Baseball's MVPs will be announced Thursday. It will be the 103rd American League MVP, 102 for the National League.
The first MVPs resulted from a scandal. Prior to the 1910 season, Harry Chambers, owner of Chambers Automotive, announced that his company would present one of their luxury models to the player with the highest batting average that season. In the deadball era, the batting champion usually was the best hitter.
It was a battle between Hall of Famers Ty Cobb of the Tigers and Napoleon Lajoie of the Cleveland Nats, named to honor him during his years as player-manager. Just abut everyone was rooting for Lajoie, who was very popular, while Cobb was unpopular.
With one day to go in the season, Cobb appeared to have it wrapped up with a .383 average to .376 for Lajoie. Cobb sat out the final game which was meaningless in the standings.
The Nats had a doubleheader with the St Louis Browns. Browns manager Jack O'Connor ordered his rookie third baseman Red Corrigan to play deep every time Lajoie came to bat. Lajoie went eight for nine, with seven bunt hits.
When the dust cleared, he was at .384, one point higher than Cobb.
American League president Ban Johnson was horrified. He ordered a game-by-game review of the season for Cobb and Lajoie. The review “discovered” that one game for Cobb had been omitted. With two hits it raised his average to .385 making 1910 one of Cobb's record 12 batting titles.
An investigation by The Sporting News many years later found that the extra game was bogus, probably manufactured by Johnson.
A league investigation exonerated Corrigan, but O'Connor was fired and informally banned from baseball.
Poor Mr. Chambers was caught in the middle. He tried to do something nice and a scandal was the result. He awarded cars to Cobb and Lajoie and announced that beginning in 1911, he would award a car to the player in each league voted MVP by a panel of sportswriters. Cobb was the first AL winner after his best season with a .419 average. He then announced he would not be a candidate in future years.
The Chambers Award, as it was called, was discontinued after four years.
There were league awards during the 1920s, in the AL for seven years from 1922 to '28, the NL for six years from 1924 to '29. That's why there has been one more AL MVP.
Babe Ruth won in 1923 when he had a career high .393 average. But the AL had a no repeater rule. He would have won at least two more had he been eligible.
The NL did not have that rule. Rogers Hornsby was a two-time winner, for the Cardinals in 1925 when he batted .403 and won the triple crown, and in 1929 when he won the batting title with a .387 average for the pennant winning Cubs.
The current award presented by the Baseball Writers Association of American began in 1931. The first winners were Hall of Famers Lefty Grove of the Philadelphia A's and Frankie Frisch of the Cardinals, both playing for pennant winners.
This year's favorites are Arron Judge of the Yankees and Paul Goldschmidt of the Cardinals. If they win, it will be a record 23rd for the Yanks and a National League record 21 for the Cards.
