Brice Turang deserves to be an NL MVP finalist, and the people treating his name like a punchline should be embarrassed. Nobody should be surprised he made the ballot.
Start with the part nobody disputes. Pete Crow-Armstrong is going to win this, probably by a wider margin than any vote should allow. He led the Majors in fWAR at 10.6, slashed .280/.372/.570, topped the NL in slugging, OPS (.942) and wRC+ (157), and piled up an MLB-high 84 extra-base hits. Jon Heyman called him "the unanimous NL MVP, there's no question about that," and the betting markets agreed so completely they basically shut the race down. The winner won't be revealed until the week of Nov. 9, but everyone already knows the name. The only thing left to argue is who gets the other two chairs.
Turang earned his. People glance at his slash line and stop reading. By Baseball-Reference's accounting, Crow-Armstrong led all NL position players in WAR at 9.8, and Turang was second at 7.3, ahead of every other hitter in the league.
He did it with the best glove at the position in baseball. Turang finished second in the Majors in defensive runs saved, first among all infielders, added a top-five mark in outs above average, and won his second career Gold Glove at second base. Baseball-Reference had him leading every NL player in defensive WAR, ahead of even Crow-Armstrong. The bat played too: .268/.366/.450 with 21 homers, a 124 OPS+, and 100 RBIs, a Brewers single-season record for a second baseman.
The doubters should sit with the irony here. Back in July, ESPN named Turang the National League's biggest All-Star snub, noting he was seventh in bWAR and eighth in fWAR among NL position players at the break. The same production that made him a victim in July is making him a punchline in November. The numbers say he was overlooked all along.
The finalist nod feels like it came out of nowhere because nobody put his name in the MVP conversation while it was happening. His own teammate Jacob Misiorowski, a near-lock for NL Cy Young, drew more MVP chatter than Turang did all season. The hype machine never got around to him until Milwaukee won the whole thing.
The real complaint is about the third name. Shohei Ohtani didn't pitch in a game after July 3, and once he started throwing again his bat cratered to .205 the rest of the way. MLB.com's own writeup admitted "it was arguably not the best season played in the NL this year." Even a shortened Ohtani threw a 1.79 ERA with a 237 ERA+ across 14 starts while slugging 30 homers, and nobody has produced a position player with a cleaner all-around case who got left off. If you want a name that was robbed, you'd have to invent one.
The snub already happened, back in July, when the writers couldn't be bothered to put Turang on an All-Star roster he'd clearly outplayed his way onto. The finalist nod is just the apology, mailed four months late.
