Freeman Slam: A Game Changing Moment
Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani is for sure a top-three finisher in National League MVP voting, and it would be a monumental surprise if he doesn’t win the award when it is announced next Thursday afternoon.
If When Ohtani wins, it will be his third MVP award after winning American League honors in 2021 and 2023 with the Angels. In both of those AL MVP years, Ohtani got all 30 first-place votes. Coupled with Atlanta’s Ronald Acuña Jr. last year, 2023 was the first time both MVP winners won unanimously. Ohtani and Aaron Judge figure to be runaways for this year’s MVP awards, too.
Michael Baumann at FanGraphs wrote about the trend in recent years toward consensus award voting. He referenced Twins utility man César Tovar getting the lone first-place vote not sent Carl Yastrzemski’s way when the Red Sox outfielder won the triple crown for the AL pennant winners in 1967.
The Tovar vote, seen as a disgrace even at the time, actually represented a pretty common issue among MVP selectors well into the 2000s. At the time, there was no data to speak of apart from what’s in the box scores. Anything not represented there was left to the imagination and the writers’ own insight and recollection. Before the internet, it was hard for voters to read each others’ analysis to catch up on games they hadn’t witnessed personally, let alone watch tape on players they might have to vote on after seeing only a handful of their games.
