A week or so ago, Sports Illustrated posted a question on social media, the responses to which were included in the letters section of this week's issue. The question is fairly simple and straightforward, but it's a very dumb question all the same: Should MLB get rid of the separate awards for the AL and NL and instead only present one Cy Young, Rookie of the Year and MVP per season?
My answer to that question is a resounding "No!" I know the question was posed solely as a topic for discussion/debate, but that debate should be a short one. For starters, they're not going to change it. There's going to remain separate awards for the American League and National League. And there should be.
The argument that one guy made as to why there should only be one award is because they only have one MVP, etc., in each of the other sports. Well, that may be true, but each of the other sports has always operated as one league with two separate conferences. Major League Baseball has always been two completely separate leagues. Interconference matchups have always been the norm in the NFL, NHL and NBA (in the latter two, you face every other team at least twice each season). In Baseball, interleague play, like it or not, has become an accepted part of the schedule. But it's also only existed since 1997. That's not even 20 years.
Before the existence of interleague play, when teams from the AL and NL never faced each other except for the All*Star Game and World Series, having separate awards for the two leagues made complete sense. It wouldn't have been fair to compare players from one league against the other when they were facing completely different opponents. Some would argue that since there's now interleague play, that distinction no longer needs to be made. Well, interleague play has been integrated into the schedule, but it's not a big enough part of the schedule to render AL vs. AL or NL vs. NL games insignificant.
Furthermore, the NFL, NBA and NHL maintain only one set of league statistics. It's the NFL rushing leader, the NBA scoring leader, etc. In Major League Baseball, they still keep separate league leaders for both the American and National Leagues. Sure, it's easy enough to figure out the Major League leader in a given category, but they still deem how you do within your league more important.
Part of the reason for that is the sample size. In the NFL, they play four interconference games. That's 25 percent of the schedule. In the NBA, it's 30, which amounts to 36.6 percent of the schedule. In the NHL, there are more teams in the Eastern Conference, so the amount of crossover games varies. It's either 28 or 32 depending on which conference you're in. For the Eastern Conference teams, that's 34.1 percent of the schedule. In the West, it's 39 percent.
Major League Baseball, of course, has a season that's twice as long as the others. They have that brutal grind of 162 games in 180 days. Of those 162 games, only 20 are interleague. Or, 12.3 percent of the season. You can't discount the fact that for almost 90 percent of the season, the two leagues are completely independent of each other. You play 142 games against only half of the available competition, yet you're going to be compared against that other half when it comes to awards season? How's that fair?
Then there's the elephant in the room anytime there's any discussion about Major League Baseball and interleague play. I'm, of course, talking about the DH. Baseball's the only sport where they play by different rules. And the DH makes it impossible to compare the American League with the National League statistically. National League pitchers have to hit, but they also don't have to face a DH. That's why offensive numbers are generally higher in the AL. That's also one of the reasons interleague play is so much fun.
When they first started the Rookie of the Year and Cy Young Awards, they did only have one for the two leagues combined. That only lasted a couple years before they separated the awards, which they have been ever since. And there's no rush on anyone's part to change it back.
It seems silly to even think about having one award for the two leagues. There's no difference between AFC football and NFC football, and a hockey game is a hockey game, regardless if it's Kings-Blackhawks or Rangers-Bruins. That's why it makes sense to only have one set of awards in each of those sports. The same can't be said about Major League Baseball. A Yankee game and a Met game are very different. And those differences are very abundant. You know whether you're watching the American League or the National League. Until that's not the case anymore, there's no reason not to have separate awards for the two leagues.
Discussion over. It ain't changin'. If you want to make the case for a "Player of the Year" award, then I might be willing to listen. But when it comes to whether or not there should be two different MVPs each year, that's not a debate.
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