Why not.

Cy Young

Starting with the arms, because there aren’t a whole lot of appearances on the MVP list.

I took the ESPN projections and converted them into Wins and got the following rankings:

AL

NL

Now, I used “Wins” instead of the “Wins Above Replacement” for two reasons. First and foremost, the formatting for ESPN does not lend itself well to automatically pulling position information for each player. My current WAR approach is strongly impacted by a players position. I foresaw a lot of tedious manual work to isolate each players position, either manually or automatically, and didn’t have the time or inclination to see that task through to the end. I could have used a generic position factor to account for this, but, and this leads into point two, I’m not convinced it’s necessary. Doing this would have leveled out RP, SP and hitters, but what’s left when looking at total “Wins” is total impact, regardless of position. I think this could have unique value when looking at things like “Most Valuable Player” and “Best Pitcher”. The end results seem wonky as a result, as RP seem to be so elevated (sneak peak, hitters were elevated as well for MVP), but, maybe this is fair for some of the elite relievers in the game. One thing’s for sure, it’s different. Maybe not for the better, but sometimes different for the sake of different can at least be interesting.

MVP

AL

NL

Welp, there you have it. If the ESPN projections hold, these are the players that should contribute the most Wins in the CPL. But, as we all know, projections are inherently meaningless. So, what that leaves us is a list of names that should have the highest probability of taking home the MVP, despite the reality that the final results will look almost nothing like the stats ESPN projects.

I had fun though. So, I guess that’s all that matters.