Ok, I paraphrased that. Here's what he really said:

"As for this year's AL MVP race, A-Rod backers point to impressive stats and excellent play at third, conveniently ignoring a lack of leadership and a comical tendency to turn into Roy Hobbs only during blowouts. When the Yankees are leading by 30 or more runs, A-Rod is hitting .950 with 19 HRs and 45 RBIs. All right, I made that up. But he's certainly no David Ortiz, the most dangerous clutch hitter in baseball, in addition to being the soul of Boston's clubhouse and the emotional center of the team. Without him, this year's Sox would be a .500 team, or worse. That makes him the MVP. But since he doesn't play in the field, the door will stay open until the AL East plays itself out."

There are a few things that you can count on from a person who goes by the name 'Dr. Burgher.' As a general rule, I try to be objective and analytical. Hence, I am a real stats geek.

Since the stats quoted by BS can't possibly be real, I decided to do a little bit of research and looked up the stats for both A-Rod and Ortiz. Let's start with the totals for each player (As of 9/30/05).

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that these two players are pretty darn similar. Both players sport a boatload of RBI, the same number of homers, and a monster OPS. For those not familiar with OPS, it stands for On Base plus Slugging, and it is considered the best single metric for judging hitters. To put it simply, an OPS of 1.000 is awesome (for more info on OPS, check out Rob Neyer's page #add link#).

The big argument from the pro-Ortiz camp, including Simmons, is that Big Papi is some sort of phenomenal clutch hitter. Luckily, the good folks at mlb.com compile all sorts of situational stats, so we can make some concrete comparisons.

That's a lot of numbers, so I'll try to explain it all.

Case 1: Bases empty

Both Ortiz and A-Rod had a lot of at-bats with the bases empty; roughly 50% of each player's ABs came in this situation. Thus the Bases Empty stats make up a pretty good sample size for comparing stats.

Ortiz had slightly lower OPS with the bases empty than his overall stats (0.991 to 0.999), but he slugged 20 points higher in these situations. Big Papi actually hit 62% of his home runs with the bases empty, though this accounts for only 50% of his at-bats.

A-Rod had significantly better OPS with the bases empty, and, like Ortiz, had a much better slugging percentage with nobody on base (0.666 to 0.608). He hit 55% of his homers with the bases empty, which accounted for 49% of his at-bats.

The verdict: Even. Both players showed better power with nobody on base, and that probably reflects some on the pitchers. It's easier to justify a solo home run than why you threw a 2-0 fastball to one of these guys with the bases loaded. A-Rod was a much better hitter with the bases empty, but Ortiz hit a larger percentage of solo homers.

Case 2: Runners in Scoring Position (RISP)

Before I get too far ahead of myself, I have one quick note on RBIs. RBIs, like runs scored, depend a lot on the other guys in the lineup. The stat is popular in some circles, but it does little to measure a player's performance. Any cleanup hitter worth his salt should get 100 RBI (with the exception of a few teams). Here is an example: At the All-Star break, Carlos Lee had around 70 RBI, and Jason Bay around 40. Both players had a similar number of home runs (15 and 16) and the same batting average with RISP. The difference? Lee had nearly twice as many at-bats with RISP.

Stats that measure individual accomplishment – average, OBP, slugging, homers – are much better indicators of performance than RBIs or runs. These stats tell us something about the performance of the player relative to the league (and in the context of the whole league); RBIs can be severely biased by a particular lineup or just plain luck, as in the example above.

The verdict: Slight edge, Ortiz. Ortiz has better stats, but A-Rod's protection in the lineup was either Giambi or Tino. Tino stinks, and Giambi took a few months to warrant being called 'protection.'

Here is where Ortiz backers stake their claim: In late innings (7th or later) of close games, Big Papi slugged an absurd 0.821, while A-Rod posted a very pedestrian 0.808 OPS. The Ortiz camp claims that the late-inning heroics should be more than enough to give the MVP to their man. I disagree.

For starters, 'Close and Late' constitutes a very small portion of each player's season. Ortiz had 56 such at-bats, while A-Rod had 47. That is less than 10% for each player, and means that the sample size is probably too small to be significant. Don't believe me? Imagine if you tried to poll the people in your office, but only 8% of people responded. Extrapolating the results from 8% of the people to the whole population of the office is fraught with potential errors, especially if your 8% were not representative of the whole. If, for example, all of the respondents were white males over 50, but the office was 50/50 male/female and had a median age of 30, the results would be meaningless (except to tell you something about the group of 50+ white males).

The same goes for the 'Close and Late' stats. There are very few at-bats for each player, and these at-bats generally came against relief pitchers. What if Papi got 35 of his 'Close and Late' ABs against Brian Meadows, but A-Rod had 35 ABs against Joe Nathan? That obviously did not happen, but I posed the question to illustrate a point. When considering a very small sample size, it is easy to introduce bias, as with the pitching matchups listed here. That is why we generally compare stats for the entire season – the larger sample size takes away some of the sources of bias. Over the course of 600 at-bats we can reasonably expect that both A-Rod and Ortiz faced a similar number of both good and bad pitchers.

As for BS's claim that Ortiz kept the Sox for being a .500 team? Bill James created a stat called Win Shares. I'm not going to get into the specifics of the calculation here, but each actual win requires three Win Shares. A typical MVP candidate will accumulate 25-30 Win Shares in a season, and the average player will gain about 7-10. That means that Ortiz was responsible for around 8-10 wins (Win Shares for 2005 have not been published yet). Thus, replacing Ortiz with an average player would have left Boston with about 88 wins.

The verdict: Slight edge, Ortiz.

Even upon further review, the stats leave us right where we started -- with a virtual dead heat in the MVP race. Time for me to throw out a few tiebreakers, starting with two numbers.

20 and 1.

The first is A-Rod's stolen base total, and the second is the number of Gold Gloves he will win this year.

I do not think that stolen bases are particularly important, but for a player like A-Rod to gain 20 steals means that he is a pretty good baserunner. You can trust A-Rod to score from second on a single. He probably does a good job of going first-to-third on singles to right field. By contrast, the only way to get Ortiz from first to third is to bounce one over the fence.

I will reiterate: 20 steals are not that important, but the implication of being a good baserunner is important. One common question raised in MVP debates is 'Who would you want batting in the ninth inning of a close game?' I might be inclined to favor Ortiz if I need a home run, but what happens if the batter singles? If A-Rod singles, the Yankees do not have to worry about him clogging up the base paths. Ortiz is a completely different story. If, for instance, Ortiz leads off the ninth inning of a close game with a single, Sox manager Terry Francona has to seriously consider bringing in a pinch runner and removing one of his best hitters. You don't take MVPs off of the bases with the game on the line.

Ortiz backers also poo-poo the issue of DH versus third base. They say that third is not a very important position defensively. I agree to an extent. Great defense at third would not be enough for A-Rod to make up a deficit of 5 or 10 home runs. But in a case where all of the offensive stats are virtually equal, A-Rod's contributions on defense make a great tiebreaker. Rodriguez went out 162 times and exposed himself to a potential barrage of balls coming at him at 100 mph. He contributed to his team's success by helping to prevent runs from being scored, and did this at an expense to his body. Ortiz, on the other hand, could have bought hot dogs between at bats and could escape to the air-conditioned clubhouse while the Sox were in the field.

There is still one more tiebreaker that favors A-Rod: Ortiz hit behind Manny Ramirez. You remember Manny, right? One of the 5 or so best hitters in the AL? A guy who hit 40+ homers? Without Manny to protect him, Ortiz would be the 2005 equivalent of Steve Balboni.

The final verdict: A-Rod by a nose. The overall stats are very close, but the tiebreakers, particularly defense, all favor A-Rod.

Manalyzer results:

Last week: -75

This week: -50. The research for this column took me all of 15 minutes, and I do this for free. I would expect at least a minimal amount of research from someone who is being paid.

----Dr. 'Burgher

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