It’s been standard operating procedure around Major League Baseball to just declare Los Angeles Dodgers DH/SP Shohei Ohtani as the best player in all of baseball.

I mean, Ohtani won two unanimous American League MVP awards, sandwiched around a 2nd-place finish to New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge’s absolutely absurd, record-setting 2022 season.

MLB.com has a different idea for “best player in baseball”, and it’s Atlanta Braves outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr.

You see, it all comes down to how you define “best”.

Statcast guru Mike Petriello wrote about the issues with the definition, and made some good points:

If you look at just the last three years of WAR (weighted towards more recent years), then it’s clearly Ohtani, with 9.8 WAR over that period.

But here’s the thing: The Shohei of the last three years won’t be the Shohei of 2024, because his Tommy John surgery means he won’t be pitching next season for the Dodgers.

Additionally, a three year lookback period discounts both Acuña and Judge, as they both missed time with injury and took a while to get back to full health.

So Petriello had a new idea: look at just the last two years, not three, weighting the results to give more credit to the more recent season, 2023.

Again, the issue is Acuña’s injury – he missed the first month of the 2022 season because of the last bit of rehab for the knee injury, and then was not the same player that season as he admitted to not having full faith and confidence in the knee, as well as dealing with swelling and occasional discomfort. Judge’s foot injury was in 2023, and so he’s hurt even more by this.

And so Petriello finally settles on going back to a three-year window, but incorporating 2024 Steamer projections from Fangraphs as the third year.

And this is where it gets interesting.

We’ve discussed the 2024 Steamer projections a little, mostly talking about the context of Jarred Kelenic’s projections to outproduce Eddie Rosario, but were saving most of it for our 2024 team previews (which will start soon!). But it’s worth diving into Ronald’s projections for next season.

Ronald Acuña Jr projects to be the best player in baseball via Steamer, with an estimated statline of .318/.405/.578, hitting 38 homers and stealing 56 bases, good for 7.4 WAR.

This gives Acuña a three-year weighted “window” of 7.2 WAR via Petriello’s calculations, half a WAR better than 2nd place finisher Mookie Betts of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who Ronald beat out for this year’s MVP award.

Petriello goes a bit further in his analysis, noting that some of the negative WAR impact for Ronald’s defense goes back to correctable errors with his jumps in the outfield, while Mookie’s projections don’t yet account for his expected move to second base for 2024, where the threshold for offense is lower than right field.

Either way, it looks as of now to be an interesting race for the 2024 NL Most Valuable Player award between the two leadoff men, with teammates Matt Olson and Freddie Freeman contending for down ballot votes.

On FanDuel and several other popular sportsbooks, Acuña is the frontrunner for NL MVP for 2024, coming in at +500, with Betts behind him at +650 and Olson, Freeman, and Ohtani usually rounding out the top five.

Either way, it’ll be a fun battle between the two best teams in the National League all season. The Braves travel to LA for a three game series in early May, while the Dodgers come east to Atlanta for a four game set in mid September.