The 2013 AL MVP

Since I live around Detroit, I hear an awful lot about Miguel Cabrera and how great he is. There is no doubt that he has been phenomenal, but I want to talk about one of the most underrated players in all of baseball. He's not underrated because you've never heard of him, but rather because no one seems to grasp how incredible he really has been.

Miguel Cabrera is going to win this years' AL MVP award, but he doesn't deserve it. And he didn't deserve it last year.

Why not?

Because of how much better Mike Trout has been.

Fangraphs, a wonderful little site that you should entirely check out, has a sabermetric statistic called WAR, which stands for wins above replacement. It assumes that there is a fairly standard level of play that one could expect from a "replacement-level" player (generally AAA sub). WAR tells you how much better a player is than the average replacement. It is a counting statistic that grows over the course of the season.

Over the past two seasons, Miguel Cabrera has an fWAR (the "f" distinguishes it from Baseball-Reference's version of WAR, known as rWAR) of 14.2, an average of 7.1 WAR per year. According to Fangraphs' convenient little guide, anyone with a 7.0 or higher fWAR in a season is an MVP caliber player. So Cabrera has been incredibly good.

Trout, on the other hand, has accrued a 19.8 fWAR, which averages out to 9.9 per season. Fangraphs doesn't offer any rankings above 7.0, but if they did, it would probably read "Hall of Famer." What we do know is that Trout has been worth 5.6 more wins than Miguel Cabrera over the past two seasons. According to Fangraphs, that's an entire "superstar" caliber player.

So why is Trout so much better than Cabrera, even though he doesn't hit quite as well? Because he can actually play baseball. Cabrera is good for only one thing: hitting a ball hard. Trout, on the other hand, can hit, field, and run bases -- he's a well rounded player. Allow me to demonstrate statistically:

Miguel has committed 25 errors in the past two years, Trout has only committed 6. Miguel has stolen 7 bases, Trout has stolen 81.

In closing, while it's true that Miguel hits better, it isn't true that he's a more valuable player. So the next time that you hear someone saying that Miguel Cabrera is the best player in baseball right now, think of Mike Trout. He deserves a little more recognition.