What has created such a stir is the notion that somehow starting pitchers can't be MVPs. They have their own award, they only pitch in one-fifth of the games, yada yada yada. The last to do it was Roger Clemens, 25 years ago. But Verlander had three things going for him: he had awesome numbers, he was on a playoff team, and there was no other consensus every-day player that deserved the award.
In fact, six different players received first-place votes. If the writers were skeptical about Verlander's credentials, they didn't show it en masse. He got 13 of 28 first-place votes, not a majority, but except for being left off of one ballot and on another finishing eighth, he did no worse that a sixth-place vote. Jose Bautista, finishing third, actually had the second-most first-place votes, with five.
This seems to me to be completely reasonable. Yes, if there's an awesome every-day player, he trumps a starting pitcher, but there just wasn't one this year. Perhaps Jacoby Ellsbury, who finished second, was hurt by the Red Sox collapse, as ballots were turned in the day after the season ended, and the Boston carcass was still fresh. Or perhaps the writers realized that Verlander was amazingly "valuable" to his team.
As noted in an article below, Verlander becomes the fourth Tiger to win both the Cy Young and MVP in the same season. I should also point out that all of the Tiger MVPs have been pitchers, save for the two Hank Greenberg won, in 1935 and 1940. Of course, before the invention of the current award, Ty Cobb won a Chalmers Award in 1911, which was the first such award voted on by baseball writers.
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