David Wright got screwed

[Tweety]

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Wright was the best all-around player in the NL in 2007.

That's all.

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It's called "Most Valuable Player". Not "best all-around player."

Of the top 10 vote-getters, three were paid less than DW. Per baseball-reference.com:

Wright finished 4th, and earned $1.25M in 2007
Fielder finished 3rd, and earned a paltry $415K
Howard finished 5th, and earned $900K
Hanley finished 10th, and earned $402K

I know it's the MLB, and $800K is peanuts, but one could argue that at least Fielder and Howard were more "valuable" than Wright, who was paid 3 times as much money.

Rollins and Holliday were a close 1, 2. Rollins earned $8M, and Holliday earned $4.4M.

There are several ways to define the "MVP" award, and most of them suck. The award should be terminated.

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This is the kind of non-standard reasoning I can honestly get behind. When I think value, this is what goes through my mind. Its not IMPOSSIBLE for guys like Arod to be the best value but its pretty hard.

You'd have to make some amendments though, you'd have to establish some kind of minimum salary or service time, because otherwise its guys like Arod and Pujols trying to compete with every single rookie and 1 year service time guy who has a pretty decent bustout year. they make 20 times as much money, they arent going to provide twenty times as much value very often.

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If you are going to get into the value per dollar angle to this analysis, it might also be worth looking at the player's salary as a percentage of his team's payroll. A $5 million a year guy who is only slightly less valuable than a guy making $9 million a year might not necessarily be more valuable to his team if the $5 million guy is playing for the Devil Rays and the $9 million guy is playing for the Yanks.