NY Boston Fan

Count me among the people who were surprised by Manny Ramirez being named MVP. He played well the last 3 games, but I think I would have given it to Nixon, Bellhorn, or Foulke.

Well, by the metric I referred to in this post HERE, which counts the impact that a player's batting, pitching or errors had on the team's chance of winning on a play-by-play basis, David Ortiz was actually the series MVP

Of course this metric has never really been proven, it's just one interesting way to look at things. But it does make sense, even if it has some flaws, and the most surprising thing is that it found Manny Ramirez to actually be the least valuable player on the Sox in the Series. Even if you took out game 1, where they really did in win in spite of Manny, he was still the 7th most valuable player.

For the World Series, this metric ranks them:
1. David Ortiz
2. Keith Foulke
3. Mark Bellhorn
4. Curt Schilling
5. Derek Lowe
6. Trot Nixon
7. Mike Timlin
8. Johnny Damon/Orlando Cabrera/Pedro Martinez

To pick the Cardinals' least valuable player, it is pretty easy as it goes Jim Edmonds, then Scott Rolen, then all their starting pitchers along with Kiko Calero and Julian Tavarez. According to the player percentage calculations, Jim Edmonds actually had a negative total impact on the Cardinals' chances of winning in every single game.

That is pretty hard to do.

It's pretty interesting, check it out:
Play-by-play percentage