That being said, I think the Twins, as a team (aka, as J-Mo, Mauer, and Santana) sexerved to get this award from one of them to honor all of them.

It's just nice to see the flaws in baseball's system to work in the Twins favor and against the Yankees for once.

Yes, it's valuable when comparing players at a certain position. It's valuable to compare Morneau against Konerko, e.g. And it's especially valauable for  GMs and talent evaluators who want to identify holes on their team. If a guy is below league average in VORP and there's little chance for improvement, that would be a position a GM should consider upgrading.

But there is no formula that I know of that gives the relative value of the positions. Yes catcher and shortstop are more valuable positions than first base, but how much more? If you knew that VORP multipier for each position, you could defiitively say whether or not Jeter's numbers are more valuable than Morneau's. Until you do, it's just guess work. To say that they are is just an admission that there are a lot more Juan Castros around than Carlos Penas. So what?

I happen to think catcher is more valuable than shortstop. Apparently I'm in the minority. But until there is a way of objectively deciding this issue, there's no winning the argument.

Even if you had that multiplier, you would also want to take into account close-and-late numbers and such, which would ultimately introduce bias against starting pitchers. So I'm not optimisitic that you can take all the MVP votes over the years and creat a formula for it.

It seems to me the surest way to make an out if you're either a hitter or a pitcher is by strikeout. If you are a contact pitcher, your success depends on your fielders' making plays. If you're a contact hitter, your success depends on the other teams' fielders not making plays.

There are lots of ways in which a contact out is better than a strikeout for a hitter and worse for a pitcher. They move runners along, they force the defense to make plays. And in the extreme case, you can never score on a strikeout except by wild pitch. So not all outs are created equal, and strikeouts are good for pitchers and bad for hitters in roughly the same magnitude. But Sabermetrics treats strikeouts indifferently for hitters and makes them perhaps THE key stat for  pitchers.

The reason for this is that different people developed diferent metrics for hitters as pitchers. Voros McCracken developed defense-independent pitching stats, but never developed defense-independent hitting stats. Bill James developed most of the hitting stats and never considered whether two hitters that have very similar statistics except for strikeouts might actually vary in quality.

Have you ever considered that Joe Mauer had one of the unluckiest years in the league: He hit the ball hard almost every time up and he only hit safely 35% of the time. Jayson Tyner hit the ball hard only half the time and still hit safely 30 % of the time. Why? Because defenses made plays against Mauer (better advanced scouting, Mauer the marked man, etc.) that they did not make against Tyner. If someone developed a defense-independent hitting stat, Mauer would be twice as good as Tyner. Such a stat would severely penalize hitters for strikeouts.

I don't know what this means for the present discussion, except that VORP is not a defense-independent hitting stat, and, in fact does not take situational hitting into account at all. James doens't think situational hitting makes a difference. I'm not convinced by his arguments. When someone argues from assumptions and proves something in direct conflict with observed reality (such as productive outs), my first response is to question his assumptions.

In short, your criterion is a measure of who is more valuable to the team. It's not a measure of who helped the team win the most games in 2006. I give that honor to Morneau, though I confess that I have no argument that will convince you.