Otie wrote:

Dawson won an MVP. Davis didn't.
Ralph Kiner only played 10 years. However he led the league in home runs for 7 of them.


Kiner didn't win an MVP either. But he might have, if his teams had been a bit better.

I was interested to discover that Dawson finished 2nd in the MVP voting twice. It was a very distant 2nd both times, in years when the winner was near-unanimous (Mike Schmidt in '81, Dale Murphy in '83); it wouldn't be accurate to say he "almost" won the MVP those years because there really wasn't any contest. But still, it was 2nd place.

Back to Kiner: In one of James' books he uses Kiner as an example of how the image of players can change over time. As I recall (though the details may be a bit hazy), sometime back in the early 1950's Warren Spahn was asked which batters he had the most trouble with, or which ones were feared the most in general, or something like that, and Kiner was near the top of the list. After Spahn retired he was asked the same question and listed essentially the same names with one big exception: he didn't even mention Kiner.