In many ways, I feel that it was way better to be a baseball fan in the glorious era from 1960 until about 1975, as opposed to today. Rosters didn't turn over annually, there were four-man pitching rotations, games took two hours instead of four, there were frequent doubleheaders and we had names the likes of Mays, Mantle, Aaron, Clemente, Kaline, McCovey, Stargell, Robinson, Robinson, Rose, Morgan, Koufax, Marichal, Seaver and Gibson take the field.

But in one way, it's much better to be a fan today and that's because of the wealth of statistical and analytical information now available to them.For example, we now know how often every single player goes first-to-third on a single or first-to-home on a 2B. Analysts can also tell us how often each MLB shortstop successfully fields a softly batted ball about 20 feet to the right of the normal SS position, as compared to all other MLB SSs. We also know, within about two per cent, how many runs any one player has "created" for his team, via his batting and steals. The trick is in putting all of this together in order to see how much any one player has contributed to a winning team. Of course, Derek Jeter gets extra credit for his intangibles, which some analysts (including those on the YES network) claimed accounted for an extra 50 Yankee wins per year, until Derek's freeze-out of A-Rod, which reduced Jeter's "intangibility quotient" from plus 50 games to minus 34 games.

Anyway, I attempted to employ my admittedly limited understanding of all of these numbers in order to decide who was the AL MVP in 2006. (I did not include pitchers in my analysis, because that would be way, way over my head). The only answer I can give is this: I really don't know who the MVP was, but it definitely was not Morneau. It was either Jeter, Ortiz or Mauer.

I had underestimated just how good an offensive year Jeter had because I was misled by his (mere) 97 RBIs, batting behind Damon. But he led the AL with 132 runs created, although he was behind Hafner, Manny, Thome and Ortiz (and tied with Giambi!!) for runs created per 27 outs. The numbers show that a "team of Jeters" would average eight runs per game, with Ortiz at 8.3, Thome at 8.8, Manny at 9.3 and Hafner at 9.6. (If anyone is interested in this whole "runs created" thing, see me privately; but trust me, it's a real thing, not some phoney ESPN B.S.). Jeter's stolen bases (34 out of 39) are part of his runs created, so he doesn't get extra credit for them, but I guess he must earn a bit of a bonus for trying to play a very demanding defensive position, even though he really shouldn't bother trying. Jeter's (non-SB) baserunning is just average, way worse than Melky, way better than Cano, way, way worse than Reyes or Beltran or Damon and just slightly better than Ortiz. (I'll deal with (non-SB) baserunning another time, but we're talking about taking the extra base on hits or on stuff like wild pitches, not making outs on the bases and runs scored as a percentage of times on base).

Morneau only "created" 118 runs, or 7.4 per 27 outs. He is probably slightly below average defensively as a IB and a slightly below average baserunner. He was not MVP.

David Ortiz created 129 runs, as I said that's 8.3 per game, but was a DH and on OK baserunner on a disappointing team. In many respects, Manny's numbers were better, despite Ortiz's 54 HRs and 137 RBIs, but Manny quit for the entire September.