Historical Travesties No One Remembers: Fred Lynn Not Winning the '79 AL MVP

Fred Lynn is one of those guys who was really, really good for a short period of time and then became just pretty good for a much longer period of time. That's why he's not in the Hall of Fame, although it can be argued that the HoF is chock full of guys who fit that very description. Fred was drafted by the BoSox in '73, made his Major League debut in '74 and in '75 he won the Rookie of the Year, AL Gold Glove AND the AL MVP awards. That's pretty good, but that was literally just the tip of the iceberg. Starting in '75 and running through '83, Fred played in 9 consecutive All Star Games and won 4 Gold Gloves. His finest season came in 1979 when he hit a career high 39 homers and his slash line of .333/.423/.637 lead the league in BA/OBP/SLG and resulted in an incredible 1.059 OPS and a WAR of 8.4. And if you have no clue what any of those stats mean, well, get yourself over to Baseball-Reference and learn something already! So, with an amazing season like that you'd assume he was the run away AL MVP that year, right? Nope. Runner up? Negative. Surely he finished 3rd, right? No, for his Herculean 1979 campaign Fred Lynn finished 4th in the AL MVP voting that year. Now, it should be noted that this happened back in the day when advanced metrics weren't really a widely known thing and people still placed a lot of weight in basically meaningless stats like RBI's and a pitchers won/loss record. Of the 3 men who finished ahead of Fred in the voting that year, the only one who you can make a legit claim to having had a better or comparable season is George Brett. Brett finished 3rd in the voting and lead the AL in triples and finished just behind Lynn in BA with a .329 effort. Fred probably wouldn't have lost any sleep if he finished second to George. The real crime is in the winner and runner up in the voting.

Orioles rightfielder Ken Singleton was the MVP runner up, hitting 35 homers and a BA/OBP/SLG/OPS of .295/.405/.533/.938, numbers all bested by Lynn. Hell, Brett beat him in BA, SLG and OPS. Singleton posted a WAR of 5.3, which was also behind both Lynn and Brett (albeit at different positions). Singleton certainly had a very good season, but by nearly all metrics, he was inferior to both Fred Lynn and George Brett. 5th place finisher Jim Rice also had a better season than Singleton. And despite all that, Singleton still had a better season than the actual AL MVP in '79.

I don't want this to sound like I'm picking on Don Baylor, because I really don't mean for it to sound that way. I always loved watching him play and I was lucky enough to watch him end his career as a member of the '88 Oakland A's. He sure knew how to get hit by a pitch. He wasn't a bad player by any means, but he sure as hell wasn't the Most Valuable Player of the American League in 1979, either. He didn't have a bad season by any stretch of the imagination, hitting a career high 36 homers and putting up a decent slash line of .296/.371/.530/.901. Again, these are numbers that were all beaten by Lynn. The only numbers that he actually outperformed Fred in were games played (162 to 147), runs scored (120 to 116) and RBIs (139 to 122). Again, this was back before people realized that RBIs were not a good way of gauging a hitters value and before numbers like on-base percentage were given any credit for being far more accurate in terms of judging performance. Baylor also posted a solid WAR of 4.4, 4 whole wins behind Lynn and 4.3 behind Brett. So in the end Don Baylor ended up with 20 of the 28 first place votes and ran away with the damned thing. Fred Lynn received zero first place votes. One of the finest non-steroid hitting performances is now a historical footnote. The greatest promise of the nerd revolution is the possibility that miscarriages of justice like this may not happen as often in future.