The 2012 AL MVP Debate Will Continue Until Morale Improves

 2012 was the first year I followed most of the MLB season. At the time the sports landscape on the internet wasn't the content machine it is today, I know it wasn't because at the time I thought I struck gold when I found a daily podcast on YouTube that talked about baseball.

That concept here in 2026 is no longer new or novel, in fact there's a bunch of podcasts on YouTube talking about sports for hours on end almost every day that end up with maybe 37 views max.

But at the time, in 2012, the way I remember it there wasn't really much out there outside of blogs like SB Nation or Bleacher Report. Twitter and YouTube weren't even close to being what they are today. Sports talk radio still filled the audio niche but Japan wasn't exactly in WFAN territory, so I couldn't listen to those.

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Instead I found a podcast called Getting Blanked, brought to the masses by theScore (aka Score Media and Gaming), a Canada based digital media company that was starting out around then. It was hosted by Drew Fairservice, Dustin Parkes and Andrew Stoeten.

Fairservice is a nomadic baseball writer who's written for outlets like The Athletic and Fangraphs. Parkes and Stoeten ran the Toronto Blue Jays fanblog "Drunk Jays Fans" which became part of theScore's umbrella and have since gone on to write for other outlets. With a few rotating guests every once in a while they'd talk about baseball (not just the Jays) and it was fun to follow along a season with people paid to watch games so I didn't have to.

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I consider myself lucky with this podcast because it was blending a lot of topics in baseball at the time when baseball discourse was about to turn into what it is today and gave me insight into the oncoming Sabermetric revolution in baseball.

This podcast was the first time I heard of stats like Wins Above Replacement, On-base Plus Slugging Plus, Weighted Average, Outs Above Average, Defensive Runs Saved, etc...

The show had several segments where they used those numbers to go into the latest going-ons in baseball at the time. Like if Ian Kinsler not being a prototypical lead-off hitter is a good thing (he'd set the stage for modern day lead-off hitters like Kyle Schwarber and Shohei Ohtani), or how the Washington Nationals could've used Stephen Strasburg coming off of Tommy John Surgery like the Atlanta Braves eased Kris Medlen back, or if Omar Infante is a good hitter.

Nowadays these numbers are ubiquitous and have replaced a lot of the traditional stats, but at the time they were perceived as just numbers that nerds used to make the Tampa Bay Rays look better on paper than how they played.

Even so, just learning about them and hearing them brought up did me a huge favor. I can't imagine trying to get into baseball now and going through baseball fandom not really understanding what the numbers are.

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At the same time I do feel like there are too many numbers. Numbers people use at their leisure to backup whatever narrative they want to claim. Numbers that can disagree with themselves if you're not smart enough to understand them.

For one thing WAR has the Baseball Reference version and the Fangraphs version. While both can be fairly close, usually people only cite the number that supports their argument.

For another thing, one of the most famous things about these metrics is that we still can't put a number of defense. There's a bunch of methods both traditional and advanced that measures defense and they're all terrible.

Additionally, I've also gone through my baseball fandom feeling a sense of "I know what these are, but I also do not care". To be clear this also goes to traditional stats like batting average and ERA. It's not that I'm ignorant to them, it's just that if you were as prospect centered as I was a few years ago then you know these numbers don't mean much of anything when the name of the game is development.

A simple ERA+ or OPS+ where 100 is the average and anything above is great and below is bad is good enough for me.

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Anyway that brings me back to the podcast/modern podcasts.

While Getting Blanked and Drunk Jays Fans no longer exist on the web as they did in 2012 (the three have since moved on to other things), the way sports podcasts would come to sort've be a blend of those podcasts and the traditional sports talk radio speak has been interesting to see come together.

For the most part it's been for the better because you have really smart players, fans, writers and insiders talking about the sport in ways that are a lot better than yammering morons from Long Island who remember the dinosaurs complaining about Juan Soto walking too much.

At the same time it's been weird just because baseball is still going through the old vs new school debate. While the new metrics are here to stay and nobody is going to argue for only caveman analysis (aka Colorado Rockies thinking), "analytics" is often the buzzword used when people just want a scapegoat for why their team lost last night. What that specifically means is usually unclear. I'm pretty sure people saying it just want a vague catch-all term for stuff they don't like, which western society as a whole has been trying to do since it decided people can't use the r-word or f-slur anymore.

We recently saw a small repeat of the debate with the Aaron Judge vs Cal Raleigh AL MVP debate. Judge had the numbers to be MVP, Raleigh had the more interesting story (catcher, switching hitting accolades, all that jazz).
Regardless of which way you leaned it was basically Trout vs Miggy all over again but a lot less heated since people have since come to value the MVP less than a World Series Championship. Which reduced both seasons to abject failures. 
Also any discourse online here in the mid-2020's is shit since it's all bots and engagement farmers over genuine people with genuine thoughts so I assume people were just tuned out in general (I sure was).

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So yeah, in essence the 2012 AL MVP Debate never left us.

I was young and new to baseball enough that I was very in-tuned with WARmongers who spent large chunks of their lives writing about why Mike Trout's statistically historic season was worthy of MVP or how old geezers thought Miguel Cabrera's Triple Crown and intangibles makes it a no brainer. I didn't take part in it but I did read a lot of what people had to say on forums and in the comments sections. In retrospect I don't know what's more pathetic, the people who spent hours writing novels about men in pajama pants (those days were pre-Chat GPT, actual humans had to write them!) or me who read every last word.

So much productivity and time went straight down the toilet during those debates that regardless of who won, we all lost.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.

Yeah, These Ruled

 So as part of my downsizing efforts I try to constantly filter stuff I want to keep by asking a simple question " why do I need this around?".

In years past answers like "just because" or "I just like the way this card looks" were sufficient but now my criteria is a lot stricter. If a card wants to occupy space in my tiny apartment it's going to need to have a reason.

Some have an extremely solid, albeit extremely personal, reason to me and me alone.

There are six cards that are part of an exclusive club I like to call "these cards mattered to me a lot in the winter of 2012 and I got to meet the players on them in person later too".

2012 was a very special year for me. I was a freshman in college living on my own for the first time in Japan. It was also my first full year in the hobby and the first year I was a fan of baseball following along the season and of course prospects. Like...

Austin Aune, Ty Hensley and Mark Montgomery.

In the winter of 2012 at least they were still considered top prospects.

Hensley and Aune were the Yankees' first and second round draft picks in that year's draft respectively and though the Yankees took a big risk with high school players, there was hope they'd turn into productive players since at the time the Yankees started to try and get more out of their farmsystem. 

More importantly I opened two hobby boxes of Bowman Draft and pulled BOTH of their autographs myself. It felt so awesome to pull prospects I wanted from my then-favorite team.

Montgomery was also a big name in prospecting circles since he climbed the ladder so quickly in 2012 as a relief prospect that with Mariano Rivera's looming retirement people thought maybe Montgomery would be a candidate fill that void when the time came.

The unfortunate part of me associating them so much with 2012 specifically is that their careers in the years to come wouldn't really go how everyone including them originally hoped. But maybe because of that I associate them and these cards with a specific point in my life that I like having them even more.

But onto 2013. When I moved back to the US.

My first ever baseball card purchase on eBay was that Montgomery autograph from 2013 Bowman. Which is another point in this card's favor. I still remember how the Yankees had a small army of prospects in the non-autograph checklist but Montgomery was the lone representative in the autograph checklist. I also overpaid a ton for this, a whopping $20 shipped at release. At least I had enough sense more like lack of funds to not go after the superfractor autograph.

2013 was a mixed, mostly negative, year for the trio as players. Hensley needed hip surgery and was out for the year. Montgomery also suffered injuries and despite making it to triple-A, he was never able to quite make that one last big leap to get the MLB call-up. Aune's season in rookie-ball unfortunately was the first of many seasons where he had a lot of strike-outs while the rest of his offensive game struggled to develop.

The real fun (for me personally at least) came after the end of the 2013 season.

For starters I got to meet Montgomery at a card show in November of 2013. The drop in his prospect stock made it a lot less interesting than it should've been at the time but in hindsight I regret not being more appreciative that I just casually met someone who I'd only been reading about in prospect lists just a year earlier. At the same show I got to meet Ivan Nova and Adam Warren too.

Then skip a bit to 2014 and I got to meet Aune in Staten Island.

My attention in 2014 was on a certain prospect named Luis Torrens but I still can't forget how Aune took the time to sign my card with a card that was basically still an exact 1:1 of his certified signature. Look at it, it's legible!

Then finally in the later half of the 2014 season I got to meet Hensley. Even got to see him pitch.

I'll never forget how he was so cool and willing to sign for fans after the game even with his arm bandaged and wrapped up just in case. Makes it super understandable why he went the extra mile with his (still) biggest fan The Lost Collector.

It didn't dawn on me until I came back to Japan in 2024 and went through numerous rounds of downsizings that I was able to have some sort of full circle moment.

I knew about all these guys before I met them, I learned about them in Japan, I even had some of their cards which I pulled from boxes of Bowman Draft. Then I got to meet them in the US and got their autographs (on 2013 Pro Debut at that!). Then a decade later all these cards came back with me to Japan where I'm blogging about them in retrospect.

Even this unlicensed Panini Contenders Montgomery autograph above is important to me because I remember really wanting it in late-2012 but the card shops in Japan I went to just didn't have it. 2011 Contenders was also sold out everywhere so pulling one was a non-option. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that I was able to get one for super cheap.

Which unfortunately kind of brings us to what happened after 2014.

Hensley went on to miss three straight seasons between 2015-17 with various injuries. He was released in early 2018 and went on to pitch in indy ball. He did throw a no-hitter in 2020 but his career ended after 2021. All time what-if for me, because going into the 2012 draft he was seen as having one of the best curveballs among all draft prospects and he was a 6'5 giant capable of reaching 97 mph as a teenager. Who knows what he could've turned into if he was healthy and allowed to develop.

Ty Hensley in 2014

Montgomery continued to try and make his push towards the big leagues but velocity issues had him going back and forth between double-A and triple-A until he was released by the Yankees in early 2017. The St. Louis Cardinals, Detroit Tigers and Boston Red Sox took fliers on him later but bad luck and injuries never really allowed him to make that one leap with those organizations either.

Aune continued giving his best effort in the Yankees system but the results were more or less the same every year. He was released in mid-2017 and then went down the college football route, something he had originally been considering before the Yankees gave him a big bonus to play baseball instead. He became a quarterback for North Texas and after four years he was signed by the Atlanta Falcons as an undrafted free agent but waived a month later.

For those of you who skipped those paragraphs, basically the years after 2014 weren't kind to their professional careers. Thus cementing them in my mind to 2012.

To the wider public these are just cards of prospect busts, to me they're really important memories of my earliest years in the hobby. I can't put a price on that.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.