Its what MVP means. Where are the Angels right now without Trout and Ohtani? Same place they are with Ohtani and not Trout!!!
By end of season, Ohtani will not be leading any offensive category or pitching category. Book it.
So the only reason hes in consideration for MVP is because he can hit and pitch??? Sorry not an MVP for me. Vladdy is having a monster season, and if he wins triple crown which could be hard it should be a lock. Like I said top 3 in every offensive category does the trick. Not to mention his stellar defensive play at 1B which likely gets him consideration for a gold glove.
In theory, sure. But not in practice. not for a long time. In almost every sport with an MVP trophy it has become synonymous with "best player" simply because judging "value" is a potentially highly subjective and noisy exercise that leads to insanity like people trying to vote for middling sparkplug players like David goddamn Eckstein because "they don't compile numbers but they're winners and their teams win" BS. Seriously, Eckstein made it onto two (
TWO!!!) MVP ballots in his career because someone took the "most valuable" argument far too literally. This is actually one of the things that I like about the CFL. There's no illusions of "value" in their award because they've done away with that mealy-mouthed terminology and just outright said the top award is for the most
outstanding player.
You're also making a pretty scattershot argument here, playing both sides of the debate in opposite directions. On the one hand Ohtani's personal accolades don't matter because the Angels suck. But on the other hand Vladdy deserves it because the Jays are in a solid position and, oh yeah, he has a bunch of personal accolades to rattle off.
Ohtani is doing something that pretty much nobody in baseball has done in like a hundred years (literally) and is doing it at a level that pretty much nobody has ever done in the entire history of baseball
ever (because Babe Ruth may have also been a two-way player, but his best pitching years and best hitting years do not overlap. His historic batter impact didn't begin until right at the tail end of him being a pitcher (likely because Boston realized "oh my god, he's really good with the bat, what are we doing wasting his effort being an OK-ish pitcher for a hundred plus innings a year?") and in his best couple of years on the mound he was a very un-Babe-like as a part-time hitter.)
If Vladdy captures the triple crown, then it's a debate. Or if Ohtani really falls off during this last month of the season and Vlad hugely passes him by. But right now the uniqueness value of Ohtani's performance coupled with the elite level of performance on both sides of the ball creates MVP helium that defies a simple "yeah, well he's not the best hitter/pitcher in the league and his team sucks"
