Unfair bias could hurt Francisco Lindor’s MVP hopes, Insider says

The consensus in the baseball community is that the race for the 2024 NL MVP award is between two players: Los Angeles Dodgers superstar designated hitter Shohei Ohtani and New York Mets star shortstop Francisco Lindor.

Both players had spectacular seasons. However, the most common argument for who deserves the MVP award is that while Ohtani objectively has better hitting stats than Lindor, Ohtani (who is not pitching this season due to his recovery from Tommy John surgery) is not playing the field while Lindor will likely win a Gold Glove for his elite play at shortstop.

While Lindor’s defensive impact is much greater, there’s also the fact that Ohtani will likely steal 50 bases by the end of the regular season, while Lindor currently has 27 steals.

Yet, Jon Heyman of the New York Post wrote in a September 8 article that the MVP race may not come down to how Ohtani and Lindor played, but instead Or they play.

“And, frankly, Ohtani will probably win because the East Coast bias is a figment of someone’s jealous imagination. Yes, fake news,” Heyman wrote.

“The East Coast bias is so small that, if anything, it has reversed itself — yes, there may well be a West Coast bias — just check the history.”

Heyman goes on to point out that there have been 33 West Coast-based players who have won the MVP award since the Mets became a team in 1962.

He also added that “none of the 63 NL MVPs since the Mets began play have been Mets,” despite the WARs of New York icons Carlos Beltran and David Wright (8.2 for Beltran in 2006 and 8.3 for Wright in 2007) being significantly higher than the players who won the MVP award in those seasons.

But then again, the MVPs of those two seasons (Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins) played for the Philadelphia Phillies, another East Coast team.

So maybe there’s not so much an East Coast bias as an anti-Mets bias when it comes to MVP voting. Even if Lindor would be hurt by both.

While MVP voting takes place before the playoffs begin, the results aren’t announced until after the World Series, so Mets fans will have to wait until November to see if Lindor ends their team’s long MVP drought.