Hello and welcome to episode 1418 of Effectively Wildly Baseball podcast from Ben Grass presented

by our Patreon supporters, I am Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer joined by Sennaur of ESPN, Loeb San.

Hey Ben, I wrote an article this week about Bryce Harper and about his first season as a Philly

and sort of judging it on its merits and a few things have changed in the last few days, but not real time.

Yeah, yeah. You always root in the days after an article for the premise to hold up and because the

judgment was a little complicated, the fact that whatever happened was going to also complicate it

further and I wasn't even sure whether what what I wanted, I didn't even know what I wanted to

happen to support what I wrote, but here's one of the key things that I wrote and I'm going to

lay it out with updated stats because I actually just have a question for you about it.

Bryce Harper is 89th in the majors in war this year at baseball reference. He is tied with

Lure Garcia, he is tied with David Fletcher, he's tied with the 50 games that Yordan Alvarez has

played. He is 61st in OPS Plus, he is just behind Omar Narvaya's and Tim Anderson and Tommy Lestella,

but he is 5th in the majors in win probability added. He is in a virtual tie for third, in fact,

with Cody Belinger and Freddie Freeman. That cluster of three basically tied players is behind only

Christian Yalich and Mike Trout and so my question is very simple. It is if you had an MVP ballot,

would he be on it and where would he be? I was going to start this episode by asking you a similar

question, not quite this question, but no, I don't think he would. I think he has been extremely clutch,

you wrote about it, then he hit the Grand Slam, the walkoff Grand Slam that has been his signature

moment as a filly so far. Craig Edwards also wrote about his clutchness at fan graphs on Friday.

I think clutchness, I'm sure we've talked about it before in the context of award races, but

it's sort of a tiebreaker for me, I think, more so than it is something that I would base a

candidacy on or vote for someone over someone who had been way better in all situations, context

...