USA TODAY Sports via Reuters
Francisco Lindor is not going to win the NL MVP this season, but he — at minimum — pushed himself closer to being a Hall of Famer.
Big picture: There is a pathway for Lindor ending up with the most career homers while playing shortstop. He already is in the inner circle for most 5.0 Wins Above Replacement seasons at the position, and what he added in 2024 are the kind of highlight moments that tend to enrich a candidacy.
Baseball Reference has a metric called Championship Win Probability Added (cWPA) that attempts to define how much a player’s efforts in a game moved his team closer to a World Series title.
The No. 1 play in this category for the regular season was Lindor’s ninth-inning, two-run homer off Atlanta’s Pierce Johnson that flipped a 7-6 deficit to an 8-7 victory and clinched a playoff spot for the Mets in Game 161. It is now a forever highlight at Citi Field.