[Tweety]

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vhawk, i dunno. the mvp award is a regular season award, so its actually 1st-4th, and not 1st-4th (in each league). giving the mvp award to a player on a team that doesnt make the playoffs is like giving the world series mvp to a player on the losing team imo.

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Why couldn't the most valuable player in the WS be on the losing team?

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again, because baseball is a team game, your goal is to win

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The Mets' collapse had absolutely nothing to do with David Wright. He was playing sensational baseball when it happened. It's not on David Wright in any way that other players failed in a game comprised of individual performances.

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agree 100%. But personally, unless the numbers are hugely different, id rather give it to a guy who's team made the playoffs.

I love David Wright in the most Heterosexual way possible. And he had an MVP-caliber season. And if the Mets didnt collapse, he may have won the MVP. But they did. And since the goal is to make the playoffs, and David Wright's team fell short, then he was not the most valuable player in the league.

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I think this is a toally fair way to think in most sports other than baseball. In basketball for example, you have five guys on the floor. If a guy puts up big time numbers but his team only wins 37 games, it's virtually impossible to justify giving him the MVP, regardless of how good his numbers are.

You could say the same for hockey, and possibly even football, despite the high number of players in an active roster, simply because there is so much teamwork involved, and for a player to be truly great he ought to make others around him better, and thus win.

Baseball just isn't like that though. When Jose Reyes is at the plate striking out or not running out ground balls, David Wright is sitting in the dugout. When Guillermo Mota is blowing up and costing the Mets leads late in games, Wright is on the field, but there isn't much he can do to get Mota to pitch better. Sure, there are some instances where teamwork comes in, like in rundowns, signal reading, hitting the cutoff man, etc, but by and large baseball is a team sport comprised of individual performances that are nowhere near as interrelated as they are in other sports. Not even close. So baseball is really an exception to your rule. It is perfectly conceivable (and common) for the best all around player in the league to play for a less than great team like the 2007 Mets.

If the stats are even or very close, then sure, you go with the guy on the playoff team versus the guy on the .500 team, but in the Rollins/Wright case the stats were not close.