MVP Voters Screw Zimmerman

OK, so hear us out. Yes, the Nats sucked. We won't pretend they didn't.

But that doesn't mean that the performances they got from their players meant nothing. But that's apparently the lesson the stupid, idiot, moronic voters of the Baseball Writer's Association of America.

How else, then, do we suppose that Ryan Zimmerman -- he of the Silver Slugger and the Gold Glove -- is worthy of only two 10th place votes for MVP.

That's one point ahead of Jeremy-freakin' Affeldt, a generic middle reliever, who threw 62 IP for the Giants! Miguel Tejada played a terrible shortstop while hitting just 14 homers for a similarly lousy baseball team, and he got an eighth-place vote!

It's a ridiculously poor job by the voters to not recognize the value of Zimmerman, even on a terrible team.

Offensively, Zimm hit .292/ .364/ .525 with 33 homers and 106 RBI.  That's a big season by any measure.  It's as good a line (and value) as many of the people above him on the ballot, including Justin Upton, Yunel Escobar and Andre Ethier.

He's not up there with the elite hitters like Albert Pujols, of course, but he's in the discussion among the best of that second tier.

He's also a better defender than most of those great-hitting sluggers.  He's playing excellent defense at a far more demanding position than those guys are.

The stat crunchers at Fangraphs have come up with a stat called RAR (runs above replacement). It attempts to give a run value for how many runs a player adds with the bat and subtracts with the glove.

Pujols, it's no surprise, runs away with the stat.  But fourth on the list?  Ryan Zimmerman.  The very good bat plus the excellent glove means he does more to help his team win than so many other players.

Derrek Lee, Pablo Sandoval and Troy Tulowitzki all finished higher than Zimmerman in the voting, but lagged him where it counts: in their contributions to their teams.

It's understandable if not everyone around the country saw the brilliance of Ryan Zimmerman's season.  But that the two people from the D.C. market who ostensibly covered Zimmerman all season long didn't think that he -- by one measure, the fourth best player in the league -- wasn't worth more than a 10th place vote? 

Perhaps that's the most fitting end to a miserable baseball season.