The 2007 NL MVP race will surely be one of the closest in recent memory.

The two frontrunners — Rockies’ outfielder Matt Holliday and Phillies’ shortstop Jimmy Rollins — both had superb seasons and led their respective teams to improbable playoff berths. The Rockies won 14 of their last 15 games to clinch the wildcard, and the Phillies came back from a seven-game deficit with 17 games left to win the NL East.

Neither team could have accomplished either feat without its respective MVP candidate, and both players’ performances left the Baseball Writers of America — who vote for the award after the regular season ends but before the postseason begins — with a difficult conundrum: who was more valuable?

On the surface, the race is airtight. Holliday led the NL in batting average (.340), runs batted in (137) and hits (216) while placing fourth in home runs (36); Rollins completed a rare 20-20-20-20 (20 homeruns, steals, triples and doubles) season, a feat so remarkable that only three other players in baseball history have done the same. Rollins kept his team competitive through injuries to stars Ryan Howard and Chase Utley, while Holliday led the Rockies to their best season ever.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If we only examine the most rudimentary of statistics and intangibles, we might as well flip a coin. In order to determine a player’s true value to his team, we must use so-called “new age statistics.”

Batting average exists in a vacuum — it does not take into account playing conditions, the skill of the pitcher or the inning/out/base path situation. But a new statistic — equivalent average — considers all these factors and more.

Baseball Prospectus, the authority on baseball’s numerical information, calls it “a measure of total offensive value per out” while including all the above information that batting average does not. Essentially, it is a batting average alternative that gauges how good a hitter is based on all the scenarios that would affect each at-bat. Holliday posted a .318 EqA in 2007, about fifty points above the league average and good for ninth in the NL. Rollins had an EqA of .290.

Two more common yet still marginalized statistics can also help us solve our problem: on-base percentage, which compares the total number of times a player reached base to his total number of at-bats, and slugging percentage, or total bases divided by at-bats. Both help us discern good hitters from average hitters better than batting average can. The ability to take pitches and draw walks is a skill that only the best hitters have — OBP takes this into account. SLG demonstrates power.

Holliday had an OBP of .405 and an SLG of .607, which placed him sixth and second, respectively, in the NL in those categories. Rollins had an OBP of .344 (47th in the NL) and an SLG of .531 (15th).

Combine OBP and SLG and you get OPS. Adjust OPS for the league average and you have OPS+, which measures how much better (or worse) an individual hit than a normal player that year. It takes into account every at-bat for every hitter that year, with external factors included, then formulates the scale so that 100 is defined as average. OPS+ gives us a way to equate all hitters against each other, rather than just individually. Holliday’s OPS+ was 151, or 51% better than the average NL hitter. That astounding number placed him sixth in the NL. Rollins, by contrast, had an OPS+ of 120, making him only 20% better than average.

Our final measurement of value is VORP, or Value Over Replacement Player. It bears a similarity to OPS+ in that it measures how many more runs a hitter contributed than a replacement player would have. Here, the numbers are closer: Holliday posted a 75 in this category, which means he accounted for 75 more runs than a substitute would have.

Rollins finished with a 66.1. Both were in the top 10 in the NL, but consider that the Rockies essentially had to win-out in the month of September in order to make it to the postseason. They won the wildcard by one game — if you switched Rollins’ and Holliday’s VORP and thus subtracted nine runs from the Rockies’ total, no doubt Holliday would be sitting at home right now instead of leading his team to its first World Series appearance (and being named NLCS MVP).

All these numbers lead up to this: Matt Holliday is the clear-cut NL MVP.

When we used statistics that factor in external conditions and show value as compared to other players, Holliday leads in every category. Even in the basic, practically useless statistics (batting average, anyone?), Holliday still beats Rollins in nearly every grouping.

The Baseball Writers of America, though, are generally prejudiced against these “new age statistics.” Most surely made their vote based off the numbers they know and measurements of immeasurable intangibles. But if they cared to step out of their comfort zone, they would see that the debate is actually moot, and, come late November, that Matt Holliday should be the NL MVP.

Wyndam Makowsky is a freshman. Contact him at makowsky@

stanford.edu.