Bobby Tolan @ baseball-reference.com
In Timeline 4, the 15-inning marathon, Bobby Tolan went 4-for-4 with 3 walks.
Seven plate appearances. Four hits. Three walks. He reached base every single time. A perfect day.
He drove in zero runs.
Across 35 simulated timelines of Game 4 of the 1972 World Series, no other batter went 4-for-4 or better. Not Johnny Bench. Not Joe Rudi. Not Pete Rose. Not Tony Perez. Nobody.
Bobby Tolan had the only perfect multi-hit game in the entire multiverse. And he couldn't drive in a single run.
Cincinnati won this game 2-1. Two runs, in fifteen innings. And Bobby Tolan - who reached base seven times - drove in neither of them.
His WPA was +0.390, the highest of any Cincinnati batter in that game. The multiverse recognized that he helped. He put runners on. He kept innings alive. He moved the chains. He did everything right except the one thing that shows up on the scoreboard.
Four hits. Zero RBI. The loneliest perfect day.
While Bobby Tolan was going 4-for-4, the rest of Cincinnati's lineup was collapsing.
Joe Morgan went 0-for-6. WPA: -0.148. The future back-to-back MVP came to the plate six times and failed to reach base even once. Six at-bats in fifteen innings of World Series baseball, and nothing.
Tony Perez went 2-for-7 with 5 strikeouts. Five. In a single game. The most strikeouts by any batter in any game across 35 timelines. Perez's WPA: -0.263. He struck out more times than he got hits.
Johnny Bench went 1-for-6. WPA: -0.276. The greatest catcher in baseball history had six chances in fifteen innings and produced almost nothing.
The three Hall of Famers - Morgan, Perez, Bench - combined to go 3-for-19 with 6 strikeouts and a combined WPA of -0.687. That is a catastrophe. In a 15-inning World Series game, three of the most famous hitters of their generation combined for 3 hits in 19 at-bats.
Tolan went 4-for-4. They went 3-for-19.
He did everything. They did nothing. Cincinnati scored 2 runs.
Bobby Tolan's career across 35 timelines: 38-for-159. A .238 batting average. 1 home run. 10 RBI. Cumulative WPA: -1.361.
That is the third-worst WPA of any player on either roster. Only Angel Mangual and Ken Holtzman were worse. Bobby Tolan was, by WPA, one of the worst players in the multiverse.
And yet.
He went 3-for-4 or better in three different games. He went 3-for-7 twice. He went 3-for-5 once. He had the only perfect game in the multiverse. On his good days, Bobby Tolan was the best hitter in either lineup.
On his bad days, he went 0-for-4 or 0-for-5 and disappeared. He went hitless in 11 of 33 games where he had at least 3 at-bats. One-third of the time, he contributed nothing.
There was no middle Bobby Tolan. He was either 4-for-4 or 0-for-5. Either the best hitter on the team or a black hole in the batting order. The multiverse could not decide what to do with him, so it gave him everything and nothing, over and over, timeline after timeline.
Fourteen innings. One run. The quietest game in the multiverse.
Tolan went 3-for-7. He scored the only run in the game - the loneliest run, the only run that scored in 28 half-innings of baseball.
But he drove in zero runs. Again. Three hits, and not a single RBI. He scored a run, yes. Someone else drove him in. His hits put him on base, but they did not bring anyone else home.
Pete Rose also went 3-for-7 in this game. They combined for 6 hits and scored zero runs between them as batters - their only contribution to the scoreboard was Tolan eventually crossing the plate on someone else's work.
Tolan went 3-for-4. Cincinnati got 10 hits. Cincinnati scored 1 run.
This game appears on the Ten Hits and Nothing page. It is the purest expression of Cincinnati's inability to convert hits into runs. And Bobby Tolan is the purest expression of that expression - 3 hits, 0 RBI, 0 runs scored.
Three-for-four, and none of it mattered. His WPA was +0.018 - barely distinguishable from zero. Three hits with the impact of a gentle breeze.
Tolan went 3-for-5. Cincinnati got 13 hits - the most by any team in any regulation game across 35 timelines. And Cincinnati lost 4-3.
Tolan's WPA: +0.006. Essentially zero. Three hits in a game with 13 total team hits, and his contribution to Cincinnati's chances of winning was statistically indistinguishable from not playing at all.
And then there is the other Bobby Tolan.
Timeline 34. Tolan went 0-for-4 with 2 strikeouts. WPA: -0.365. His worst game in 35 timelines. Oakland won 2-1. In another one-run loss, Tolan was the single biggest liability in Cincinnati's lineup.
This is the same man who went 4-for-4 in Timeline 4.
The same man. The same game. The same lineup. The same park. The same October afternoon. In one timeline he reached base seven consecutive times and his team won a 15-inning epic. In another he went hitless in four at-bats and his team lost by one run in nine innings.
The multiverse is not interested in your identity. It is interested in your outcomes.
Bobby Tolan went 4-for-4 in a 15-inning World Series game and drove in nobody.
That sentence contains multitudes. It contains the best single batting performance in the multiverse and the most profound futility. It contains a man who did everything right at the plate and could not translate any of it into the only number that matters. It contains a team that won 2-1 in fifteen innings despite its best hitter producing zero runs.
In the multiverse, you can be perfect and still be lonely. You can go 4-for-4 and have nothing to show for it. You can have the best day of your life and still not matter.
Bobby Tolan knows.