Why don't we just rename the MVP the PWBAASOACT

Lets drop the MVP award. Seriously. The Cy Young goes to the best pitcher, and while it's often debated who the best pitcher is, the meaning of the award itself is not questioned. The MVP should be the same way. It should go to the best player in each league. This will almost always be the position player who has the best season. In rare cases, a pitcher may be so dominant or there may not be a clear cut best position player. In those cases, like with Cliff Lee in 2008, Pedro Martinez in 2000, and Greg Maddux in 1995, it would be ok to award the distinction to a pitcher.

All this makes sense to me, and it seems pretty clear cut. I don't why writers get so hung up on the valuable part. Why would there be an award for being the best player on a contending team, or as it seems, especially in the national league this season, the player with the best august and September on a contending team (PWBAASOACT). How else do you explain the suggested candidates: CC Sabathia, Manny Ramirez, Ryan Howard, and Carlos Delgado? Every single one of those guys either sucked or did not play in the league during the first half. It's a 6 month season and it should go to the player who had a 6 month season. The ridiculous arguments for each:

Sabathia:
Has been the most dominating pitcher in the league since his arrival, and his arrival has coincided with the Brewers rise in the standings.

First of all, Sabathia has been terrific, but Tim Lincecum has been just as good in the second half and he has pitch and pitched well the whole year. Also, you can't tell me that CC has added more wins to the Brewers than Ben Sheets or Ryan Braun both of whom have been good and at times great since the season started.

Ramirez:
He has been the CC Sabathia of hitters since his arrival, and it has coincided with the Dodgers rise despite me criticizing the trade.

Like Sabathia, Ramirez has been almost equaled by Albert Pujols, a man who has also been that good since day 1. Eithier and Billingsley are bigger reasons why the Dodgers are where they are. Also as Gammons has found, Ramirez sparked the Dodgers to play better more than invigorating their offense, "In Ramirez's first 40 games, the Dodgers had a run differential of plus-22 and averaged 4.55 runs per game, as opposed to 4.43 through July 31....It's hard to talk about the MVP Award for Manny when the team that paid the Dodgers to take Ramirez is 27-13 without him through Sunday and have seen their runs per game increase from 4.94 at the time of the deal to 6.22 since." Could not have said it better myself.

Delgado:
Delgado took a 3rd place team that was going nowhere and made them into a contender not simply by the numbers. He lifted many of his teammates play, leading by example.

Whatever that means. He had a good but not great second half: .289/.374/598 with lots of homers and lots of RBIs, too bad his first half of .248/.328/.455 counts! Getting that kind of production from a 1st baseman is a big reason why the Mets were a 3rd place team to begin with. Wright, Beltran, Reyes and Santana were all more important to the Mets this season.

Howard:
Perhaps the worse case out of all of them, Howard's is similar to Delgado without quite as bad a first half or quite as good a second half. They have almost identical YTD lines of .263/.345/.508 for Delgado vs. .249/.335/.537 for Howard. The difference is Howard leads in the all important (not important) counting stats of home runs and RBIs. He is also about to be the first man to strikeout 200 times in a season.

I could spend all day discussing why counting stats (particularly RBIs and saves) as bad indicators of performance, but I'll skip it for now and go to more relevant arguments. Howard plays in one of the best hitters parks in all of baseball and it shows, he has OPSed 72 points higher at home than on the road. He has also done almost all of his damage against right handers OPSing 232 points higher against them than against lefties. Finally, like the others, there are better candidates on his own team: Burrell, Utley, Hamels, and even Werth. All of whom carried the Phils to a great first half while Howard was trying to start his own personal hurricane with the avalanche of whiffs he put up. Pujols is vastly superior to Howard in every way. If he were playing on the Phillies in Citizens Bank, he'd have more homers, more RBIs and better stats than the amazing ones he currently has. And he may be spending October golfing this year, but he still has won more world series rings than Howard has won playoff games and it remains to be seen if that will change anytime soon.