hitter is having a good year: batting average (hits per at bat), home runs, and RBI (when one hits the baseball and someone scores (or if the bases are loaded and he draws a walk). If you lead the league in all of these categories, you have won the Triple Crown. Miguel Cabrera did that: .330/44 homers/139 RBI. He also scored 109 runs despite the fact that his principle job is to make sure that other people score… His winning the award is super cool…

Buuuuut… a guy named Mike Trout did this: .326/30/83, scoring 129 runs, in 21 fewer games – he drove in 83 runs despite the fact that that’s not his primary job; and, he stole 49 bases* (Cabrera stole 4). The thing is, Cabrera is a not a good defender. At his very best, he’s average. Trout, on the other hand, is a superb defensive outfielder. In summary, what Cabrera did hadn’t been done in 45 years. However, Trout’s combination of steals and homers has almost never been done. Yet, Miguel Cabrera won the league Most Valuable Player award. Now, to the crux of my temper on the matter:

*Steals are a decent measure of how well a guy uses his speed on the base paths.

It’s not that I have a problem with people voting for Cabrera. One could find an argument or two for him. I think that Dutton’s reasons - basing his vote on whom do other players think should win the award and whom would a manager want in the batter’s box with the game on the line – are weak. Still, they’re, at least, not logically problematic and adolescent. What I have a problem with is the voters who voted for Cabrera based on him winning the Triple Crown. Here’s why.

Just as a pitcher is told to only worry about what he can control, a hitter cannot control what happens to the ball after it leaves his bat, nor the actions of the other guys on the field towards retrieving the ball. He cannot control if a base runner falls down and doesn’t score; he can’t control if he gets a hit even if he hits a the ball super hard. He can’t even control if, in the event that he hits the ball really high and far, it goes over the wall. EVEN MORE TO THE POINT, a hitter doesn’t control where he hits in the lineup; he doesn’t control what managers think of him and whether they’d consider pitching to him in a key situation. RBI is a stat that measure s situations largely beyond the hitter’s control.

I am mad because this stuff is tolerated. I am mad because, in my opinion, we U.S. citizens need to grow up in our thinking and information-processing. This kind of reasoning is adolescent.