Blast From the Past: Willie Mays 1962

I must confess, as a Giants fan I carried a lot of chips on my shoulder for many years.  It's harder to do that now after 3 World Series Championships, but I still harbor my share.  A lot of them involve Willie Mays.  Why didn't Hank Aaron have to take 2 years out of his early career like Mays?  How many home runs did that injustice cost Willie?  Why did the wind have to blow HR balls hit to LF out  into CF where they were easily caught?  Why did Aaron get to play 10 years of his career in a ridiculous bandbox?  I've long since run those questions into the ground and they are covered again today in a piece on NBC Sports Bay Area site.  But here's another one.  Why did Willie Mays only win 2 MVP's in his career?  The answer is likely that nobody knew anything about quantifying player value in those days.  If you look up retrospective WAR scores, Willie led the NL every single season for at least 10 years, often by large margins, yet won only 2 MVP's.  Probably the most egregious case came in 1962 when he finished second to Maury Wills.   Had that season occurred after the SABR revolution, Willie would almost certainly have been the runaway winner.  Maury Wills was not even the MVP on his own team!

Here are the stat lines for the 1962 NL MVP candidates in order of voting(from Baseball Reference):

1.  Maury Wills(Dodgers):  .299/.347/.373, 13 2B, 10 3B, 6 HR, 104 SB, 13 CS, 759 PA, 6.0 WAR.
2.  Willie Mays(Giants):      .304/.384/.615, 36 2B, 5 3B, 49 HR, 18 SB, 2 CS, 706 PA, 10.2 WAR.
3.  Tommy Davis(Dodgers):  .346/.374/.535, 27 2B, 9 3B, 27 HR, 18 SB, 6 CS, 711 PA, 6.0 WAR.
4.  Frank Robinson(Reds):  .342/.421/.624, 51 2B, 2 3B, 39 HR, 18 SB, 9 CS, 701 PA, 8.7 WAR.
5.  Don Drysdale(Dodgers):  25-9, 2.83, 314 IP, 5.9 WAR.
6.  Hank Aaron(Braves):      .323/.390/.618, 28 2B, 6 3B, 45 HR, 15 SB, 7 CS, 667 PA, 8.5 WAR.

*Bolded denotes league leader in category.

My gosh!  Were there some great players in the 1960's NL or what?  Maury Wills was an electric player and captured imaginations by blowing away previous SB records and he didn't get CS often, but as we all now know, SB's aren't nearly as valuable as they seem.  Tommy Davis won the "batting championship", but we also now know that BA is close to a useless stat when calculating player value.  Frank Robinson had one of his monster seasons and led the NL in OPS by a wide margin, but he was a corner OF and Mays was a superior defender in CF.  MVP often goes to the best player on a pennant winning team.  The Giants and Dodgers finished tied in the regular season and the Giants won in a playoff, so playing for a pennant winner should not have penalized Mays.  The order should have been Mays, Robinson, Aaron.  Maury Wills stole the award just like he stole all those bases!