Quote:
Originally Posted by Baseball Rarities
Yeah, but he was still voted the 17th most valuable player in his League. To me, it is all relative to the others players who he played against. Stats can be de dining and matter what they were, he was regarded as a top 20 player in 12 different seasons.
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This is a perfect example of stats with no context being useless, so thank you.
What the voting record actually shows was that post 1970, Yaz was a good player, but no longer elite. This is not an insignificant accomplishment, as you can't forget his peak existed, but if we want to use MVP voting records as evidence of value, we need to dig deeper.
Yastrzemski's MVP voting totals after 1970 are as follows
1973: 9 votes for a 3% share
1974: 14 votes for a 4% share
1975: 1 vote for a less than 1% share
1976: 28 votes for an 8% share
1977: 25 votes for a 6% share
1978: 17 votes for a 4% share
So to review, once he reached the other side of his peak, he never received more than 8% of the possible vote totals in MVP voting. These totals in ABSOLUTELY NO WAY show that he was a top 20 player in any of those years. It shows that a vast minority of the voting population thought he was a top player. Those are different issues entirely. How many of those people do you think were from New England?