Ryan Howard: Not Even a Whiff of MVP

There's been a lot of talk in the last couple of weeks about Ryan Howard as a legit MVP candidate in the NL. It would be much more appropriate to vote him MLK: Most Likely to Strikeout. With six games left he's on a pace to best his own 199 single-season mark (set last year) by 2, breaking the magical 200-K barrier.

While fanning doesn't automatically discount him from MVP contention, look at the full scope of his offensive output compared to his 2006 MVP-winning campaign. At this point he's played 156 games compared to 159 played in the full 2006 season, but the numbers are not even in the same ballpark (pun intended):

AVG: .313 to .247
SLG: .659 to .533
OBP: .425 to .336

Huge dropoffs in each category. Now look at walks: 108 to 79. What happened to those 29 additional walks? That's right. They became wiffs. Ryan had just (just?) 181 strikeouts in 2006 compared to 194 this year - in three fewer games.

So this clearly isn't a hitch in his swing or anything else physical. This is a simple matter of impatience, perhaps born of huge success early on in his career. (I'd like to find some way to blame this on Pat Burrell batting behind Howard, but that's not the case.)

The remarkable thing about Howard's wiffing is the career pace. If he plays out the six remaining games this year and his numbers remain constant, Howard should have 680 K in 553 games between 2005 - 2008. (He only played 19 games in 2004 so we're omitting it.) That works out to be 1.23 K per game.

The all-time MLB leader for strikeouts is Reggie Jackson with 2597 K in 2820 games. That averages out to 0.920 K per game. In fact, only two of the top five players in the category have averages over 1.0 per game (#3 Jim Thome, 1.01 and #5 Jose Canseco, 1.03).

Look at it another way: Jackson averaged one K every 3.798 at bats, while Howard averages one every 2.995 at bat. At his current pace, Howard will eclipse Jackson's mark in 2,111 games, an astonishing 700 games less!

So should Howard be a candidate for MVP? No, but not because of his wiffs. In 1961 Roger Maris won the award with his then-record 61 HRs and the lowest average ever for an MVP, just .269. His OPB was .372. But his numbers are 22 and 36 points higher in each category than Howard's current stats. Oh, and Maris fanned just 67 times.