With the San Francisco Giants and Texas Rangers set to begin the 2010 World Series, we couldn’t help but allow our minds to drift to all things World Series related.

Great pitching, late-inning hits, walk-off homers, all of it is great on the World Series stage.

Most semi-serious to serious baseball fans can name the World Series winners from the last 10 years. Some could even name them from the last 20 years. If you can name beyond that, I think you have too much time on your hands.

But here’s a more difficult task: How many World Series MVPs can you remember?

It would be impressive if you could remember the last five. Hell, I had trouble thinking of last year’s until I looked it up.

Since MVPs are largely forgotten, we thought it would be fun to take a look at World Series MVPs from the last 25 years.

How are we going to do that? Power rankings.

We took the past 25 seasons (1985-2009) and ranked the MVPs in some loose order—in other words, don’t get too caught up on who is No. 11 and who is No. 16. They are all MVPs and all worthy of the list.

One clarifying note: Due to a work stoppage, there was no World Series in 1994 and therefore no MVP.

But there was one year on the list that had Co-MVPs, so instead of taking the list back to 1984 (sorry, Alan Trammell) we decided to use those Co-MVPs as two in order to fill the gap from ’94.

One last thing to ponder: Pitching is the headliner of this year’s World Series beginning with Cliff Lee and Tim Lincecum. For what it’s worth, out of the last 25 MVPs, 14 were pitchers. Will this year make it 15-of-26?

On to the power ranking… 

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