The case for Carlos

You should know right off that if you came here expecting anything other than baseball, you should turn around right now. It's September, and it's on my mind a lot lately.

Today I'd like to argue that Carlos Gonzalez deserves to be the National League MVP. Let's start by turning back the clock two weeks. With September looming and playoff races getting tight, the National League looks to be a six-team playoff picture: San Diego and San Francisco in the West, Cincinnati and St. Louis in the Central, and Atlanta and Philadelphia in the East. One of these teams, probably the loser of the East, will win the Wild Card. The race in the central division is particularly interesting because the first basemen for these two teams have emerged as legitimate contenders for the Triple Crown. Since about the All-Star Break, Albert Pujols and Joey Votto have taken turns leading each of the three Triple Crown categories (batting average, RBI, and home runs), with the occasional interloper displacing them in one category or another. As baseball heads into its stretch run, sports writers and media types begin to speculate about the end-of-season awards and it becomes evident that one of these two sluggers should almost certainly win the MVP. Conventional wisdom says that if one of them wins the Triple Crown, he'll be a shoe-in, and if not it will probably go to the player whose team wins the division. While the competition remains open (and fierce), it seems to be strictly a two-man affair.

Then something happened in Colorado. Carlos Gonzalez started hitting at a ridiculous pace. After yesterday's 7th-inning single, CarGo has a 16-game hitting streak during which he is hitting better than .500 with seven homers and 21 RBI. That streak has fueled him to a near-20-point lead in the batting race and made him the first player in the league with 100 RBI when he hit a three-run blast on Tuesday. If you're paying attention, you already know that this means Gonzalez - not Votto or Pujols - leads two of the three triple crown categories at the start of play today. And with 32 home runs, he is only four back of Pujols for the lead in that category, too. So if the Triple Crown is the metric of the MVP race, you'd have to say Carlos Gonzalez is the odds-on favorite.

But wait-- there's more. CarGo's ridiculous performance at the plate not only fueled his rise in the batting categories, it also pushed Colorado back into playoff relevance. While the Padres collapsed in late August and early September, the Rockies got hot and sit four and a half games back in both the NL West and the Wild Card. So if contribution to a team's success if the primary criterion of the MVP, there's a good case there, too, especially if Colorado can claw their way into a playoff spot.

CarGo can Go, Go, Go, too. He ranks fifth in the league in triples, with 8; Votto has 2 and Pujols has 1. He's 11th in stolen bases, with a realistic shot at being a 30/30 player if he can pick up seven more steals. That's a dimension the NL Central guys don't bring to the game. Nobody worries about Albert Pujols stretching a double to a triple, or Joey Votto swiping second and then third in the same at-bat.

Pitchers are starting to catch on that this guy might be for real. In the third inning of last night's game, with Dexter Fowler on first, Bronson Arroyo pitched delicately around Gonzalez, walking him on four pitches. Then he hung a curveball over the middle of the plate that Troy Tulowitzki promptly deposited in the left field bleachers. Without swinging the bat, CarGo added a run to the Rockies' score because the Reds were so concerned with not letting him hurt them that they let the next guy do it instead. That's a pretty valuable contribution.

And then there's his defense. In Tuesday's game, the speedy Brandon Phillips hit a ball into deep left field. Gonzalez tracked it down some twenty or thirty feet from the outfield wall, spun around, and threw out Phillips trying to stretch for a double. CarGo can play all three outfield positions, and his speed and arm are a great fit for the expansive outfield of Coors Field. Pujols and Votto may be roughly indistinguishable from CarGo when it comes to batting, but his contributions are so much broader that the argument becomes clearer the longer you look at it.

All that being true, there exists a certain bias among awards voters. In 2007, a Rockies left-fielder wearing number 5 also led the league in batting while leading his team to a playoff berth. He was snubbed in favor of an East-coast player, and so were the emergent rookie shortstop Tulowitzki and manager Clint Hurdle. That team went to a memorable World Series and got no recognition for it. Tulowitzki seems like the presumptive favorite for the Gold Glove (and Silver Slugger) at his position, but a DL stint could be the excuse voters need to pass him up. One-time Cy Young lock Ubaldo Jimenez has given a number of pitchers the opportunity to state their cases, and a player like Roy Halladay, Josh Johnson, or Mat Latos will probably win that award over the league's winningest pitcher. But the arguments against Carlos Gonzalez are weaker, fewer, and disappearing every day. As a fan, I hope MVP voters do the right thing and vote for the player who clearly did the most for his team down the stretch.