Just How Good Was Cooper Pratt in the World Series?

Cooper Pratt doesn’t drink alcohol, but he has to buy Fanta again in Wisconsin for as long as he lives.

The shortstops 22-an-olds had a World Series for the ages, driving in eight hits in these 19 at-bats (.421 batting average) in a series high seven runs, among which he would have saved the trophy if only by a blow. It was a remarkable, probably MVP-worthy feat that any player in the history of the game would kill to have on his résumé. The fact that Pratt is a rookie who has been playing high school ball in Mississippi for three years now feels like it borders on fiction.

Just how good was Pratt in the Brewers’ five-game triumph over the Rays? His 0.62 Win Probability Added is not only the highest position of all position players who saw the field in this year’s Classic Classic, it was the third-highest ever for a position player 22 or younger in the World Series. That round error was tied by Tim McCarver — who started with a 0.63 WPA while hitting .478, catching, not typing, 27 innings off Bob Gibson — in the 1964 World Series as the Cardinals beat the Yankees in seven. And the top spot on that leaderboard belongs to Charlie Keller, the Yankee outfielder who had a 1.02 WPA and hit three home runs in a 1939 sweep of the New York Reds, each with a run scored or within one run. For pitchers, 1921 Waite Hoyt was the best in that era with a 1.55 WPA, while 2001 Byung-Hyun Kim and his -1.11 was the worst. (Matt Martell just wrote about Hoyt’s 1921 World Series in a mailbag column last week, answering the question of the best World Series performances by players on the losing team, so check back for more).