Ultimately, he doesn't want Bautista to win because he plays on a second-rate team. That's his whole point, statistics be damned. He just took 3 pages to come to that cliched conclusion.
I think thats oversimplifying it. He thinks team performance absolutely should be a factor, but not the sole factor. Thats not an especially unusual position to take.
I give him partial credit for at least using statistics, but I don't think he really buys into them. He spends the first half of the piece talking about how statistics are great, then spends some time talking himself out of it (more or less: they don't matter if the team sucks)
"Buys into them" in what sense? Recognizing that they offer a really accurate window into how good a player was? I think he does that. But one can recognize that stats are the best/only way we have to reliably gauge how well a player performed, but not necessarily think that individual performance is all that matters when determining MVP. If holding players accountable for shit beyond their control (who they played with, when and where they played, who they played against) seems unfair, it shouldn't, because we as a society do this for EVERYTHING. Presidents are judged on economic performance which they very rarely have any real control over. Oscars are taken from movies that fulfill a fairly narrow range of criteria regardless of how good the performance of any one actor might have been. CEOs are credited when their company does well or badly, even if said companies are simply performing in line with the rest of the market.
"Greatness" in American society has never been about an individual doing everything they can with what they can control, it has always been about also benefiting from being in the right circumstances. One can recognize this without disagreeing with it. Stats give us a better way to isolate individual performance, but they don't override the fundamental fact that as a culture we like holding people accountable for stuff they can't control.
Bill seems to be running on the theory that a baseball team cannot have an MVP if they are not a playoff contender, but they can also not have an MVP if they are too good. Essentially, his MVP has to come from the Rangers, Angels, or Tigers (and the Tigers are questionable enough for me, they are as far ahead in a playoff race as the Red Sox are). It's like saying that the most valuable teacher in a school district has to come from the school whose students rank 3rd to 5th in standardized test scores. The #1 and #2 schools have a lot of good teachers so they're out, and the #6 through #14 schools are in need of improvement so there's no way the best teacher can be hidden in there. I'll never get that argument.
Its not that strange an argument at all. It comes to two simple questions:
What did player x's team accomplish?
How much of that accomplishment should be credited to player X?
If your team didn't actually win much at all, then the answer to question 1 is "not much", and so no matter how much of that meager accomplishment you want to credit to player X, they're still operating with a ceiling.
If your team won a shitload, but were so stacked that it is questionable whether player X was absolutely critical to all of those wins, then they're also going to suffer. Call this the "Lebron James can't be MVP while he's playing with Wade and Bosh unless they collectively shatter every record in the books" corollary.
Again, you see this thinking all over the place. The best presidents are always considered the ones who took over the country at a shitty/tough time, and then performed "well", even if a lot of that wasn't stuff they really controlled (like they came in when the economy sucked, then it improved, so they are seen as great for the economy regardless of what they did). If the country went to shit when you were president, sorry, you can't be one of the greats. But if it was in great shape when you found it, you can't be one of the greats either even if you kept the ship sailing smoothlly. How good you actually were as a leader is but one of many factors in determining how history will view you.
We don't have sabermetrics for presidents, but if we did, I don't think this dynamic would change in at all.
Edit: To expand upon this a bit, Americans don't like people who "make excuses". But what is "making excuses", really? Well, more often than not, it means
putting outcomes in context. "Sure I was late to work, but only because there was a pileup on the freeway." "The only reason we lost is because our starting quarterback had the flu". That kind of thing. It takes a black and white outcomes and muddies the waters, and we've never liked that, which is why we have so many sayings like "no excuses." We like tasking people with outcomes they may or may not be able to entirely control, then holding them fully accountable for those outcomes.
Well, a lot of sabermetrics is fundamentally about context. "Pitcher X might have given up a shitton of runs, but only because he got super unlucky on balls in play." "Player Y might have had a zillion RBIs, but really thats because he played in a hitter's park with 3 speedy, high onbase guys in front of him in the lineup." That kind of thing. They're a direct challenge to the prevailing "no excuses" ethic, because they are all about providing more in-depth context.
I suppose one might therefore say that to buy into sabermetrics, you have to reject the "no excuses" ethic that blames or rewards people for outcomes regardless of context. But I don't think thats true. Its possible to recognize that one is holding people accountable for stuff beyond their control, and then
happily do it anyway. Like, one can say, "RBIs are clearly only tangentially related to individual performance. They are massively dependent on having hitters around you in the lineup get on base." and fully believe that. Then one can also say, "The MVP is the hitter who best took advantage of opportunities created for him by teammmates who get on base a lot." There's no contradiction there. Its an eyes-wide-open, fully conscious embrace of an ethic that knowingly takes into account factors beyond the control of the individual.
Of course, thats hugely unfair to those individuals, to the guy who might have hit every bit as well but simply had worse teammmates. But who ever said life, let alone baseball, was fair?