Normally, when you put up a statline of a .322 batting average with 58 home runs and 144 runs batted in, you would be a shoe-in for the league’s Most Valuable Player award. But this year, that was not nearly enough for Aaron Judge to win his second DTBL MVP award. Bobby Witt and Jose Ramirez also had seasons that would have won them the award in many other years. In 2024, however, there was another player who had a truly historic season. Shohei Ohtani became the first member of the 50/50 Club. Prior to this year, no DTBL player with at least 50 home runs had stolen as many as 25 bases. Ohtani more than doubled that, finishing with 59 steals to go along with his 54 home runs. The Moonshiners versatile slugger is the 2024 DTBL Most Valuable Player.
Ohtani filled up the league leaderboard this season. His .310 average ranked fifth. He led the league with 144 runs scored. The 54 home runs, 59 stolen bases and 130 runs batted in all ranked second. His 16.4 Batting PAR lapped the field and ranks second in all calculated seasons since 2005, trailing only Ronald Acuna Jr’s MVP winning campaign from last year. In both Acuna and Ohtani’s situations, the stolen base component of PAR has been wildly inflated the past two seasons since steals have exploded across the league since the introduction of the pitch clock and other rules changes in 2023. However, by any reasonable measure, they were still two of the best seasons this league has ever seen. Ohtani and Judge became the 25th and 26th players in league history to hit the 50 home run plateau. Before Ohtani this year, the highest stolen base total among that group was Alex Rodriguez with just 24 in 2007. On the other side of the equation, there have been 51 players to steal at least 50 bases in a season. The only other player to pair that with more than 30 home runs was Acuna last year. Truly unprecedented stuff from Ohtani this year. I guess he took full advantage of his year off from pitching after his second major elbow surgery last fall.
When the Moonshiners drafted Ohtani with the fourth pick in the 2019 Draft, what his future would hold in this league was a very open question. While they opted to use him as a hitter in 2019, most believed his future was brightest on the mound. To date, he has only pitched in one fateful game for the Moonshiners before being shut down from pitching for the remainder of the shortened 2020 season. Since then, he has been a mainstay in the Moonshiners lineup and would appear to have far more value at that spot moving forward as well. He has been a DTBL All-Star the past four seasons. 2021 had been the best season of his career prior to this one. In that season, he slugged 46 home runs with 26 steals, but with a much more pedestrian .257 batting average. It earned him a second place finish in that year’s MVP vote, behind his Moonshiners teammate Vladimir Guerrero Jr. This year, Ohtani and Guerrero once again teamed up to lead a much improved Moonshiners offense. They finished a distant second place to the Mavericks in the overall standings, which was a nice bounce back after a disappointing 2023. As an aside, that 2019 DTBL Draft is looking like an all-timer in this league’s history. Ohtani fell to the fourth pick, but two of the players chosen ahead of him are no slouches either: Acuna and Juan Soto.
The MVP vote largely came down to how much weight people put into the Batting PAR stat, as Ohtani blew away the competition there. But as I have stated a few times, stolen bases are overvalued in that figure right now. So there was a decent case to be made for other players as well, most notably Mavericks slugger Aaron Judge. In the end, Ohtani received nine of the ten first place votes and ranked second on the other ballot for a total of 97 points. Meanwhile, Judge’s historic season in its own right that led to him winning the American League MVP placed him second in this vote. His votes were scattered all over the place though: one first, six seconds, two thirds and a fourth for 65 total points. He will have to wait for another year to win his second league MVP. While Ohtani entered a class of his own in the power/speed departments, Bobby Witt Jr and Jose Ramirez were in pretty impressive territory as well, with both joining the 30/30 Club. Witt, the Mavericks young superstar shortstop, won the batting title with a .332 average to go along with his 32 homers and 31 steals. He and Judge combined to form one of the most impressive offensive teammate partnerships this league has ever seen, and were a major reason why the Mavericks absolutely dominated the league in batting points. Witt received a pair of second place votes and 42 total points. Finishing right behind him is Komodos third baseman Ramirez. Ramirez continues to be the most consistently dominant offensive player in the league. He has hit a minimum of 20 home runs with 20 stolen bases in every season of his DTBL career except for the pandemic shortened 2020 and his rookie year of 2017 when he came up three steals short. This season, he had arguably the best season of his career, tying his career high with 39 home runs and setting a new personal high with 41 steals. Ramirez has been so consistent that he is often overlooked come MVP time. This is the fourth time he has finished in fourth place for the award, and never higher than that. He received one second place vote and 40 total points. There was a pretty big drop-off after those four. Diamond Dogs Rookie of the Year winning Elly De La Cruz rounds out the top five. His impressive rookie campaign earned him fifth place votes on eight of the ten ballots.
Click here to view the full voting results.
That brings an end to the 2024 DTBL awards announcements. I do still owe Marc an article to document his dominant championship season, so I intend to do that sometime soon. I hope you have a great Thanksgiving!