Why Kershaw shouldn't have been MVP

Kershaw had a tremendous year.  He well-deserved the Cy Young award, though he pitched in less games than every other pitcher who had votes.  Phenomenal year.  That being said... he didn't deserve the MVP award.  

First, the exceptionally easy part--because he only played in 28 freaking games.

That is the easiest, most reasonable answer there is.  He played in 17.284% of his team's games.  Tell me how that was MVP-able.  How many Dodgers contributed in more games than Kershaw did?  15 position players, 7 relief pitchers, and 2 starting pitchers.

Oops.  Wait a minute.  I was wrong on the 28 games.  According to Baseballreference.com, he only played in 27.  That's 16.6667% of the team's games.

Not very MVP-able.

Innings played?  I'm working on the numbers now, but innings played for the regular players isn't something I'm going to catch exactly.  I'll see how close I can get to real data on that without paying for services, but I'd bet he didn't play the most innings in his 28 games, nor 2nd or 3rd or 4th or 5th most innings during those games.  After all, pitchers need relieved.  He only played a whole game 6 times all year.  Eleven regular players played more complete games in Kershaw's 27 games than he did.  Most of those more than doubled him.

So, not only did he play 1/6th of his teams games, but he didn't even play all of most of those individual games.

Here are the players who played more of Kershaw's games from beginning to end:

Kemp	24
Gonzalez	22
Gordon	22
Puig	21
Ellis	20
Crawford	12
Uribe	12
Ethier	10
Van Slyke	9
Ramirez	7
Turner	7

As you can see, even some scrubs played whole games during Kershaw's games more than he did.

What else happened in Kershaw games?  Here are the leaders for a few categories:

Runs - Ramirez, with 18

Hits - Kemp, with 29

RBIs - Kemp, with 18

Walks - Ellis, with 15

Batting Average (minimum 3.1 x 27 plate appearances, which is 83.7) - Kemp, .326.  

On Base Pct (same minimums) - Kemp, .394

By the way, four other batters had higher batting averages in Kershaw-pitched games:

Crawford, .407, 55 plate appearances

Ethier, .378, 49 pa's

Turner, .353, 37 pa's

Ramirez, .329, 82 pa's--just 1.7 too few to count as the leader
Oh, by the way, Kershaw had 67 plate appearances during his 27 games played.

It is a little shocking to read Kemp's name so frequently, knowing that they dumped him within their own division during the off-season.  That ought to make things interesting when the Padres come to town, eh?

It seems like Kemp may have been the MVP of Kershaw pitched games, really.  Maybe Kershaw will buy him a car.