Kemp v. The Mets

Well Ryan Braun won the NL MVP. I thought it would be Kemp so I spent this morning looking at his stats and not Brauns. I will do a post later about Braun v. The Mets but for now, we will discuss the how the 2nd best player (according to often illogical and confusing standards) in the NL fared against our beloved Metropolitans.

The Mets actually did pretty well against Kemp. Kemp had a BA of .324, a ridiculous .399 OPB and an equally impressive OPS of .986. The Mets held him back pretty well, as you can see in the below chart:

Kemp Stats	Overall	NYM
AVG	.324	.269
OBP	.399	.387
OPS	.986	.733

As you can see the Mets held Kemp well below his season totals. We played seven games against the Dodgers (going 5-2) and Mets pitchers faced Kemp 26 times. So obviously based on the sample size these comparisons aren't perfect, but they still tell a compelling story. In those 26 AB Kemp got 7 hits, 4 walks and we struck him out 5 times.

The most important number about Kemp this season was his .380 BABIP. He had a ridiculously lucky bat and I have not heard a lot of people talking about it. I doubt this factored in at all into why he didn't win the MVP but I am interested to see if anybody talks about it in the coming weeks.