If you’re a regular RTG? listener reading this the week that it comes out, you may have heard our most recent episode in which I introduced my co-Host Diaz and our Very Special Guest Xavier to a little research project that I’ve been working on: the Least Valuable Player Award. The two of them got walked through the most recent instance of my spreadsheet-induced-madness with some answers as the the who, what, when, where, why, and how of it all; and I shared a few choice nuggets that came up during the compilation of all of the data, but only a few - after all, we like to keep episodes to about an hour. And having released the sheet to anyone who wanted to look, I figured that all those other stories were at least there for other folks to find and dig into. But… what if some of the good ones just lay untouched. What if someone never learns about all of the Guys named Dick on this list?

And then, I remembered that I could just start writing some of those up here.

And so, as with Curtain Call, I’m debuting what I hope will be a weekly series for as long as I have more LVP stories to share¹ . For the time being, there are a few excellent stories discussed in that episode to tide you over until the next one of these posts comes out next week. But if you skipped that episode, let’s take a second to catch you up on what we’re talking about in the first place.

WHO?

The Least Valuable Player award is an honor that we at RTG? have retroactively bestowed on more than 500 athletes from the four major North American pro-sports: baseball, football, ice hockey, and basketball (men’s and women’s). The 569 (nice) seasons represented in this database have very little linking them with one very important exception - they were all, for the season in which they won, the most statistially detrimental to the overall success of their team(s). In other words, they provided the least value of any other player in that given league for that given year.

WHAT?

Value, the intangible concept at the heart of the question that voters have to determine every year when selecting the MVPs for various leagues - does that mean “the best season”, does that mean “the best player on the best team”, and how would one measure whichever metric you think best determines that value. This is where the nerds come in with numbers and statistics, and generally over the years more numbers become available, and generally we as a society get better at interpreting those numbers. Runs Batted In, when it became an official statistic in 1920, was very good for expanding the contemporary understanding of the sport of baseball; but that and a lot of the other traditional stats are largely understood now to be useful in many contexts but lacking when determining something like value because of, using RBI as an example, how context-dependent they can be.

So more and more refined numbers started getting generated using many of these traditional datasets as jumping off points. As a regular user of the sports-reference family of website, I am particularly indebted to a series of statisticians including Sean Smith, Justin Kubatko, and Doug Drinen who have developed a number of catchall statistics for the four major professional North-American sports: Wins Against Replacement for baseball (specifically baseball-reference Wins Against Replacement or bWAR), Win Shares for basketball, Point Shares for hockey, and Approximate Value for football. All of these measure in their own way the general contribution that a player made to their team over the course of a given season or career - in other words, their value. And if these can be used to try and mathematically determine the Most Valuable Players, then it should in turn be able to help us determine the Least Valuable Players as well.

WHEN? WHERE?

To better describe what the source of our data is, these two questions are best lumped together. Between the four sports that I mentioned in the last graf, I built out a list of all the LVPs that I could find in the history of five different leagues (with some asterisks):

1. In the case of baseball, Major League Baseball as it exists today is made up of the formerly separate entities that now function more like conferences, the American and National Leagues. However, Major League Baseball also technically includes: the National Association, the Union Association, the American Association, the Players League, the Federal League, the Eastern Colored League, the American Negro League, the Negro Southern League, the East-West league, the Negro American League, and two different Negro National Leagues.
   
   While baseball-reference has records going back to 1871, when the National Association began operations, for the purposes of this exercise baseball’s LVPs will be awarded beginning in 1876 coinciding with the National League’s founding and then incorporating the American League beginning with its founding 1901. The public LVP index does also include a table that shows a few LVP winners prior to 1943 from the other various leagues, but in the interest of knowing what the history of the “award” looks like as it pertains to modern existing franchises, all winners will have been members of teams participating in the leagues that remain in operation dating back to 1876.²
   

2. In the case of men’s basketball, basketball-reference records go back to the founding of the Basketball Association of America, which begins play in 1946. As with baseball, several franchises here may wink in and out of existence, but at all times the winners will have participated in a season recognized as part of the current league’s existence. This will not include the seasons played in the National Basketball league prior to its 1949 merger with the BAA that lead to the NBA rebranding, nor will it include any of the American Basketball Association seasons prior to the 1976 NBA-ABA merger. For the purposes of this exercise, any of those franchises that came over from the NBL and ABA are considered to have begun existence when they became members of the NBA; and the history of the Least Valuable Player in men’s basketball will go back that far as well. The men’s basketball Least Valuable Player has been awarded to one member of an eligible franchise every year dating back to that inaugural 1946 BAA season.
   

3. As for women’s basketball, basketball reference has data for all 29 WNBA seasons, beginning with 1997. There database does not contain the statistics for the American Basketball League that co-existed alongside the WNBA for about two-and-a-half years before folding; and while those are publicly available, for the time being the necessary sheer amount of calculations that would be necessary to determine the winshares for those 2.5 seasons are too daunting even for a dork like myself. Plus, while many of those players later joined the W, none of the franchises themselves were absorbed into the extant league. So, the women’s basketball LVP is just the history of the WNBA LVP.
   

4. In the case of hockey, point share statistics on hockey-reference date back to the founding of the National Hockey League to take the place of its National Hockey Association predecessor as a result of discontent with league leadership in 1917. Some of the franchises from the NHA made the leap, but they will be treated as having begun anew alongside the NHL in 1917, even though some of those teams and even the Stanley Cup itself are older than the actual league.
   
   As for the teams that would later join from other leagues like the World Hockey Association, which was subsumed by the NHL after a brief period of competition in the 1970s: just like any of the basketball teams from leagues that later joined the primary one still in existence, their history dates back to when they joined. And from that pool of teams, an LVP for hockey has been selected going all the way back to that 1917 season.
   

5. In the case of pro football, we unfortunately have a more limited dataset than in most other case. Pro-football-reference AV stats only go back as far as 1960, due to the fact that many of the individual statistics used to calculate the AV for players weren’t recorded. So for starters, we’ll only be able to give out LVP awards in pro football beginning with the 1960 National Football League season through present day. We do also run into the situation again where during that span of time, our still-in-existence league consumes another, smaller league in the American Football League. For the pro football LVPs, players were only eligible when they were playing for a team that was in the NFL at that time (or, in the case of the AFL teams during the 4 years of Super Bowl play prior to the formal merger, when they were playing a season that would later be considered a retroactive NFL season). The Canadian Football League will not be included even if their stats were available due to rule differences (go Stallions though); and no other startup leagues like the United States Football League or the World Football League will factor in either, though if a player later joined an NFL team that later season would be eligible.

WHY?

Let me be real with you - I’m a hater, and an unabashed one at that. And the hate that I feel for the New York Yankees runs deep in my marrow, just waiting for a chance to flare up. Like, say, when Aaron Judge (yes, the greatest hitter of his generation, okay cool) beat out Cal Raleigh for the 2025 AL MVP award despite Raleigh being A CATCHER WHO HIT 60 HOMERUNS AND WAS THE BEST PLAYER ON A TEAM THAT FINISHED WELL AHEAD OF NEW YORK AND LOOKED A HELLUVA LOT BETTER THAN THEM IN THE PLAYOFFS.

I, personally, hated this decision. Sincere, “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”-type hate. And I fully understand, that if you go to baseball-reference and just sort American League players by bWAR, Aaron Judge outpaced #2 Cal Raleigh by 1.3 amongst all position players, regardless of American or National League. And if the award is just supposed to go to the person with the highest bWAR every season, then this was the correct decision.

And despite everything that I have demonstrated to this point about my affinity and affection for numbers, I think that’s stupid. WAR, like all of the other catch-all stats, is an incredibly useful tool to talk about baseball and contextualize the accomplishments of our favorite (or least-favorite) players. It’s also a formula, albeit a very good one, developed by people that cannot possibly exist without bias. I don’t mean that they’re all closeted Yankees fans engaging in a vast conspiracy, I just mean that all of these formulae are developed by people who have a certain idea of what aspects of a player’s contribution are valuable and how valuable each individual aspect is.

Now maybe you see the chasm between #1 and #2 of 1.3 wins, the same difference amongst position players between #2 and #10, is sufficient for you to say there’s no interpretation of “value” that can justify saying that Judge isn’t tops in that category. And you, my dear hypothetical friend, are as welcome to have that opinion as I am to disagree with it. I think there were several additional factors about the CATCHER WHO HIT 60 HOMERUNS AND WAS THE BEST PLAYER ON A TEAM THAT FINISHED WELL AHEAD OF NEW YORK AND LOOKED A HELLUVA LOT BETTER THAN THEM IN THE PLAYOFFS that, to me, put him over the top.

And so, as I was being a crotchety grump about this, I decided to take it in the complete opposite direction - if this one sum-everything-up stat is the end-all be-all of the valuable conversation, then surely looking at the bottom of the leaderboard on a season-by-season basis can tell us which player is least valuable, regardless of any other circumstances. To be completely honest, this kind of started out as an exercise in spite. But the further down the rabbit hole I went, the more delighted I became from the stories and the Guys I was coming across, the more interested in the question of what “least valuable” could tell us about the sport - and so, now with a much more positive outlook, I completed the awarding of the RTG? Least Valuable Player awards.

HOW?

With the concept, it was time to actually run the hundreds of stathead searches that would be needed to get all of the necessary information to hand out the LVPs. This was more tedious than actually difficult, but it’s probably still worth a quick walkthrough.

Just as baseball currently awards two MVPs, one each for the American and National Leagues, we too at RTG? will award two baseball LVPs for every season dating back to 1876. However, this will be league agnostic (since after all that includes a quarter century of just National League play), and instead will be split between pitchers and hitters. This partially because I thought it would be interesting to compare the two player pools, see if there were any differences in how the worst of the worst looked in those two realms compared to one another throughout history. It was also partially because stathead season searches for batters and pitchers have to be run separately and the idea of then later going through and deciding what to do about seasons with potential ties between batters and hitters gave me hives, and so: two awards for every year going back to 1876. There were a handful of ties amongst batters and pitchers themselves at times, and when in doubt I followed one general guideline on that: same negative value in fewer Innings or Plate Appearances = less valuable player overall. In total, that means we currently have exactly 300 baseball LVPs following the recent conclusion of the 2025 season.

Basketball Win Shares are pretty straight forward for both the NBA/BAA and WNBA LVPs; and just like with baseball, the few instances of a tie were easily solved by looking at either Minutes Played or Games Played, depending on which statistic was available for that given season. This allowed us to pretty easily get our 79 NBA LVPs and 29 WNBA LVPs. And everything I just wrote is easily applied to hockey with Point Shares as well, though it did more often fall to games rather than minutes played for what it’s worth. The only real difference is that with basketball, every position is equally able to accumulate positive or negative Win Shares³ . In hockey, at least with hockey-reference, goalies simply do not accumulate Point Shares. This feels tough, because it is probably the easiest position in theory to gain or lose value at in terms of your contribution to the team’s success. But, with no easy number available to me, and with the ample data for Point Shares for all other players, I have decided that goalies are like The Troops, and we must respect The Troops - because being a goalie seems like it largely sucks, and I don’t mind saying that they have enough intrinsic value to just never be LVP. You are welcome to develop your own formula to counter me if you would like, but for now, we looked at exclusively skaters while handing out 108 LVP awards.

Football by nature is the sport with the fewest games, and as a result it gives us the smallest amount of actual in game data to pull from when judging the value of a player. It is also unique in that where WAR, WS, and PS all try to directly put the value in context of how it affects the team’s win/loss total; AV is really just useful in tiering where players stand in terms of their overall contribution to the team when compared to other players instead of being some kind of metric directly related to team success. An incomplete data set for decades of NFL seasons, combined with AV just kind of being funkier than its counterparts, means that this is actually the only award in which we actually have several seasons where no one posted a negative value⁴ . For any of those years, there was simply never going to be a way to parse all of the players with an AV of 0, and as such no LVP was awarded. In total, 12 of the 65 seasons for which data was available saw no negative players, and as such there are only 53 NFL LVPs.

In total, the newly formed history of the LVP award now spans 430 total seasons across the 5 leagues, dating as far back as 1876. During that time, a total of 569 (nice) LVPs have been awarded to 550 different individuals. I look forward digging for new stories in this list as well as going deeper on some of the stories I’ve already found, and I hope you do too!

1  And, to clarify, not just the Dick ones.

2  Worth mentioning for a moment here that those leagues do absolutely show up when considering all major leagues for their given active season, often due to the talent or lack thereof that they attracted, and so this is likely ripe for some revisiting down the line…

3  Admittedly I don’t have data at this time about which positions in basketball, or any of the sports really besides football, tend to pick up the award at a higher rate than any others. Something to look into!

4  The last thing I looked at over the history of the award was the total number of players posting negative value seasons in a given year. We talk a little in the episode about what these trends might be able to reveal over time, and that does of course require some additional context based on the number of teams in the league fluctuating throughout, so that’s something to go further into depth about at some other time. But now, if you’re wondering what those last couple of columns are in the sheet, well, there you go.