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Eric Karabell and Mark Simon brought up a fun topic on their Baseball Today podcast on Thursday: Who is the best active player never to receive an MVP vote? By an MVP vote, we mean not even one little 10th-place "I like this guy" vote. (For purposes of this discussion, we're only looking at position players.)

Nearly all good players at some point receive a vote or even have a season that places them in the top 10. Corey Hart had two points last year. Jeremy Affeldt received a 10th-place vote in 2009. So did Brad Hawpe. Nate McLouth had a 10th-place vote in 2008, Placido Polanco has twice received votes and Gary Matthews Jr. and A.J. Pierzynski each got a vote in 2006. You get the idea.

Eric and Mark mentioned guys like Jay Bruce, Nelson Cruz and Drew Stubbs as the best candidates to get a vote for the first time in 2011.

Thanks to the genius of Baseball-Reference.com, we spent a little time cross-checking this kind of stuff. Here are a few random nuggets:

• The active leader in WAR (wins above replacement) without a vote is Jason Kendall. And I'm thinking he's not about to get one. Kendall was a terrific player with the Pirates in the late '90s (he hit .314/.402/.456 his first five seasons), but played on a bad team and his on-base skills were underappreciated in the barrage of home runs.
• The No. 2 guy is ... Randy Winn. He did once make an All-Star team with the Devil Rays.
• The best players without a top-10 overall finish in the voting are Johnny Damon and Mike Cameron. Damon has received votes four times, but his best finish was 13th in 2005. Damon still has a small chance to reach 3,000 hits (2,571). If that happens, his Hall of Fame vote will be interesting. Cameron had a terrific season in 2001, the year the Mariners won 116 games. B-R rates him the seventh-best player in the league, but he received just four points in the voting, fewer than Doug Mientkiewicz, who scored fewer runs, drove in fewer runs and played first base.
• Omar Vizquel is a surefire Hall of Famer? He's received just three MVP points in his career, all in 1999.

You can see all the MVP voting history here at Baseball-Reference.

Follow David Schoenfield on Twitter at @dschoenfield. Follow the SweetSpot blog at @espn_sweet_spot.

Well, at least this shouldn't terribly impact Project 2012:

Royals catcher Jason Kendall is scheduled to undergo season-ending surgery Friday on his right shoulder after an examination earlier this week revealed extensive tearing in his rotator cuff.

--snip--

Kendall, 36, is in the first season of a two-year, $6 million deal signed last December as a free agent. He finishes the season with a .256 average in 118 games. He had 18 doubles but no triples or homers while driving in 37 runs.

Yost said Kendall suffered the injury July 17 against Oakland on a slide while stealing second base. Kendall responded, initially, to receiving a cortisone shot before aggravating the injury in early August on a check swing in Oakland.

“He got to the point where he couldn’t even raise his arm,” Yost said. “He got to the point where he had to take his glove and push his arm back into a throwing position -- and he was still throwing runners out.

“It just shows you the mentality and the mental makeup of Jason Kendall. He would have played the rest of this year if the training staff hadn’t hog-tied him and made him have an MRI.”

The more things change ...

Have you noticed lately that the best organizations don't encourage their players to play hurt? That the best organizations understand that injured players cost you wins today because they're not playing well and in the future because they'll wind up on the DL?

After suffering the shoulder injury on July 17, Kendall started 33 of the Royals' next 41 games. After aggravating the injury in early August, Kendall started 19 of the Royals' 24 games.

Now, this might have made sense if the Royals didn't have any reasonable option.

They did, in Brayan Pena.

This might have made sense if Kendall wasn't signed for 2011.

He is. The Royals owe Kendall $3.75 million next season.

This might have made sense if Kendall was indispensable in 2010.

He hasn't been. The Royals' pitchers have struggled all season, Kendall's throwing arm is just fair, and of course he can't hit. At all.

The Royals were foolish to sign Kendall for two years in the first place. But once they had him signed, they had every reason to keep him healthy for as long as possible.

They didn't. At all.

With the Winter Meetings just a memory and Santa Season upon us, do you really have time to be reading about baseball? If not, please let me know so I can do some shopping ...

* Are you like me? Do you wonder how Rafael Soriano can possibly be worth something like $8 million to a poor franchise like the Rays? It's all about marginal value of a win, my friends.

* Why does Brian Cashman seem so unconcerned about who's going to replace Hideki Matsui in the lineup? Because of Juan Miranda, of course. And yes, Miranda might be good enough, particularly in a platoon.

* Joe Posnanski's right: the signing of Jason Kendall won't make a material difference to the Royals. But as Posnanski writes, it sure does tell us something large about the men who run the Royals.

* Everyone's wondering -- for example, here -- why the Pirates non-tendered Matt Capps. According to GM Neal Huntington, it's because of that pesky media.

* Do No. 1 starters, over the course of the season, tend to face a disproportionate share of No. 1 starters? For the hundredth time, no.

* Three things I think we all adore: Baseball, movies, and on-line polls. And when you can combine those adorable things? Nirvana. (If you're interested in which three movies got my votes, check the comments here).

* ESPN's Dan Shulman has picked up a wonderful honor. And I'm happy to report that in addition to being an outstanding broadcaster, Shulman is also a wonderfully nice man.

* It won't be out for a while yet, but Keith Olbermann really, really likes reliever Dirk Hayhurst's upcoming memoir (for the record, so do I). More when the book is actually available.

Jason Kendall hit a real milestone last night:

ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Jason Kendall of the Milwaukee Brewers singled in the second inning Monday night for his 2,000th hit, becoming the eighth full-time catcher to reach that milestone.

The 34-year-old Kendall is primarily the eighth-place hitter for Milwaukee. He singled up the middle off Kyle Lohse of the St. Louis Cardinals with one out in the second, his third hit in two games.

Ivan Rodriguez of the Houston Astros is the leader among players with at least 1,000 games at catcher with 2,636, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. Kendall, the only other active player on the list, is 48 hits behind Johnny Bench for seventh place.

Others on the list are: Ted Simmons (2,472), Carlton Fisk (2,356), Yogi Berra (2,150), Mike Piazza (2,127) and Gary Carter (2,092).

One might reasonably wonder why Simmons isn't in the Hall of Fame, but that's probably a discussion for a cold winter's day. Most of these names are those of Hall of Famers, though, and so we might reasonably wonder what Kendall's doing among them.

Well, Kendall reached the majors 13 years ago when he was 21, and he's been playing regularly ever since, with the only interruption coming in 1999 when he missed half the season with a broken ankle. Kendall did come back strong the next season, but really he's never been the same since. Before that injury, Kendall had become a leadoff man, and in the two-and-a-half prior seasons he'd swiped 66 bases in 80 attempts. In the three seasons after the injury, he stole 50 bases in 84 attempts.

It's hard to blame Kendall's decline on the ankle, though. He set a career high in homers in 2000. He batted .325 in 2003 and .319 in 2004. At that point -- at the end of the 2004 season -- Kendall was still on something like a path to Cooperstown. He was only 30, his lifetime batting average was .306 and he'd already collected more than 1,400 hits.

But then he lost his power: one home run in the next two seasons.

And next he lost his batting average: .243 in the next three seasons.

The only thing Kendall's got left is walks. He drew 50 of them last season, which is roughly what he's done for his entire career, and he'll probably draw around 50 again this season. Really, though, the walks aren't enough to keep him in the lineup because he's just an absolute zero otherwise. At least with the bat. It's clear that his defense is valued, and one can't really argue with the Brewers' success this season. And if Brad Ausmus has taught us anything over the years, it's that if your defense behind the plate is valued, you can play regularly long, long, long past the point at which your bat would suggest otherwise.

Don't look back, Yogi; someone might be gaining on you.*

* In a technical sense, Kendall has already passed Berra, along with Bench, Carter, Piazza, and Simmons, too.

Of Kendall's 2,001 hits, 1,966 of them have come when he was in the lineup as the catcher.

Oddly enough, Piazza finished with 1,906 hits as a catcher, Carter 1,907, and Simmons 1,908. Bench is well behind, with 1,644 hits as a catcher. And while we don't have splits for Yogi's entire career, we do know that more than 200 of his hits came as an outfielder.

At this moment, then, Kendall is actually No. 3 on the list that matters, behind only the two Pudges, Fisk (2,145) and Rodriguez (2,547). Not bad, and a pretty good trivia question the next time you want to stump someone.