Every week is a new opportunity to explore someone random on MLB Monday, and today the lucky professional baseball player is longtime New York Yankees second baseman Bobby Richardson, perhaps one of the most overrated athletes in the history of the sport. But hey, he played for the Bronx Bombers in an era (1955-1966) where anyone wearing the pinstripes seemed to be adored, no matter how good they were or were not on the diamond. His career is pretty unique, though, in terms of really being overrated.

Robert Clinton Richardson played 16 games combined for the 1955-1956 Yankees, hitting .152 in those brief stints at a young age. His official rookie season (1957) at age 21 was also pretty unimpressive—but somehow he made the first of eight All-Star teams nonetheless. Never mind his .573 OPS in 97 games played, with no home runs and only 19 RBI, or the fact he was 1-for-4 in stolen-base attempts. His main value came on defense, where he posted 1.1 dWAR to establish a reputation that wasn’t accurate.

That 1957 season was one of just two years where Richardson topped 1.0 dWAR, and his career OPS (.634) was a joke, really. His career WAR mark (8.1) is incredibly low for a guy who made so many All-Star teams and played on three World Series championship squads (1958, 1961-1962) and four other AL pennant winners (1957, 1960, 1963-1964). Truth be told, he managed to somehow post a .735 OPS in 36 World Series games, so there’s that tidbit: he upped his game in October, if we can call it that.

After all, with his bat, there was nowhere to go but up, really. Across 73 games in 1958, his OPS was just .578 at age 22, suggesting he just didn’t have the talent to stay in the majors through his first 186 games. Yet, that is just more than one full season, and by 1959 at age 23, Richardson did finally “figure out” MLB pitchers: he hit a robust .301 with a middling .713 OPS to finish with 2.2 overall WAR. His defense slipped to just 0.3 dWAR, but perhaps the improvements at the plate were worth it, right?!

Whatever those improvements were, they disappeared over the next two campaigns (1960-1961), where Richardson posted a combined 0.0 WAR on two pennant-winning teams. It’s hard to imagine how he played in 312 regular-season games, fielded to the tune of just 0.2 dWAR in those 312 contests, and still held on to his starting spot in the New York lineup. After making his second All-Star team in 1959, it’s almost a relief to see that he did not make the All-Star teams in either 1960 or 1961: he was that terrible.

It must be noted at this point that he somehow won the 1960 World Series MVP vote, even though we completely disagree with that, as noted elsewhere. He had 12 RBI in those seven Fall Classic games against Pittsburgh (none of them came in the decisive Game 7 which New York lost by one run), after driving in only 26 runs during the regular season in 150 games. Clearly, though, he was a media darling to win that vote as a member of the losing team, as his WPA mark for the Series was actually negative. Ouch!

Richardson also somehow won a Gold Glove in 1961 with negative dWAR (minus-0.4) at age 25, and by all rights, his career perhaps would have been over if the Yankees hadn’t managed to win the World Series. Maybe that is an exaggeration, although the statistics and sabermetric profile (67 OPS+) are terrible. He was beloved for reasons we cannot understand from a distance, but again, anyone who put on the pinstripes in this era just automatically was feted, whether deserved or not. That’s the case here, eh?

What’s perhaps most intriguing is how he made All-Star teams in his final five MLB seasons (1961-1966) and then abruptly retired after his age-30 season. His best year, 1962, featured 3.3 WAR and a laughable second-place finish in the MVP vote. It was the only campaign of his career that featured a triple-digit OPS+ mark (101), though. So there’s that, ahem, but he also won another Gold Glove with a negative dWAR mark (minus-0.5) in 1965. His career is just quite confusing to analyze now 60 years later.

The “good” news here is that Richardson is not in Cooperstown. We know that sounds mean, but not even the Veterans Committee would go there after he fell off the ballot in just three years after becoming eligible. At this point in time, he ranks as the 235th-best keystone in MLB history, despite all those individual accolades earned during his playing career. Richardson is still alive today, but even the most flattering bio is deceiving: “Richardson was by all accounts a slick, rangy glove man and a steady stick man.”

The first claim is debatable, and the second boast just is an outright fiction. But hey, he played for the Yankees when they were winning all the time, so despite the sabermetrics that clearly show he was inconsistent and overall mediocre, he gets praised. This is one of those examples of the infamous “East Coast Media Bias” that plagued an era of sports coverage, and sometimes still does. If Richardson had come up with the Kansas City Athletics in 1955, he’d have disappeared pretty quickly. Oh, to be lucky in life!