100 years from now people will still be talking about Miguel Cabrera's season. How do you not reward that with the MVP award? I know defense counts, but it doesn't count THAT much. I watched Trout a lot this year play against the Mariners and he is a great player, but I agree that if you dont give it to Cabrera, something is wrong with the voting.
I do however completely disagree and always will with the notion that you have to be a playoff team to win MVP. This is a recent trend developed in the last 20 years or so as a result of ESPN and other Talk Shows overanalyzing Sports to no end. Look at the history of the MVP award since it was started. Yes sometimes the players pre 1990 made the playoffs, but a good portion of the time they didn't and that was always ok until recently and now people treat it like a hard rule.
MVP means "best player" despite how you want to interpret the "Value" aspect of it. For some reason they dont do this for Cy Young and often times reward a pitcher like Felix Hernandez for being dominant on a bad team, but flip the tables on hitters. There is no logic to this no matter how people try and stretch it.
Sometimes the best players in the game are on bad or mediocre teams and that is the beauty of baseball!
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