Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw are MLB’s MVPs

Baseball concluded its post season awards by announcing a Los Angeles sweep. L.A. Angels outfielder Mike Trout was named the American League Most Valuable Player and L.A. Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw was the National League winner.

Trout was a unanimous winner, and at 23, is the youngest unanimous MVP ever. He hit .287, with career highs of 36 home runs and 111 RBIs. He led the league in runs scored (115), the third straight year he’s done that. This will probably be the first of many MVP awards for Trout, for whom the sky is the limit.

Kershaw achieved a rare double. Not only is he the Most Valuable Player in the NL, he also won the NL Cy Young Award. The last time that happened in the National League was in 1968, when Bob Gibson of the Cardinals won both. It’s happened a little more often in the American League, most recently with Detroit’s Justin Verlander in 2011.

There are arguments back and forth over whether pitchers should even win the MVP award since they have the Cy Young, essentially an MVP for pitchers according to one point of view. We’d say for a pitcher to win both, it would have to be a performance of extraordinary proportion, which is what Kershaw did in 2014. Despite missing five or six starts with a back injury, Kershaw was 21-3 with a 1.77 ERA, 6 complete games (all league leading stats) and 239 strikeouts and just 31 walks in 198 1/3 innings. He also pitched a no hitter. So far, the only blemish on Kershaw’s career has been his poor overall performance in the post season, where he is 1-5 with a 5.12 ERA lifetime. The MVP votes are cast before the post season. At 26, Kershaw may get even better, and should get plenty more chances to improve his post season record.