Blue Jays Josh Donaldson wins AL MVP

Harper was a unanimous victor in the NL over Paul Goldschmidt and Joey Votto, while Donaldson won over Mike Trout and Lorenzo Cain.

Two Baseball Writers Association of America writers from each AL city were chosen to vote on the AL MVP award. Mike Trout of the Angels, who won past year, received seven first-place votes. Trout put up strong numbers this season, but Donaldson beat him out with 41 home runs and 123 RBI.

Earlier this month, Donaldson was named a Silver Slugger award victor for the first time in his career.

Only Stan Musial (1943), Johnny Bench (1970) and Vida Blue (1971) were younger MVP winners than Harper was in his age 22 season.

This caps an award-filled season for Harper, who joins Hall of Famer Walter Johnson (1913 & 1924) and Roger Peckinpaugh (1925) of the Washington Senators as D.C. MVP honorees.

The Blue Jays went 93-69 last season, good for first in the AL East. Donaldson then led Toronto to the ALCS, where they ultimately lost to the World Series-champion Royals. His contributions helped Toronto reach the playoffs for the first time since 1993, a factor which surely helped his candidacy. Just as important, Harper played in a career-high 153 games.

Donaldson led the American League in runs, RBIs, total bases and sacrifice flies and led the big leagues with 20 game-winning RBIs while helping the Blue Jays win the AL East pennant.

“Just being healthy, being able to stay in the game every single day and doing everything I could to help my team win on a daily basis”, Harper said of his improved offensive approach.

Donaldson collected 23 first-place votes. At the close of the season, Harper led the Major Leagues in a number of categories, including: on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS (1.109), and Wins Above Replacement (9.5, per Fangraphs.com). 297 with 41 home runs and a major league-best 122 runs scored.

What happened here? Was it because Josh Donaldson had more RBIs, an antiquated and useless traditionalist counting stat that should be stricken from the box score? I’ll say this, though, his statistics were far more superior to the other two candidate’s.

I first watched Bryce Harper play baseball in 2010 in Las Vegas as a 17-year old catcher for the College of Southern Nevada where around 200 people were watching him take batting practice. He also smacked eight home runs and had 40 RBIs in those situations.

“I was a little ahead of my timetable for when I thought I was going to be traded”, Donaldson said on a media conference call Thursday.