11/02/2023
Unlike the NBA Finals most valuable player award, the World Series MVP has a lot of luck involved.
The NBA Finals award usually goes to what Bill Simmons calls the alpha dog of the basketball world: the best player on the best team. Sometimes some decent player gets hot and wins it, but much of the time the NBA Finals MVP is the best player in the world: e.g., Nikola Jokic of Serbia failed to win his 3rd straight regular season MVP this year, but he then proved he was the best basketball player by dominating in the NBA Finals.
Since the Finals MVP award’s start in 1969, Michael Jordan won it 6 times, LeBron James 4, Magic, Shaq, and Tim Duncan 3 times each. If you want to know why MJ remains the consensus choice for best player ever, well, he went to 6 NBA Finals, won each time, and was the unquestionable MVP each time on the big stage. In 35 NBA Finals games, Jordan averaged 34 points, 6 rebounds, and 6 assists.
In contrast, baseball is more stochastic, so the World Series MVP has only been won a maximum of two times since it began in 1955. But the four players who have done it — Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson (back when heroic ace pitchers started games 1, 4, and 7 and were expected to throw complete games [now they pitch 6 innings in each of games 1 and 5]), Reggie “Mr. October” Jackson, and now slugging shortstop Corey Seager, as the Texas Rangers beat the Arizona Diamondbacks 4 games to 1 — are really good. Seager, at 6’4″, kind of looks like Henry Fonda playing Abe Lincoln.
The Los Angeles Dodgers let Seager go in 2022 by not matching Texas’s offer of $325 million for ten years. Texas also acquired second baseman Marcus Semien, who has what sounds like a Latin American name, but is actually an African-American from Oakland, for $175 million for 7 years, for a total of a half billion for the middle of the infield, and installed Semien and Seager as #1 and #2 in the batting lineup. In 2022, this was a disaster as Seager only hit .245 and Semien .248.
But that was mostly due to bad luck by hitting line drives right at fielders. This year, Semien hit .276 with power and Seager hit .327 with power.
Semien sounds like a Latin name, but he was born in Oakland and has an African-American accent. Over the last four full seasons going back to 2019, Semien has only missed one game. (In contrast, Seager, who looks like Abe Lincoln, missed 43 games in this season alone, keeping him from challenging Shohei Ohtani for the MVP award.) That’s an incredible streak for second basemen, who tend to get dinged up making double plays.
My vague impression is that African-American baseball stars, like Marcus Semien and Mooke Betts, tend to be impressive individuals. A few African-Americans, such as shortstop Tim Anderson of the White Sox, tend to be dubious guys but most of the ones who live up to their potential deserve it.
In recent years, teams have been batting their two best hitters number one and two in the lineup, like Semien and Seager or Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman of the Dodgers, rather than three and four as in the past. For instance, the last two Arizona hitters in the ninth inning of the final World Series game were their two best hitters, rookie Corbin Carroll and slugging second basemen Ketal Marte, both of whom, unfortunately, made out. Who would you rather want most likely to come up in the 9th inning?
An interesting question is whether the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Hall of Fame pitcher Clayton Kershaw defects to the world champion Texas Rangers, his hometown club. Kershaw grew up in Dallas’s utopian inner neighborhood Highland Park, where his best friend was Los Angeles Rams Super Bowl–winning quarterback Matthew Stafford. Kershaw probably wishes tonight that he’d gone home to play for Texas this year.
Kershaw is a Christian gentleman who doesn’t like to overcharge his employer for a season in which he’s not at his best. So in 2022 he signed with Los Angeles for only $17 million. He went 12-3 with a 2.28 earned run average. In 2023, he signed another one year deal with the L.A. Dodgers for only $20 million. He went 13-5 with a 2.46 ERA.
In contrast, the elder of 35-year-old Kershaw’s only two peers, the 40-year-old Justin Verlander, signed a 2023 deal with the New York Mets and then Houston for $43 million and went 13-8 with a 3.22 ERA. And the 38-year-old Max Scherzer went 13-6 with a 3.77 ERA for $43 million for New York and then Texas. Kershaw, Verlander, and Scherzer are all obvious first-ballot Hall of Fame pitchers, with Zach Greinke probably a second ballot Hall of Famer.
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