Northbound

Back in 2007, I created a chart that showed the “Most Valuable Cities,” the cities that had earned the most MVP awards in the four major sports over the last fifty years (when all the sports started giving out MVP awards). The following is an updated chart with the 2007 and 2008 winners, enjoy.

The cities with the most MVP awards since 1957 are:

Not much change from last year, with leaders Boston, New York, and Los Angeles all gaining one point apiece – and congrats to Washington for getting off the schneid with Ovechkin’s win of the Hart today.

Note: There are five major MVP awards in pro sports. The oldest (surprisingly) is the Hart Memorial Trophy in hockey, given for the first time to the immortal Frank Nighbor of the Ottawa Senators in 1924. Then there’s the American League and National League MVP awards given out by the Baseball Writer’s Association of America; Frankie Frisch of the Cardinals and Lefty Grove of the old Philadelpha A’s won the inaugural awards in 1931. The NBA followed suit in 1956; Bob Pettit of the St. Louis Hawks won the first MVP award in basketball. The NFL has two different MVP awards, one offered by the Associated Press and one by the Pro Football Writers of America, not to mention the Bert Bell Award — but these usually track each other pretty closely. (Obviously, there are also awards in other sports, like NASCAR and golf, but it’s hard to assign those wins to a city as such.)

In this chart, I am starting with the year 1957, because that’s 50 years ago and that’s when the AP started giving out the NFL MVP award. I’m using both the AL and NL MVPs, even though that gives a substantial bias to baseball, but I don’t know how else you do it, and I like baseball anyway. I’m including Joe Thornton, the 1997 NHL winner, as a San Jose player even though he started the year out in Boston.