Justin Verlander and Why MVP Voting Has to Change Immediately

Justin Verlander achieved a rare feat last week, as he won the 2011 American League Most Valuable Player award. He was the first pitcher since Dennis Eckersley, in 1992, to win the award. Verlander also won the award receiving just 13 of the 28 first place votes. He was also left off of Jim Ingraham's ballot entirely.

To put it mildly, if Verlander didn't win the MVP award because of writers like Ingraham, it would have been a robbery, similar to the 1999 MVP voting. That was the year where Pedro Martinez went 23-4 with a 2.07 ERA, while striking out 313 batters. It wasn't as dominant as Verlander was in 2011, but Martinez should have been the clear choice for MVP.

Instead, Pedro only received eight first place votes and the award went to Ivan Rodriguez of the Texas Rangers. Rodriguez's stat line of .332, 35 home runs and 113 runs batted in was nothing to laugh at, but it was clear that he was nowhere near as dominating as Martinez was.

The reason for all of this was that some writers didn't believe that a pitcher should win the MVP award, but that would be too simple of an explanation. If writers were just pointing at the Cy Young award as the only one that a pitcher could win, it would be turning their backs to greatness. That is exactly what happened in 1999 with Rodriguez winning the award.

Going back to Ingraham's reasoning, the writer for The News-Herald in Cleveland said that Verlander played in just 21 percent of the Detroit Tigers games this season. Ingraham also reasoned that it would be irrational for a player to be voted MVP in any other sport if they had not played in 79 percent of their games. It's a good reason, but it's not quite accurate.

Over the course of a season, a hitter will accumulate roughly 500-700 plate appearances with the variables of a hitters patience and health. Every time a player goes to the plate, he is impacting the game in some way. On the other hand, Verlander was involved in 969 plate appearances this season. That's 240 more than runner-up Jacoby Ellsbury of the Boston Red Sox.

That would make Ingraham's logic flawed because Verlander had been more directly involved in the success of the Tigers than Ellsbury was in the success of the Red Sox. This is something that all writers should take into consideration when filling out their MVP ballot.

Not every pitcher deserves the same consideration as Verlander does, but in an era where good pitching is becoming more and more valuable to a team, more pitchers should be considered for the award because of the impact they have on the game.