Prospectus Hit & Run: JUMP Again

Last year, our friends at ESPN tasked me with building an MVP predictor in the spirit of a system such as Bill James' Hall of Fame Monitor, one that awards points for various accomplishments in an attempt to identify who will win as opposed to who should win. Limiting my scope to the post-strike timeframe to take advantage of the fact that none of the ensuing winners were pitchers, that all of them save for the 2003 version of Alex Rodriguez came from teams that finished above .500, and that 22 of the 28 hailed from teams that qualified for the expanded postseason, I built a carefully-gerrymandered system—Jaffe's Ugly MVP Predictor (JUMP)—that could identify ("predict") 14 winners, and put 27 out of 28 winners in its top three in points for that year.

Baseball Prospectus