Jacoby Ellsbury's MVP Chances

On the heels of back-to-back walk-offs last week against Cleveland, the Jacoby Ellsbury-for-MVP-campaign picked up a full head of steam on the sports talk circuit in Boston over the past few days. Along with teammates Dustin Pedroia and Adrian Gonzalez, the Red Sox are currently fielding three of the top five horses in the race. Which is great for Boston, but his own lineup will make it extremely hard for the centerfielder to distinguish himself.

Yet, after knocking in a career-high six runs yesterday against CC Sabathia and the Yanks, Ellsbury seems to have further injected himself into the national spotlight. Contrast his play with the Carl Crawford debacle (up to this point), a player with essentially the same skill set, and many are fearing Ellsbury and Scott Boras will walk in a few years when free agency comes up.

Having said that, I need a baseball fix in anticipation of tonight's Boston-NY rubber-match, and I got to wondering about the recent history of leadoff hitters in MVP voting. The line of demarcation for me is usually 1980, since that's the year I was born and it seems as good as any as it gives us a good sample of 30 seasons prior to this one. Since then, there have been 3 players who were slotted at the top of the lineup for the majority of their games to win the award: Rickey Henderson for the A's in 1990, Ichiro in 2001 for the Mariners, Jimmy Rollins in 2007 for the Phillies. That's it. Three. The only other players who even dabbled in the leadoff spot were Barry Larkin for the Reds in 1995 and Pedroia in '08, but barely enough to warrant consideration. Just for comparison's sake here are those three MVP seasons, and Ellsbury's current numbers:

(#'s in bold = league leader)

Player	Age	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	SB	CS	BB	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS	OPS+	rWAR	fWAR
Henderson	31	136	489	119	159	33	3	28	61	65	10	97	.325	.439	.577	1.016	188	10.0	10.5
Ichiro	27	157	692	127	242	34	8	8	69	56	14	30	.350	.381	.457	.838	126	7.6	6.1
Rollins	28	162	716	139	212	38	20	30	94	41	6	49	.296	.344	.531	.875	119	6.1	6.9
Ellsbury	27	111	458	84	147	31	2	19	72	31	10	38	.321	.377	.522	.899	142	5.6	6.0

As you can see, Henderson had an absolute monster season in ’90, leading the league in both WAR categories as well as OPS and OPS+. If that wasn’t the greatest season ever by a leadoff hitter, then it was certainly among the top two or three. As for Ichiro in ’01, it was a relatively weak year for MVP candidates, and he was the best story on the league’s best team (many still think teammate Bret Boone had a better case). Rollins seems to have grabbed the award due to the Phillies’ success as well as putting up power numbers unexpectedly in another weak year. As we all know, many voters simply refuse to vote for players on non-playoff squads. And that’s fine--another debate for another day.

Ellsbury stacks up well so far with Ichiro and Rollins in their MVP seasons (extremely close in age), while Henderson was in another galaxy. My guess is that by the time it’s all said and done, either Gonzalez, Pedroia, or Toronto’s Jose Bautista will take the trophy home, with Ellsbury figuring in somewhere in the top six (along with New York’s Mark Teixeira and Curtis Granderson.)

UPDATE: Looks like the Globe's Bob Ryan had the same idea, albeit with more depth. He goes back with a look at all of the leadoff hitters ever to win the trophy.