1972 World Series Game 4 @ baseball-reference.com
Angel Mangual @ baseball-reference.com
Joe Rudi @ baseball-reference.com
On October 19, 1972, Oakland center fielder Angel Mangual stepped to the plate in the bottom of the 9th inning with the score tied 2-2. Blue Moon Odom was on second base. Mangual singled to center. Odom scored. Oakland won 3-2. The A's took a 3-1 lead in the World Series. Angel Mangual was the hero.
That is what happened.
Here is what happened 35 more times.
Across 35 simulated timelines of the game he won, Angel Mangual posted a cumulative Win Probability Added of -2.326.
That is the worst of any player on either roster. Not the worst among Oakland's bench. Not the worst among the platoon players or the pinch-hitters. The worst of anyone. Forty players suited up across 35 timelines and Angel Mangual did more damage to his own team's chances of winning than any of them.
He hit .250. That sounds fine. It is not fine. He hit .250 in a way that made .250 look like a crime. Zero home runs. Nine RBI in 140 at-bats. Five walks against 32 strikeouts. He went hitless in 13 of 35 games. And the hits he did get came when they didn't matter. The outs came when they did.
That is what WPA measures. Not what you did, but when you did it. Mangual's hits arrived in innings where Oakland was already winning or already losing. His outs arrived in innings where one hit would have changed everything.
The walk-off hero of the real Game 4 became, across 35 alternate versions of it, the most reliable engine of failure on either team.
While Angel Mangual was destroying Oakland's win probability from center field, Joe Rudi was building it from left field.
Rudi's cumulative WPA across 35 timelines: +2.336.
The best of any player on either roster.
Read those numbers again. Mangual: -2.326. Rudi: +2.336. They are almost exactly opposite. The gap between them is 4.662 wins of probability. One man gave it all away. The other man earned it all back. They played on the same team. They batted in the same lineup. They occupied adjacent positions in the outfield.
The multiverse assigned them opposite roles and made the assignment almost perfectly symmetrical.
Angel Mangual: .250, 0 HR, 9 RBI, 5 BB, 32 K. WPA: -2.326.
Joe Rudi: .263, 5 HR, 20 RBI, 16 BB, 8 K. WPA: +2.336.
In reality, you remember Mangual. In the multiverse, you remember Rudi.
This is the game that shows you everything.
Twelve innings. Oakland won 4-3. Both Mangual and Rudi played all twelve. One of them carried the team. The other one nearly buried it.
Angel Mangual: 0-for-5, one strikeout. WPA: -0.327. Every at-bat, he came to the plate with the game close, and every at-bat, he failed. Five times. For twelve innings. In a game his team won by one run, he was the single biggest drag on their chances of winning it.
Joe Rudi: 2-for-5, a home run, a double, an RBI, a walk. WPA: +0.500. Rudi's home run gave Oakland the lead. His double extended a rally. His walk kept an inning alive. He was the reason Oakland won.
The gap between them in this single game: 0.827 wins of probability. That is the largest divergence between any two teammates in any game in 35 timelines. Two players in the same outfield, on the same team, in the same twelve-inning game, and one of them was the hero and the other was the villain and the gap between them was wider than in any other game in the multiverse.
Oakland won this game. They won it because of Rudi. They won it despite Mangual. These are not the same thing. The box score does not distinguish between them. WPA does.
Joe Rudi's best game across 35 timelines. The single greatest individual performance by any Oakland player in the multiverse.
Rudi went 3-for-5 with a triple and 3 RBI. His WPA: +0.729. That number is enormous. In a one-run game, Rudi was personally responsible for nearly three-quarters of a win's worth of probability. He drove in three of Oakland's four runs. The triple broke the game open.
This is the game Joe Rudi would want you to see. This is the game that proves what WPA already knew - that the quiet left fielder, the man who did not hit the walk-off single in the real Game 4, was the most important player on the team. Not once. Not in a single moment. But across 35 timelines, over and over, game after game.
Cincinnati's Don Gullett threw a complete game shutout. Oakland lost 1-0. One run. The narrowest possible margin.
Mangual went 0-for-4. WPA: -0.301. He bled away 30.1 percentage points of win probability in a game decided by a single run. Four at-bats. Four chances to be the man who tied it or won it. Four failures.
Meanwhile Rudi went 0-for-3 with a walk. Also hitless. But his WPA was +0.111. Even without a hit, Rudi added value - his walk came at a moment that mattered, his outs came at moments that didn't. Two outfielders, both hitless, and one of them still managed to help while the other dragged the team down.
That is the difference between them. It was never about talent. It was about timing.
Mangual went 0-for-4 with a strikeout. WPA: -0.222. Oakland lost 3-2. Another one-run game. Another game where one hit from center field might have changed the outcome. Another game where no hit came.
This is Mangual's fourth-worst game by WPA. Four games below -0.22. Four games where the hero of the real Game 4 actively sabotaged his team's chances of winning. Not by making errors. Not by dropping fly balls. Just by failing to hit when hitting would have mattered.
The game lasted 15 innings. Oakland scored one run. Cincinnati scored two. The final run came in the top of the 15th.
Mangual went 1-for-5 with a walk and a strikeout. WPA: -0.175. Even in a 15-inning game, even with six plate appearances, even with one hit and a walk, his WPA was still deeply negative. His hit didn't matter. His walk didn't matter. His outs did.
Rudi went 2-for-6 with a home run, an RBI, and a walk. WPA: +0.212. Rudi's home run was Oakland's only run in the entire game. The only run in 15 innings of Oakland baseball came off Joe Rudi's bat.
Same game. Same 15 innings. Same outfield. One of them hit the only home run Oakland managed in the longest game in the multiverse. The other one went 1-for-5 and still made things worse.
Fourteen innings. Zero Oakland runs. The longest shutout in 35 timelines.
Mangual went 0-for-5. WPA: -0.266. Five at-bats across fourteen innings of scoreless baseball. Fourteen innings where one hit - one single, one double, one anything - could have broken the deadlock. The man who won the real Game 4 with a walk-off single had fourteen innings to produce a single clutch hit and could not do it.
Twenty-six consecutive scoreless half-innings. And then Cincinnati scored in the 14th, and Oakland could not answer, and the game was over. One run. The only run. And Mangual had nothing to do with any of it.
In the real Game 4, Angel Mangual's single took two seconds. The ball left his bat, found the outfield grass, and Blue Moon Odom scored from second. That is all it takes. Two seconds. One swing. One hero.
In 35 alternate timelines, he had 140 at-bats to do it again. He could not.
The multiverse does not care about your best moment. It cares about all your moments.
In reality, Angel Mangual hit one single in one at-bat in one inning and became the hero of the 1972 World Series. In 35 alternate timelines, he came to the plate 140 times and became the worst player on either roster.
Joe Rudi did not hit the walk-off single. Joe Rudi was never the hero of anything. But across 35 timelines, he showed up. Again and again. His home runs mattered. His doubles mattered. His walks mattered. He was the most valuable player in the multiverse, and nobody remembers.
Reality gave the moment to Mangual. The multiverse gave everything else to Rudi.