Rohidas: The PRV stat you have come up with may have some limited interest to some people, but can you explain why I should be interested in a stat that is only relevant to one league and not the other?

Nope. You're on your own.

btdenver: There is still a big hole in this stat. Many plate appearances, like it or not, NL pitchers are sent to the plate to sacrifice. If they succeed, they have fulfilled the mission given to them by the manager, and presumably helped the team. But they get no at-bat, and their BA stays the same, so that benefit does not show up in the PRV. If he fails, he gets punished by the PRV, even though he wasn't actually trying to get a hit.

Combine this with your doubt that sac's are beneficial, and the value of the stat starts to break down.

I would argue that the benefit does show up in the PRV. My point isn't that sacrifice bunts aren't beneficial, it's that they're usually not a good strategic move. They trade an out for a base, and an out is worth more than a base. For most big-league hitters, that's a bad trade. They have a better chance of helping their team by swinging away than by sacrificing. This is complicated by guys who can beat out the bunt, of course.

But for pitchers, sacrifice bunting is very often the right play. The benefit is that while the pitcher makes an out, he was going to make an out anyway, and this way the team gets a base. The team isn't particularly closer to scoring a run at that point -- and that's why more sophisticated versions of the runs created formula, which do take sacrifice hits into account, give them an ever-so-slightly negative value. But -- and this is where the value is -- the team is closer to scoring a run than it would have been if the pitcher had simply made an out without the runner advancing, the overwhelmingly likely result of swinging away.

The fact that the pitcher was "doing his job" by bunting is irrelevant, in my opinion. What happened is what happened, and that's what gets measured.

I would agree that PRV ignores pitchers who might be insanely good bunters, but I'm OK with that for a couple of reasons. One, I don't think there is such a thing as a pitcher who is an insanely good bunter. Two, even if there were, by putting down successful sacrifices, he's really not creating runs. He's simply giving other people a chance to create runs, a smaller chance than they would have had before his at-bat, but a better chance than they would have had if he'd struck out. That's not nothing, but it's very close to nothing.

YankeeHaterMetFan: Yankees best team in baseball???

A-whoops! Mets. Didn't I say Mets? That's been fixed. And the corresponding figure too. I just whiffed on that.

Editors apparantly do not read the column ... Or they'd know that the What The Heck pick of the week is where King picks the most obvious loser to win, and wouldn't have given that nimrod who also doesn't read the column an editor star.

I hand out the red stars.

Interesting points, Steve.

You're giving way too much credit to this debate, I think. The usual stated reason for pitchers not getting consideration for the MVP is "They have their own award, the Cy Young." That is, except in the random years when the voters decide to give the MVP to a pitcher.

Getting to what you're actually talking about, I think the value of a top starting pitcher and a top hitter is probably pretty close. The traditional baseball thinking, and by that I mean the thinking around mid-century and for a few decades on either side, was that players were worth more than pitchers because they helped you every day. In today's offensive environment, good pitching is at such a premium that great pitchers are like gold. You can kind of always find a bopper. Not really, but it sorta feels that way.

Baseball Prospectus has some numbers that might be useful, such as Value Over Replacement Player (VORP), Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP), etc.

If you go to that site and play around in the stats and look at individual players' pages (for this year in the A.L. pay particular attention, aside from the Twins you mentioned, to Derek Jeter and Travis Hafner, plus Roy Halladay if you want another pitcher), you'll see that the top pitchers and the top hitters account for similar numbers of runs produced/prevented, and therefore roughly the same number of wins above replacement level (what a borderline major leaguer would produce). A great hitter and a great pitcher are both worth about 10 wins over replacement.

I'm in favor of limiting the MVP to position players, and giving it to the best player, as opposed to whatever tortured definition of "value" is employed to justify giving it to whoever strikes your fancy that year. And the Cy Young Award is the MVP for pitchers.

But nobody, ever, asks me.

In the journalism racket, that's called a serial comma. Salon, like most daily newspapers and, of course, the AP, uses something called AP Style, which omits the serial comma. Chicago Style, which is used by most magazines and in book publishing and academic writing, uses the serial comma.

When Salon was in its infancy, there were many long and exciting debates about style. Even after it was decided -- at my suggestion as Salon's first copy chief, I might add -- to use AP style, there was a faction

(coughGaryKamiyacough)

vainly trying to argue for retention of the "elegant" serial comma. That faction was defeated.