Take a look at the 2007 Mets. The team has been riddled with injuries in left field and at second base. Carlos Delgado, Paul Lo Duca and Shawn Green have struggled at the plate all season. Carlos Beltran has hit the ball well lately, but spent most of the summer in a terrible slump and will not come close to matching his 2006 totals. Jose Reyes has improved his plate discipline and has stolen more bases than ever before, but his power numbers are way down and he has been essentially middling since his incredible start to the season.
Beyond that, the starting pitching has been inconsistent at best, there are major question marks at the back end of the rotation and throughout the bullpen, and the team's most important bench cog from 2006, Endy Chavez, has spent much of the season on the Disabled List.
Yet these Mets, despite diminished production from nearly every position on the field, are comfortably in first place with only a month left to play. Sure, they're not going to clinch the division as early or as convincingly as they did last year, but they'll almost certainly coast into the playoffs barring calamity. So who's picking up the slack?
Just one guy, really. After a miserable start to the season, David Wright has cast himself into consideration for the National League Most Valuable Player award by carrying the first-place Mets on his back for much of the year.
Somehow, despite the billboards all over New York City bearing his visage, Wright has flown under the radar for a lot of 2007. With all the talk of Delgado's slump and Lo Duca's frustration and Willie Randolph's mismanagement of the bullpen, so many of the Shea Faithful and the Mets media have overlooked the young man who has kept his team atop the National League East deep into August.
Wright's power numbers and batting average aren't much different than his totals from last year. He hit .311 with 26 homers in 2006 and he's on pace to hit .316 with 29 homers in 2007. His plate discipline and base running numbers tell the real story, though. Last year, Wright got on base at a .381 clip, stole 20 bases and scored 96 runs. This season, he's sporting a .410 OBP and is on pace to steal 35 bases and score 111 runs.
There are certainly other strong candidates to win the league's highest individual honor. But Miguel Cabrera and Hanley Ramirez play for a losing team, the Florida Marlins. Albert Pujols, though his numbers are as good as anyone else's in the league, is having a down year by his own lofty standards. Chase Utley missed a month of the season with injury. Prince Fielder's Milwaukee Brewers have fallen apart and likely knocked the hulking first baseman out of strong MVP consideration.
The unheralded Matt Holliday is having a great year, but plays a corner outfield position for a team, the Colorado Rockies, that will likely miss the playoffs. And when adjusted for park factor, his numbers are no better than Wright's.
No one's going to vote for Barry Bonds.
The National League MVP, in my eyes at least, likely comes down to two men: Wright, our handsome young hero, and Mets fans' foremost enemy, the beady-eyed villain bedecked in Braves blue, Chipper Jones.
Jones, like Utley, missed a chunk of the season with injury, but he's hit more homers than the Phillies second baseman and hasn't had the luxury of hitting in front of reigning league MVP Ryan Howard nor that of playing half his games in the Citizen's Bank bandbox in the City of Brotherly Love. Still, Larry Wayne Jones is hitting .336 with an outstanding .420 on-base percentage and his best OPS+ (park- and league-adjusted on-base plus slugging) since his MVP season in 1999.
But Jones is not as good as Wright defensively or on the basepaths and plays for a third-place team with what is quite likely a stronger lineup than that of the first-place Mets. So it's an MVP race that will likely play itself out alongside the more important divisional and Wild Card races across the last month of the season, with Wright, Chipper and many of the aforementioned (and perhaps prematurely dismissed) candidates making their final cases for the honor.
And in the end, the winner doesn't really matter much. Though Mets fans should root - and chant - for Wright to earn the nod, they can take comfort in Wright's 2007 achievements whether he's named the MVP or not. Wright's improvement this season, especially after such a poor start, bodes well for the Mets' future. If he keeps bettering every aspect of his game the way he has this year, he'll have a closet full of MVP awards by the time he's through.
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