Introduction
Tommy Edman was one of the best offensive performers for the Los Angeles Dodgers in their 2024 National League Championship Series (NLCS) win over the New York Mets. Although many Dodgers performed well in the series, broadcasters and fans agreed that Edman was a deserving candidate for the MVP Award because of his all-around play and clutch hitting.
However, as has been argued on this web site, OSWC—not WPA—is the best statistic to use when identifying the offensive MVP for a playoff series, and if you go by Series OSWC, then Shohei Ohtani—not Tommy Edman—was the most valuable offensive performer for the Dodgers. And it’s not really that close.
The 2024 NLCS at a Glance
Table 1 provides a quick summary of the key offensive statistics for the 2024 NLCS. Edman’s offensive statistics were clearly impressive. He led the team with 11 RBI (which also tied the franchise record for a playoff series), led the team with 11 hits, tied for third on the team with 5 runs, was fourth on the team with a 1.022 OPS, and led the team with 0.52 WPA. He was also fourth on the team in overall run production with 5.89 SRC.
Yet, Ohtani’s team-leading 0.99 OSWC indicates that he—not Edman with 0.41 OSWC—was the more valuable offensive player overall during the series. It is also true that Ohtani bested Edman in batting skill as measured by OPS (1.185 to 1.022) and overall run production as measured by SRC (7.58 to 5.89). Yet, it is Ohtani’s team-leading OSWC that identifies him as the Dodger whose offensive contributions were the most important overall for the team’s series victory.
In fact, Ohtani’s offensive contributions were not only more valuable than Edman’s overall, Ohtani was also more valuable than Edman in each of the Dodgers four wins! Ohtani has positive OSWC in all four of the Dodgers’ wins. He was the sole team-leader in OSWC in two games (1 and 6), he was tied for the team lead in one game (3), and he was second to Mookie Betts in a game (4). By contrast, Edman never led the team in game OSWC, and he is only credited with positive offensive win value in three of the four victories. Ohtani was thus more valuable offensively than Edman game-by-game and not just in the series overall.
Evaluating Edman’s Case for MVP
The three key factors in favor of selecting Edman over Ohtani as the MVP are (1) his team-leading RBI, (2) his team-leading WPA, and (3) his defensive contributions. Let’s briefly consider each in turn
RBI is an important statistic, and RBI definitely help to win games. However, RBI measures a type of run production, not win production. OSWC, on the other hand, measures offensive win value by evaluating the importance of those runs in winning the actual game. That fact makes OSWC a better measure than RBI to use when identifying the value of player’s offensive contributions. So if you want to use overall run production to measure value, then you’d be making a mistake. (Though, if want to use overall run production, then you want to use SRC instead of runs or RBI because SRC is a holistic measure that more fairly and accurately assigns run credit than RBI. And Ohtani beats out Edman by this standard as well!)
WPA measures how much a player’s plate appearances increase (or decrease) their team’s likelihood of winning the game, using past historical data as a standard. The first fundamental problem with WPA as a measure of win value is that it does not actually measure a player’s win value. The clue is in the name: WPA measures how much a player’s batting outcome changes the probability of winning, not the actual winning. A player can actually have a high WPA even when their team loses, and this fact indicates that WPA is not an actual measure of win value. This is not just a theoretical issue because in this case Edman amassed a sum of 0.10 WPA in the Dodgers’ losses! OSWC, on the other hand, assigns credit for actual wins, so it will not give credit to a player whose contribution did not actually help their team win.
Another flaw with WPA is that it gives too much credit to the player who batted in a runner and not enough credit to the player who was batted in. It is a sad but true fact that the player who gets the RBI is always given more praise than the player who scored the run—a reality that extends from Major League Baseball all the way down to youth baseball. WPA naturally biases the player with the RBI over the player with the run because it occurs later in the offensive sequence. However, a fairer allocation of credit would not have this bias. Both the batter who was batted in and the player who did the batting in (as well as any other players whose contributions were vital for the run) should be given equal credit if their contributions were equally important. This fact is shown in the Shapley Value calculations used to produce SRC and OSWC. OSWC thus makes a fairer assessment of win contributions than WPA.
The only case where Edman unquestionably outperforms Ohtani is in defensive play. Edman manned the shortstop position, which is the most difficult fielding position behind the pitcher, while Ohtani was the designated hitter in all games and never played defense. It is for this reason that I refer to Ohtani as the “Offensive MVP.” OSWC is a measure of overall offensive value with respect to wins, and it is not a measure of total (meaning both offensive and defensive) value. Without an accurate measure of defensive value, we cannot say for sure that Ohtani was the more important overall contributor.
If you believe that Edman’s defensive contributions were especially large, then you can make a case that he was the overall more valuable contributor than Ohtani. But there do not exist any good game-level measures of defensive value, so that would be a “gut” decision. Moreover, Ohtani’s OSWC lead over Edman is so large that Edman would have had to make extremely large defensive contributions during the series to make up for the OSWC difference, and that does not seem plausible. So the case for Ohtani as the overall MVP is clear.
Conclusion
Edman made important and valuable contributions to the Dodgers’ 2024 NLCS victory, but Ohtani was ultimately the more valuable offensive player. Given the uncertainty surrounding measures of defensive value, Ohtani should have been awarded the NLCS MVP Award.
[Note: SRC and OSWC used in this article were from hand-coded play-by-play rather than the machine learning. The automated machine-learning values may change slightly.]