Why Phillies' J.T. Realmuto Should've Won NL MVP In 2022

PHILADELPHIA, PA — When the 2022 National League Most Valuable Player award was given to Paul Goldschmidt Thursday night, few around baseball were surprised. The 35-year-old Cardinals slugger topped the entire league in most offensive categories, and provided elite defense that was superior to anyone who was close to him with the bat.

The MVP in baseball has always had a certain subjective ambiguity to it, an arbitrary essence only heightened by sabermetrical evolutions and the protean strategies and skills most valued on-field. But there are two things that have never changed: catcher is the most important position on the field, and the baseball world still hasn't learned how to measure that value.

J.T. Realmuto's historical 2022 season, as well his far-too-low seventh place finish in the MVP balloting, is proof.

RELATED: Phillies World Series Run Brought $78 Million To Philadelphia Economy

While it is these intangibles that put J.T. over the top, analysis needn't be too abstract to make his case. As a hitter, Realmuto had a 129 OPS+, which is a player's on base plus slugging percentages adjusted to the quirks of each stadium he hit in. It's a more holistic measurement of the damage he did with the bat. 100 is league average, which means Realmuto was 29 percentage points better than that.

For a catcher, that's exceedingly rare. Elite offensive production is almost never prioritized there, given the importance of the position defensively. While Realmuto still fell short of Goldschmidt's monster 180 OPS+ (J.T. was 11th in the category in the NL), that does not disqualify him. In fact, Realmuto's 2022 offensive output was superior to that of Jimmy Rollins when he won MVP in 2007. JRoll's 121 OPS+ that year was also well shy of second and third place finishers Matt Holliday and Prince Fielder (151 and 157, respectively).

RELATED: Phillies 2023 Rotation Plans Revealed: 1 Rookie, 1 Veteran

So there's precendent. And there's more to the Rollins comparison. JRoll stole 41 bases that year. J.T. stole a whopping 21 this year. It's more icing on the cake when a very strong defensive player, who plays one of the two most critical positions, can also run.

Realmuto became only the second catcher in baseball history to hit 20 home runs and steal 20 bases in a single season. Hall of Famer Pudge Rodriguez did it in 1999, and it earned him MVP. His OPS+ that year was 125, nearly identical to Realmuto's 2022 mark.

Baseball has statistics that purport to be even more comprehensive like WAR (wins against replacement), which aims to measure how many wins a player's entire body of contribution is against a league-average player. Realmuto's WAR placed him 4th in the National League in 2022, behind the three finalists: Goldschmidt, Manny Machado, and Nolan Arenado. But highest WAR often does not equal MVP, because intangibles matter.

In fact, Rollins had just the 7th highest WAR in the National League when he won in 2007. It's a metric to reference, not lean on. The point was resurfaced upon star catcher Buster Posey's retirement at the end of the 2021 season, when ESPN's Joel Sherman argued Posey and another top backstop of the same era, Yadier Molina, deserved more respect. "We have to use our eyes and some knowledge of what the professionals on the field are telling us."

And the truth is that the baseball world, and particularly the Baseball Writers Association of America (which votes on these seasonal awards and the Hall of Fame), has not yet learned how to value catchers. That catcher is the most important position is near-universally acknowledged, but catchers still make up only 19 of 333 members of the Hall of Fame, or five percent.

Meanwhile, the "professionals on the field" are adamant that J.T. deserves more credit, even beyond his high placing on traditional statistics alone. “In my mind, at this point, I think he should be in the MVP conversation,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson told reporters in September, citing his "baserunning, offense, defense, running the pitching staff, running the bullpen...he's just so valuable to us."

There are countless reasons more. A catcher's skills are the most scarce, as a team typically only has two players on an active roster than can get behind the plate with any degree of comfort. The catcher is the only player involved in every single pitch of a game, outside of those rare occurrences when a starting pitcher who throws a complete game. They must do more than call pitches, they must inspire confidence in pitchers, make them feel comfortable, get to know their quirks, react to every contingency in real time. They frame pitches to woo umpires, they learn the strengths and weaknesses of hitters as well as pitchers do.

These aren't things that show up in OPS+ or WAR. The calm a pitcher feels thanks to a compatible catcher, a calm that allows them to tick their dial up to their genetic ceiling, isn't shown on the stat sheet. So when a catcher does all of those things well enough to start nearly every day for the best team in the National League, and then puts together a spectacular statistical season on top of it, the moniker of criminally underrated is inevitable.

And finally there are the words spoken by the BBWAA itself, which has provided the same guidelines to writers voting on the MVP every year since 1931. Number one is "actual value of a player to his team, that is, strength of offense and defense," in which Realmuto consistently finished in the top five. Two is "number of games played," and Realmuto has played in an astounding 134 games or more in each of this three full seasons with the Phillies, the most by a catcher in the NL each year.

And then there's number three. If someone needed convincing, the intangibles are baked in.

"General character, disposition, loyalty, and effort."

Catch up on more Phillies coverage from their magic 2022 run to the World Series:

• Bryce Harper's Shot Heard Around The World
• How Phillies Vs. Goliath Astros World Series Is A Rematch Of Eagles Vs. Patriots Super Bowl
• From $20 To $20K: The Surreality Of Phillies World Series Ticket Prices
• Phillies Vs. Astros World Series Preview: Schedule, Tickets, Odds
• Phillies 'Old School' Ball Bucks Trends Of Their Superteam Opponents
• How Ruben Amaro Jr. Helped Build Phillies World Series Team
• Phillies Return To Houston For World Series, Where They've Won Before