This year, the easiest slot to fill-in on the MVP ballot was the top one. It was the other nine spots that were troubling.
As one of 28 voters for the AL MVP award, I spent hours over the final weekend of the season pondering what to do, completing the 10-player ballot, as required, before the start of the playoffs. My usual guidelines are to identify the players who had the best seasons and helped their team have success, so I usually have at least one player from each of the playoff-bound teams at the top of my list, and the non-playoff bound players toward the bottom.
Yankees 3B Alex Rodriguez was the obvious No. 1 choice, so much so I expected him to be a unanimous selection. (And he would have been except for the two writers from Detroit who both just happened to have him second and the Tigers' Magglio Ordonez first.)
My biggest issues were deciding:
which Boston player was indeed more valuable (I picked Mike Lowell over David Ortiz),
whether a second Yankee deserved to be in the top 10 (Jorge Posada was, I decided)
and where to place Tampa Bay's Carlos Pena, weighing his individual performance with the team's lack of success, raising the question of how "valuable" he could be while not wanting to be too biased from having seen him play every day (I settled on sixth; two writers had him as high as third, Bob Dutton of the Kansas City Star and Dave Sessions of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram).
All that said, here is the ballot I cast:
1. Alex Rodriguez, Yankees
2. Magglio Ordonez, Tigers
3. Vladimir Guerrero, Angels
4. Mike Lowell, Red Sox
5. Victor Martinez, Indians
6. Carlos Pena, Rays
7. David Ortiz, Red Sox
8. Jorge Posada, Yankees
9. Ichiro Suzuki, Mariners
10. Curtis Granderson, Tigers