As the end of the year approaches, baseball's award season kicks into high gear, setting off the biggest fights to take place that don't require the approval of a state athletic commission. Like Hall of Fame inductions, there's always this argument: They're just awards, don't take them too seriously. But where's the fun in that? We love baseball, and arguing about which first baseman is the best and which pitchers deserve demotions to Double-A is the lifeblood of the sport.
And if one award is most likely to be controversial, it's the MVP award.
One of the things that makes the MVP battle so contentious is that you have competing definitions of that troublesome word, valuable, which can be stretched in as many directions as the slime in those little plastic eggs 8-year-olds get from grocery store vending machines. (And which I hope still exist so I'm not dating myself.)
Anyway, with those conditions and contortions in mind, let's analyze three main schools of thought, and decide who should win the MVP award based on each of them.