Joe Mauer is Inarguably the 2009 AL MVP

At the end of every baseball season fans, writers, and pundits alike — especially those who root for and cover teams not participating in the playoffs — love to speculate on who will win the various end of the season awards, usually schilling for their homer pick. The most prevalent of these debates always centers on the Cy Young Awards ( for both leagues) and, of course, the MVPs.

It is the "MVP Race" as they call it through  roughly the final month or so of the season. Providing constant fodder for the round-the-clock sports coverage, mediums like ESPN constantly track the statistics of the top "contenders" for the awards, using the numbers and their various biases to rank the players like horses in the Kentucky Derby coming down the home stretch for the trophy. The debate even gets philosophical with countless attempts to define what exactly constitutes an "MVP," like it is some great existential question whose answer is known only by some unseen baseball deity. Is an MVP a player who adds the most value to his own team or simply the best player in each league? It ranks up there with "do the ends justify the means" and "Barack Obama's citizenship" as one of the great intellectual debates in history.

Needless to say, there is always a large volume of opinions and rarely a clear cut winner. Every season camps from different locations of loyalty campaign for "their guy," and usually many of these arguments have a certain level of validity. Shockingly enough, it is not a rare occurrence for the voters to pick candidates of whose validity there is actually a strong consensus against (especially in historical retrospect, see Hank Sauer's 1952 NL MVP).

But this season in the American League there should not be one iota of debate or disagreement except by the most blatantly bias of cheerleaders. There is absolutely, without a doubt, a clear cut winner of the MVP, and his name is Joe Mauer of the Minnesota Twins.

Throughout the year Joe has fulfilled every possible definition (and all the facets of those definitions) of the term "MVP." He is easily his team's most valuable player (as he showed after Justin Morneau's injury caused nary a hiccup in the Twins run to the playoffs), especially when his offensive and defensive contributions are considered

He is also, at the very least, one of the top five hitters in the game, batting proficiently for average and increasingly proficiently for power with startling consistency. While for six season Mauer displayed little slugging ability all that changed in 2009 with his 28 dingers and his outstanding OPS, elevating Joe to a completely new plain of existence in the figurative baseball sphere.

Article Author: Anthony Tobis

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