The Weirdest World Series MVP of All Time

 Folks who know a little something about the history of the World Series, or who have looked at the history of the World Series MVP Award, or who are really old and remember mid-century baseball probably won't find this one particularly hard to guess.

There's only one World Series MVP winner (through the 2024 season) who came from the losing team. That, by itself, is pretty weird. The winner is Yankees second baseman Bobby Richardson, the year is 1960. It was, in fact, one of the weirdest World Series ever as well. The Yankees lost to the Pirates, 4 games to 3. The Pirates, in their four victories, had a total margin of victory of 7. The Yankees, in their three victories, had a total margin of victory of 35, meaning that the Yankees outscored the Pirates by four runs a game, and still lost.

Richardson led both teams with 12 RBI in the Series, putting up an impressive .367 batting average on 11 hits, with five of them going for extra bases. While Mickey Mantle had more impressive numbers outside of the RBIs, hitting .400 with 8 walks and 3 homers, Richardson's Series drew more attention because of just how unexpected it was. He'd hit .252 in the regular season, with 1 homer and 26 RBI in 507 plate appearances. He was a great glove and light bat player, not expected to be a major offensive contributor on a team with Mantle, Maris, Berra, Skowron, and a deep supporting cast.

But that's not what I find weirdest or most interesting about Richardson's award. That crown goes to the fact that Richardson is one of two World Series MVPs through 2024 who had a negative cWPA in the Series where they won.

...And if anyone actually reads this, there's about an 80% chance I just lost them with the alphabet soup stat name. cWPA is likely to take some explanation for most people, and that's fine, but I certainly find it interesting.

WPA, or Win Probability Added, which cWPA is based on, is in some ways a kind of old school statistic that should appeal to someone who likes the idea of clutch hitting, of rewarding those who come through in the big moments. Here is MLB's page on the stat, which is a succinct enough explanation that I won't try to better it, but to protect against dead links in the future, WPA compares the game states before and after somebody does something, and credits the batter, runner, or pitcher with the change between those game states.

So, lets look at Freddie Freeman's game winning grand slam in game 1 of the 2024 World Series. Two outs in the bottom of the 9th with his team trailing 3-2, it's fair to say that Freeman's Dodgers, even with the bases loaded, were less likely than the Yankees were to win the game as Freeman came to the plate. A walk would only tie it. A single, with the outfield in, would likely only tie it. And as good a hitter as Freddie Freeman is, he's still more likely to make an out than he is to get on base. Baseball Reference pegged the Dodgers chances at 19% entering the bottom of the 9th, and at 27% after Mookie Betts was intentionally walked to load the bases. After the home run, of course, their chances of winning were 100%. WPA credits the positive side of that to Freeman, and gives the negative to Yankees pitcher Nestor Cortes. Very simple; because Freeman came through in such a high leverage situation, he's the hero, and gets a huge amount of credit. Clutch performance is rewarded.

How useful you find WPA is going to depend a lot on perspective. Personally, I think it's incredibly useful when doing things like voting for an MVP award, a backward-looking, reflective enterprise if ever there was one. If you're trying to decide how much to pay a player next year, on the other hand, it's likely not that helpful, even looking across an entire season, and you're going to be better off looking at performance without context. Freddie Freeman had an excellent 2024 World Series and Mookie Betts didn't, but if you tried to handicap which of those two is likely to be World Series MVP next year...well, I wouldn't have much bad to say about Betts's chances in the future.

But for reflecting the value that was actually brought in the past? Yeah, WPA is damned useful. It's a quick shorthand that takes big moments into more account, and if you're talking about something like the World Series MVP Award, that's good!

It's not without its flaws, though. It doesn't take defense into account at all, for example. A closer who comes in in the 9th to protect a one run lead and walks three guys, then gives up three line drives that are all caught by teammates making spectacular plays, that guy is going to get the same amount of WPA credit as a closer who enters and pitches an immaculate inning. Those teammates get no credit for their brilliance. And players have justifiably won the World Series MVP with their glove. Brooks Robinson in 1970, for example, people talk about the defensive plays much more than the offensive moments. It shouldn't be considered the final word, but I absolutely think it's an interesting place to start a discussion.

 cWPA is specifically interested in how much a player contributed to his teams chances of winning a championship. In the case of a definitive walk-off like Freeman's above, it's got to be contextualized for occurring in Game 1. Yes, it clearly helped the Dodgers cause, but how much? How much is going from a 73% chance of facing a 0-1 deficit to a 100% chance of having a 1-0 advantage worth in a seven game series? According to Baseball Reference's calculations, about 22.95% of a World Series, or 22.95 cWPA. Huge. The biggest moment of the 2024 World Series, by far. Not, in cWPA terms, what a homer in the same situation would be worth in Game 7, obviously, where that 73% would just be 73, no need to account for odds in the remaining games.

So, Bobby Richardson. With his excellent base offensive numbers during the Series, how does he wind up with a negative cWPA value for the Series? Well, he didn't have any of the biggest moments in the Series. His top cWPA moment was a single in the 9th inning of game seven for 7.4 cWPA, the 19th most impactful moment of the Series by cWPA. His second biggest was his first inning grand slam in game 3, which is blunted some by the fact that the Yankees were already up 2-0. And for the rest, well, Richardson performed a lot better in the three games the Yankees won by a ton of runs than he did in the four they lost, hitting .250 in the losses and .500 in the victories. (Though he did go 2 for 5 in the deciding game 7.) The situations didn't favor him, basically, to a degree that would only really happen in a Series as weird as this one, where the wins were all blowouts (due in part to Richardson) and the losses were all close. Did Bobby Richardson have a bad World Series? Absolutely not. Should he have won MVP? Probably not, just based on being on the losing team, but maybe also because his big moments weren't actually that huge in context.

Who should have won? cWPA makes a case for the player who had the single biggest cWPA moment in World Series history... Hal Smith. No, not Bill Mazeroski, who hit the walk-off in game 7. That moment came with the Pirates already more likely than not to win the game, batting in the bottom of the 9th in a tie game. Hal Smith's big moment came in the bottom of the 8th with two outs and the Pirates trailing 6-7, hitting a three run homer to put them up 9-7. cWPA gives him 63.62 for that play, taking the Pirates from a 30% chance of winning the Series to a 93% chance. The fact that the Pirates gave up the lead in the top of the 9th wiped Smith's homer from the memory banks of a lot of observers, but WPA still understands it as an incredibly high leverage moment. On the other hand, Hal Smith had 8 at bats in the Series, so he probably wasn't going to get a lot of consideration. Past Smith, the overall leaders are Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra, who had tremendous and good traditional stats in the series, respectively. And then you've got Mazeroski who hit .320 with two homers and a .960 OPS in the Series, and had one of the best remembered moments in baseball history. And who was one of the best fielding second basemen of all time.

So yeah, not necessarily the hottest of takes here, but I'd probably make Bill Mazeroski the 1960 World Series MVP.