Yogi Berra won 10 World Series rings in his 19-year playing career, while Ken Griffey Jr. played 22 seasons without once reaching a World Series. Both were no-brainer Hall of Famers, but it definitely became a Dan Marino-ish "How has this incredible player never played on a championship team?" talking point that followed Griffey over the latter half of his career.
It's becoming a thing for quite a few current greats, as well. Forty career wins above replacement is a good cutoff for this exercise, right? Players who reach that threshold without winning a World Series have been good enough for long enough that it becomes noteworthy if they've never gotten a ring. With that criterion in mind, we found 13* active^ players who have accumulated at least 40 career WAR on either Baseball Reference or FanGraphs.
(As it so happens, all 13 have at least 40 career WAR on both sites, so we'll just use B-R from here.) We've also included Shohei Ohtani, who is currently at 37.6 career bWAR, may well eclipse 40 before the 2024 playoffs begin and has yet to experience any round of the MLB postseason, let alone the World Series.
Because we're comparing some guys with seven years of experience to others with 17 years of experience, the ranking was a bit tricky. Didn't want to go with a straight ranking by career WAR and overvalue the older guys, but also didn't want to rank based on value added in the current season and thereby undervalue the older guys. So we settled on a loose ranking of like.
