Awards

Chalmers Most Valuable Player Award Winners

By Patrick Mondout

Baseball fan and automotive magnate Hugh Chalmers decided to promote his cars in 1910 by awarding one - a "Chalmers 30" - to the major league player with with the highest batting average. It eventually became the first annual Most Valuable Player award in Major League history.

Without giving a complete history of the man or his company, here's a brief overview: Chalmers had been a vice president at National Cash Register (NCR) before buying into what had been known as the Thomas-Detroit Automobile company, one of literally dozens of companies manufacturing cars in 1907. He renamed the company after himself and was fairly successful until World War I. He sold out to Walter P. Chrysler, who had recently started his own company, in 1922.

The idea of giving a car to the Major League batting champion seemed straightforward enough, but who deserved the car is still hotly debated today. While that interesting story is beyond the scope of this page, it briefly came down to this: Ty Cobb was hated by many in baseball and Nap Lajoie, who was chasing Cobb the final month of the season for the AL batting title (and the car), went 8-8 against the St. Louis Browns on the final day to win the title.

That feat is less remarkable when you realize that Browns manager Jack O'Connor had his rookie third basemen play back and Lajoie scored 7 bunt singles. AL president Ban Johnson wasn't amused and later claimed to have discovered a "discrepancy" in the official records. He claimed Cobb was due another 2 for 3 game and thus had still pulled out the batting title. Both the spontaneous Cobb hits and the legitimacy of the Lajoie bunt singles have been endlessly debated since.

Chalmers wisely decided to give both Cobb and Lajoie an automobile, but also changed the rules for 1911. The award was to be for the player for each league who "should prove himself as the most important and useful player to his club and to the league at large in point of deportment and value of services rendered."

After winning the awards in 1911, both Ty Cobb and Wildfire Schulte agreed to withdraw from the 1912 voting so as to allow the award to be spread around. This eventually became a rule for the official league MVP awards in the 1920 and lead to their demise, but it seemed a nice gesture at the time.

Hugh Chalmers initially said he would give out the awards for five years and was true to his word. No MVP annual awards were given again until the American League establish such an award in 1922.

Here are the winners of the Chalmers Most Valuable Player awards:

1911 NL Frank Schulte
1911 AL Ty Cobb
1912 NL Larry Doyle
1912 AL Tris Speaker
1913 NL Jake Daubert
1913 AL Walter Johnson
1914 NL Johnny Evers
1914 AL Eddie Collins

References