Why should politics get to have all the fun with chats? In preparation for the World Series, which starts Tuesday, we summoned the biggest baseball obsessives on FiveThirtyEight’s staff to Slack to talk about the New York Mets and Kansas City Royals. As usual, the transcript below has been lightly edited.

neil_paine (Neil Paine, senior sportswriter): After the long season, it all comes down to the Royals and the Mets. So, first things first, let’s just put it out there: How do these two teams compare? Kansas City had a better regular-season record (95 wins vs. 90 for New York), but what do the deeper indicators say?

hjenten (Harry Enten, senior political writer and huge baseball fan): Well, let me take the surface-layer answer here as a non-sportswriter (though one who follows some of the deeper statistics) — based off runs scored and allowed (i.e., the Pythagorean win formula), the teams are very close. The Royals should have won 90 games, while the Mets should have won 89 games.

rob (Rob Arthur, baseball columnist): I would echo Harry and say that the teams are quite even. BaseRuns gives the Mets a small but significant edge, but the Royals relief corps plays up in the postseason, when they can use their top three relievers more.

hjenten: I think that, of course, ignores the fact that the Mets were a far different team after they traded for Yoenis Cespedes in late July. The Mets went a combined .627 in August, September and October, while the Royals went .567.

neil_paine: Rob, to your point, it seems like the Royals used “sequencing” to their advantage, but there may be reason to think that at least some of that is real and can persist in the World Series?

rob: The Royals are a very contact-oriented team, with the lowest strikeout percentage in the majors by a large margin. They are also excellent against high-velocity fastballs, which pitchers often go to when they are in a jam. Those attributes may give them a tiny edge in terms of sequencing, but there’s no question that they’ve been overachieving as well.

neil_paine: And for what it’s worth, it should probably be mentioned that the Royals played a tougher schedule (certainly during the regular season); Baseball-Reference.com’s Simple Rating System has the Royals ranked 10th in baseball in strength of schedule and the Mets 29th, which probably feeds into the difference in their Elo ratings even now:

hjenten: Of course, the Mets just beat the team that had the NL’s best Elo rating going into the league championship series, the Cubs …

neil_paine: That’s true — Elo gave the Cubs about a 60 percent chance of winning that series, and the Mets won (swept!!) anyway; now Elo gives KC a 55 percent chance of beating New York, so grain of salt and all that.

Harry, you brought up a difference in the two teams as the season went on. Obviously the Mets added Cespedes at the trade deadline, but the Royals also did some dealing — some of which has worked out better than others.

rob: The Royals grabbed Johnny Cueto and Ben Zobrist at the deadline. And while Zobrist has been his typical self — with a .933 postseason OPS (on-base plus slugging) — Cueto has not looked comfortable. It’s hard to tell how much of that is normal performance fluctuation and how much is real. There are reasons that Cueto might not be at his best: a new catcher in Salvador Perez, the fatigue of a long season and many innings, and the ever-present threat of a hidden injury.

hjenten: Yes, and the Royals were actually slightly worse in the final few months of the year than they were overall. The Mets, on the other hand, were clearly better after those trades.

neil_paine: How much of that do we think is because the Royals all but locked up the division and the playoffs so early? And maybe more to that point, how much credence do we give to playing your best baseball right now? Certainly that’s what the Mets seem to be doing.

rob: I don’t put very much stock in the second-half stats, partially because the Mets put up those stats against the weakest second-half schedule in MLB. As for the more recent postseason performance, a lot of the Mets’ playoff run has been fueled by an insane stretch from Daniel Murphy, which likely will not continue.

It’s also worth noting that Cespedes is injured, so if he’s the cause of their second-half surge, the Mets may be in trouble.

hjenten: Well, here’s why I would put a little more trust in the late-season records. Yes, the Mets beat up on some crummy teams, but they also went 7-2 against the Nationals from July 31 on and more than whacked the ever-loving snuff out of some of those bad teams. They scored 320 runs and gave up 243 (a 103-win pace, according to Pythagoras); meanwhile, the Royals scored 290 and gave up 269 (an 87-win pace). In other words, NY was playing far better ball than KC over the season’s final two-plus months.

And it’s not like Kansas City has dominated the postseason, either. If not for a miracle against Houston, they’d be sitting at home like we are. As for Cespedes — yeah, he got hurt in that final game, but I haven’t seen any signs that he’s not going to play. We’ll see.

neil_paine: Since you guys mentioned Cueto, Murphy and Cespedes, let’s talk about the Mets’ hitting against the Royals’ pitching. I think we can all agree that Murphy will eventually cool down and stop hitting like a real-life Roy Hobbs, so where will the Mets’ offense come from when that happens? Do they have any players on cold streaks that might regress to the mean (in a positive way) and cover for Murphy?

rob: One reason for Mets optimism is the fact that so many of their players have been underachieving in the postseason: David Wright, Lucas Duda and Travis d’Arnaud all spring to mind. So even if (when!) Murphy cools off, one of these guys might step it up. They have an OK offense by BaseRuns, so they shouldn’t need Murphy to be superhuman forever.

hjenten: I think we’re obviously dealing with small sample sizes in the playoffs, but during the regular season, the Mets’ best hitter was not Daniel Murphy. D’Arnaud (who hit two homers in the NLCS) posted a 128 OPS+ in limited action, and Mike Conforto (who homered in the division series) had a 132 OPS+. Obviously Duda (132) and Cespedes (157) were also outstanding hitters. Duda had been in a slump, but he showed some signs of life in Game 4. To me, the offense is less of a question than whether Jacob deGrom, Thor and Matt Harvey can continue to pitch as well as they have been doing.

neil_paine: We’ll certainly get to those three later, but before we do: Is KC’s rotation as concerning as it might seem? Can its dominating bullpen make up for it?

rob: The Royals’ rotation is worrisome, especially with Cueto potentially being in trouble. But as you mentioned, Neil, the Royals have the tools to make up for their shaky starters: an incredible defense (best in MLB last year by a HUGE margin) and a top-notch group of relievers. Here, too, the Royals may be able to take advantage of sequencing, by putting their good relievers in at the moments when the lead is most threatened. (This relies on Ned Yost knowing when to put his best relievers in, but he’s been much improved in that regard of late — Game 6 of the ALCS aside.)

I think it will come down to whether the Mets can chase the Royals starters early and expose the weaker members of the bullpen. Because once it gets to their best relievers in the late innings, the Royals become very hard to beat.

hjenten: And the Mets bullpen, outside of Jeurys Familia, is quite troubling. Their eighth-inning man, Tyler Clippard, has been anything but steady, giving up three runs in 4 2/3 innings this postseason. (That’s after giving up 10 runs in 14 2/3 innings in September/October.) And their lefty specialist is Jon Niese, who was rubbish as a starter. I’d say their best pitcher out of the pen at this point (besides Familia) is Bartolo Colon. That’s never a good sign.

rob: Don’t underestimate Fireman Bart!

neil_paine: But we’d be remiss if we didn’t also point out that the Mets’ starting rotation of deGrom, Syndergaard, Harvey (you mentioned these guys earlier, Harry) and Steven Matz have been otherworldly in the postseason so far. I crunched the numbers, and New York is allowing the second-lowest playoff FIP (fielding independent pitching) — relative to the league average — of any pennant winner during the wild-card era (since 1995).

Rob, you talked about the overwhelming velocity of New York’s starters when the Mets played the Cubs in the NLCS and how the strikeout-prone Cubs might have been particularly ill-equipped to deal with their heat. But now we almost have the polar opposite kind of lineup with the Royals.

rob: Right, the Royals are contact-heavy. And there’s some limited evidence that they are better than average at hitting heat. So as far as the matchup between the Mets’ starters and KC’s lineup, this looks to be strength against strength, and it’s not at all clear how that battle will end up.

It’s worth noting as well that temperature plays a significant role in offense, and it should be pretty chilly.

hjenten: On the weather front: Going for a low of 49 in KC on Tuesday night, 40 on Wednesday night. 42 in NYC on Friday night. 45 on Saturday night. So it will not be warm.

rob: Cold temperatures mean less offense, so when you mix the cold, high velocity and the quality Mets starters, we could see the Royals doing a lot more whiffing than they are used to.

hjenten: The Mets’ great starting pitching is not a fluke, either. During the regular season, deGrom had a 2.70 FIP, Harvey 3.05, Syndergaard 3.25. Matz was the worst, with 3.61 in limited time — still 7 percent better than the NL average. That stands in contrast to the Royals’ starters (during their time with KC): Only Ventura (3.57 FIP) was better than any of the Mets starters were during the regular season.

neil_paine: Through that lens, it looks like a pretty big mismatch of starting rotations.

hjenten: Now, can the Royals, who hit for contact, avoid that? Maybe. As you mentioned, the home-run-hitting Cubs were the opposite of the Royals in that regard. The key for the Royals is to get into that Mets bullpen early. If they can, the Mets are in trouble.

rob: And bear in mind that FIP won’t be totally fair to the Royals’ pitchers. Because their pitchers aren’t fielding-independent: Every liner they give up goes toward Lorenzo Cain or Alcides Escobar or some other, similar-competent defender.

neil_paine: That’s a great point, Rob. Although relative to the league, the Royals in this postseason actually look worse by ERA than by FIP!

hjenten: Here’s another thing. Compared with the regular-season numbers for deGrom (2.54 ERA), Harvey (2.71), Syndergaard (3.24) and Matz (2.27), the only Royals starter with a better ERA than any of them was Chris Young, at 3.06. No one else was under 3.50. (And it isn’t as though the average ERAs for the AL and NL were drastically different — the NL’s ERA was about a tenth of a run lower.)

rob: Ha — well there goes that idea.

neil_paine: We mentioned the cold and how it might not be conducive for hitting. Does this give an edge to a team like the Royals, who are pretty adept at the small-ball things that win one-run games? Or have we seen enough of that out of the Mets this postseason (even if it’s uncharacteristic, given their regular season) that it might not be as much of a lopsided matchup on the basepaths?

hjenten: The Mets didn’t really run in the regular season, with only 51 stolen bases (worst in the NL). Meanwhile, the Royals stole 104 times (second in the AL). But in the postseason, you’re right, it’s different: The Mets have had nine steals, while the Royals have had seven. Cespedes can run, and Granderson can definitely run (three stolen bases in the NLCS).

rob: In theory, the Mets have the baserunning edge anyway. That’s hard to believe when you look at specific players like Lorenzo Cain (who scored the series-winning run from first on a single in Game 6 of the ALCS), but bear in mind that Cain is counterbalanced to some extent by Kendrys Morales, Mike Moustakas and others.

neil_paine: So it sounds like that won’t be as much of an edge for KC as it’s often made out to be.

rob: Yep. I think a lot will hinge on the Royals’ appetite for (and execution of) those small-ball tactics (like sacrifice bunts) that are despised by modern sabermetrics. It works for them — or at least it has worked, over and over — but the percentages suggest that it isn’t helping them in the long run. We’ll have to see whether Kansas City’s magic runs out.

hjenten: And all it takes is one play in the World Series.

neil_paine: OK, so let’s bring it all the way back for the big picture on the Series itself. What are your predictions?

rob: I will say Royals in seven, but let’s be realistic: A 55 percent favorite (as Elo estimates) is barely a favorite at all. The outcome is almost certainly within the margin of error of any publicly available forecasting tool.

So it will not surprise me whichever way this goes. And after this postseason, I am just excited to see some more weird baseball.

hjenten: I also want to say the Royals in seven. But to be different, I will say Mets in five.

neil_paine: OK, you heard it here first — Royals in seven … maybe.

Thanks for chatting, guys, and we’ll be back later in the World Series. See you then!

No matter what happens at the end of this year’s World Series, a curse is getting broken. On Tuesday, the Chicago Cubs will open up proceedings against the Cleveland Indians, and by Nov. 2, one of them will have claimed the title. For two teams with the some of the worst championship luck in all of baseball, this series will offer long-awaited catharsis for one — and even more misery for the other.

No team is ever a shoo-in to win a championship. But all else being equal, great teams should claim the title more often than merely good ones. To confirm that hypothesis, I looked at every team’s end-of-season Elo rating (a measure of team strength) and whether that team won the World Series, in every postseason era — from when two pennant-winning teams went straight from the regular season to the World Series, to the modern 10-team field that battles through multiple playoff rounds.⁴

As expected, a team’s probability of winning the World Series increases as its roster gets stronger. But the effect of having a good team is completely overwhelmed by the number of opponents a squad must face to get to the World Series. Consider the worst and best teams to have ever made the playoffs by Elo’s reckoning: the 2005 San Diego Padres (with a rating of 1489) and the 1906 Chicago Cubs⁵ (1635). In a two-team playoff system — which is what the 1906 Cubs faced — that Padres team would be expected to win the World Series only 23 percent of the time, while the Cubs had a commanding 72 percent chance of taking home the title. In the current 10-team playoff system, the Padres’ odds would shift down to 4 percent — but the 1906 Cubs would drop much more dramatically, all the way down to 28 percent.⁶ That’s why the modern playoffs are a crapshoot: No matter how good a team is, by the time it gets to the postseason, its chance at the championship isn’t radically better than that of the worst team in the playoffs.

As a corollary, any ballclub that appears in the postseason often enough — no matter how mediocre its teams are — should eventually be guaranteed a World Series win. But for more than a century’s worth of Cubs squads, no level of greatness has been able to get them over the hump. I determined just how unlucky each franchise has been over its postseason history by taking its Elo rating and the size of the playoff field and then calculating how likely the team was to win the Series each year using the process I outlined above. I added up those probabilities from all the years in which a World Series was held and compared them with how many titles the teams actually won, and I found that the Cubs are the unluckiest team of the last 113 years.

Just based on the pretty-good teams the Cubs have featured in their 18 playoff appearances, my model expected them to win six or seven championships. Instead, they’ve only won two since 1903, and both were more than 100 years ago. (Notably, this year’s Cubs triumphed in the NLCS over the second-most-unlucky team, the Los Angeles Dodgers.) The Cubs have had more years to be unlucky than most teams, since they’ve existed for a long time. But even on a per-playoff-season basis, the Cubs have been the least fortunate franchise in baseball.

But you already knew the Cubs were unlucky. The misfortunes of the Cleveland Indians, on the other hand, had attracted far less ink before this season, despite their status as the eighth-most-unlucky franchise in the same time frame. The Indians don’t have quite the cursed reputation of the Cubs, and that’s fair. But when you consider that they’ve also been the seventh-most-unlucky team in terms of converting regular-season wins into playoff appearances since 1998, it’s easier to believe that Cleveland is hexed. (By contrast, the Cubs have been the second-luckiest team at getting into the playoffs in that same period.)

One of these franchises will see its championship drought end soon. If the baseball gods have any mercy, they’ll reward the Cubs for assembling what will probably go down as one of the best squads of all time. Yet, as a Cubs fan myself, I’ve been trained to believe that seasons can only end in heartbreak. But whether or not it ends this year, statistically speaking, the curse can’t persist forever. Probably.

VIDEO: Cleveland fooled us twice

In preparation for the World Series, which starts Tuesday night, we invited ESPN MLB writer/editor Christina Kahrl and our own baseball columnist, Rob Arthur, into Slack to chat about the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians. As usual, the transcript below has been lightly edited.

neil (Neil Paine, baseball editor and sportswriter): Well, we’re finally down to two teams, the Cubs and the Indians, both of whom have long championship droughts on the line. So my first question for the room is just a big-picture one: How did these teams stack up in the overall sabermetric numbers during the regular season?

rob (Rob Arthur, baseball columnist): Both teams were good, but the Cubs were also great, fantastic, amazing and 10 other superlatives on top of that. In the first half of the season, they had as good a run differential as any team ever — right up there with the 1927 Yankees. They were merely dominant in the second half, but in either half Chicago was better than Cleveland: the Cubs had a +91 run differential in the second half alone, which is only 10 less than the Indians racked up all season. And, remarkably, some measures (such as cluster luck) suggest this Cubs team got unlucky.

Which is not to say that the Indians were a bad regular-season team — they had the fourth-best run differential in baseball. But they also probably got a little fortunate from a cluster luck perspective, and their pitching, while solid, was also weakened due to injuries by October. So this matchup is probably a bit lopsided in favor of the Cubs, at least if we go by regular-season numbers.

christina (Christina Kahrl, ESPN.com baseball writer and editor): I would think whatever metric you used, you’re going to get happy answers about the Cubs and Indians that don’t involve a stack of head-scratchy one-run outcomes or players having extraordinary seasons outside their expected range of performance. (Well, except maybe Tyler Naquin’s strikeout rate.) But across 162, these were two very good teams. Outside of the Cubs’ sporadic offensive disappearances, we’ve seen two of the best regular-season teams also play well in October. If not for injuries to the Indians’ rotation, you could have seen that these two teams belonged here months ago.

There are interesting distinctions, of course. The Cubs and Indians both walk plenty, but the Indians aren’t in quite the same class when it comes to power production. But they’re both very balanced offenses, with good amounts of contact (call it BABIP or just execution on balls in play), power, patience and speed. The fun gets into the differences between how Cleveland manager Terry Francona used his bullpen to compensate when the rotation melted down, and how the Cubs churned through relief combinations before trading for Aroldis Chapman at the deadline. To some extent, both teams are where they are because of how well their answers worked out.

neil: So we’re not seeing fluky teams! These two teams might legitimately be some of the very best in baseball! Seems like a departure from recent World Series history.

christina: And yet — maybe it’s because I’m in Chicago — because of those injuries in the Indians’ rotation, folks are already anticipating a walkover. The last 15 years or so should perhaps suggest a little less overconfidence on this score. I can’t help but think of the 2006 or 2011 Cardinals as notable examples of underdog winners.

rob: Right, and given that it’s only seven games, anything can happen.

neil: Yeah, I was gonna ask because Rob mentioned that it was “a bit lopsided” — in baseball, that still doesn’t really mean either team is very likely to win over the other. At most maybe it’s 60-40, or 65-35, for the favorite?

christina: Well, the Cubs should be favored, for all sorts of reasons about how awesome they are (not just because the Indians’ rotation is a shambles). And I think you’re right in terms of how far that lean should be. But I also remember “October unbeatable” Jon Lester losing a must-win game in 2014, so I tend not to believe in absolutes.

rob: Yeah, and interestingly, everything from betting markets to our Elo ratings to FanGraphs’ simulations puts the probability between 60 to 70 percent for the Cubs. So that speaks again to the randomness of baseball — I think it would be hard to argue that the Cubs aren’t better than the Indians, but despite that edge they only have about a 2-in-3 chance.

christina: To put it another way, this series doesn’t feel like the 1998 World Series, where there was almost no reason to watch unless you were a Yankees fan.

neil: Hey! Those Padres had a pretty good seas… — ah, I can’t finish that thought. It was a rout. But this one, less so, it sounds like.

Now, have we seen anything during the playoffs to make us think either team is better or worse than the yearlong numbers would indicate?

rob: Yes, I think it’s fair to say that the Cleveland bullpen — and Francona’s clever use of it — gives the Indians a strong advantage that isn’t reflected in their regular-season numbers. The Cubs don’t really have anything comparable to that; although their bullpen is strong, Chapman doesn’t seem comfortable outside of the eighth or ninth innings. (Even then, he’s looked shaky at times.) I don’t think we can say with much confidence how much exactly fireman Andrew Miller is worth, in terms of series win probability. But I think he probably keeps things to closer to 60-40 than 70-30, as some outlier predictions would put it.

christina: I do wonder how well the Cubs will do if the Indians get to their ’pen in the fifth, sixth or seventh innings. The Indians’ lineup has many strengths — it’s front-loaded with Carlos Santana leading off, it’s deep, and Francona isn’t afraid to use his bench. So in those middle-inning matchups, especially during games with the DH, I wouldn’t bet on Joe Maddon securing advantages as easily as he does against some NL opponents. A lot depends on whether the Indians get to the Cubs’ starters early — running up pitch counts, making them work from the stretch — and then forcing the game into the hands of relievers like Justin Grimm or Carl Edwards.

neil: Speaking of the managers, this seems like it’s going to be a battle of two extremely smart, saber-savvy tacticians — perhaps the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

christina: Well, let’s be fair, Howser vs. Herzog in 1985 was pretty awesome.

neil: If you wanted Whiteyball, you got it with last year’s Royals. This year — well, it’s not exactly Moneyball that these two teams play, but maybe something in the same tradition at least.

christina: But to your point, yes, it’s going to be a very interesting series in that regard, watching a couple of brilliant skippers with histories of putting players in a position to succeed. For those folks who say “managers don’t matter,” here are two great tacticians who are also extremely smart about how to manage people across six months, and who get the difference between managing the regular season and managing in October.

rob: Yes, although Maddon’s strength seems to lie in the parts of baseball that still aren’t visible to us: chemistry, the clubhouse and getting the best performances out of players. Francona is probably good at that, too, but bullpen management is a visible manifestation of his skill, whereas the best we can do to quantify Maddon’s ability is look at how his teams consistently have positive run differentials.

christina: Yeah, I wouldn’t put either over the other as far as people management. “Tito” and Maddon both deserve their reputations.

neil: So, aside from the battle of managerial wits and the two bullpens, what else will you be keeping an eye on as key matchups in the series?

rob: Christina mentioned above that Lester’s been incredible in the playoffs. That’s true — he’s Bumgarner-esque — but he has a critical weakness: the yips that prevent him from throwing over to first. In theory, that should make it easy to steal bases on him, but opponents have been curiously reluctant to exploit Lester’s flaw. The Dodgers tried — and failed — to do so, largely by dancing around between first and second, and Lester turned in another awesome start. But I do wonder if Francona’s tactical savvy can translate into more stolen bases and potentially weaken the Cubs’ best starter.

neil: Do the Indians have base runners who might especially be able to take advantage of something like that?

rob: The Indians had the third-best baserunning team in the majors, according to FanGraphs’ metrics. The Dodgers were 11th, although they had some good base stealers who just failed to convert. Jeff Sullivan posited that it’s a mental block for potential base stealers, as they are so unused to getting leads of 25 feet (or more!) that they don’t know what to do with them. That’s why I think it will mostly be a matter of Francona getting the base runners to actually take off, and not the skill of the base runners themselves. Almost any major leaguer should be able to get to second base before the throw when they have a 35-foot lead, as some of the Dodgers’ baserunners did:

christina: We should also remember that base stealers were 23 for 26 against Jake Arrieta, as well, so this isn’t just a Lester problem. I can see arguments that Willson Contreras might help control the damage in games that don’t feature the Lester-David Ross battery, but we’ll see.

neil: Sounds like we shouldn’t be surprised if Cleveland’s baserunning makes life difficult all series for what is otherwise a scary good Chicago rotation.

christina: They’ll need to try, because they only thing that’s going to take that Cubs’ defense down a notch is the friction multiple baserunners and men in motion can create. Play a static, big-inning offense where you wait around for hits, and the Cubs will find ways to kill your scoring opps. Russell-to-Baez-to-Rizzo is going to merit its own poetry.

rob: The defensive skill of the Cubs infield is a major factor that stops potential base runners. It’s all too easy to get caught in a TOOTBLAN* with Javy Baez’s creativity on one side of second base and Addison Russell’s sure hands on the other. In that way, it will be strength against strength.

(* Ed. note: That’s “Thrown Out On The Basepaths Like A Nincompoop,” for the uninitiated.)

christina: I’m also wondering which Arrieta or Kyle Hendricks we get. That could shape the series. Take Hendricks: The Indians are the best team in baseball at killing pitches 90 mph or slower. They’re third in baseball in OPS against off-speed pitches. If anyone is going to get to Hendricks in his magical year, it might be the Indians.

rob: I agree that Hendricks and Arrieta are less sure bets. Generally, a major strength of all of the Cubs pitchers is that they suppress batted ball velocity. I believe that’s a genuine skill that the Chicago rotation possesses, but it also seems like a skill that’s more variable than say, throwing 98 mph fastballs that your opponents can’t catch up to. So I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the Cubs have a couple of disastrous starting pitching outings and get BABIP’d to death.

neil: All right, let’s close this out with some official predictions. Who ya got, and in how many games?

rob: I’ll take the Cubs in 6. They are the better team, and one thing we only briefly alluded to is how tired and tattered Cleveland’s rotation is. I think the Cubs will dampen Cleveland’s bullpen advantage by overworking them, and that will be enough to close the Indians out. But not easily.

christina: It’s really tough, because while Cubs in 5 is probably the safest choice, there are so many things that could go wrong with that (or even just extend the series) that I’m sticking with my prediction over on ESPN.com: that the Indians find a way to win in 7. Because, how safe are the safe bets? But I’ll admit, there’s also an element of my wanting this to be an epic series, to give us something to remember beyond one of these two teams’ “curses” ending.

neil: Indians in 7? Christina, I knew you were a Chicagoan, but now I see you either are not a Cubs fan, or the most quintessential Cubs fan possible.

christina: Hah. Funnily enough, people mistake me for a White Sox fan, but I’m agnostic. (I’ve stuck with the team of my childhood, the A’s — hence my bitterness about Mr. Lester in 2014.) When I polled Chicagoans last week on Twitter, the second-largest group beyond the 39 percent of Chicagoans who call themselves Cubs fans who think they’ll win it all was the 31 percent who said they’re Sox fans who hope they blow it.

Besides, if the Cubs win, I can claim I didn’t jinx it, right?

neil: Very true, you are zigging where those not-so-covert Cubs fans we saw everywhere on Saturday night are zagging.

christina: I did the double-reverse, anti-curse, non-jinx prediction. Shazam!

neil: Well, I’ll split the difference and say Cubs in 7. That feels like the way this season is, and always has been, destined to end — though as we know, sometimes real baseball gets in the way of destiny, narratives and whatnot.

Either way, though, it looks like one of the more entertaining on-paper World Series in recent memory. I can’t wait!

VIDEO: Cleveland fooled us twice

You’re reading Back of the Envelope, an experiment that aims to bring shorter, quicker content to FiveThirtyEight.

All postseason, FiveThirtyEight’s MLB projections have had a lot of doubts about the Cleveland Indians — our forecast didn’t even think they would make it out of the division series. In the video above, Neil Paine explores the chances that Cleveland’s expectation-defying streak will continue in the World Series against the mighty Cubs.

Welcome to the latest episode of Hot Takedown, FiveThirtyEight’s sports podcast. On this week’s show (Oct. 25, 2016), we preview the World Series. First, we take a look at the Cleveland Indians and ask if credit for their success belongs only to their bullpen. Then, we chat about the Cubs and wonder if they are uniquely built for postseason baseball. We also ask Cubs fan Rob Arthur if he thinks the Cubs’ rotten luck is about to come to an end. Then, it’s NBA time again. We break down FiveThirtyEight’s CARMELO projections for the season and debate whether the Golden State Warriors can live up to their historically high expectations. And to close out the show, we share a significant digit about the WNBA finals.

Also, remember to check the Hot Takedown feed on Thursday for the third installment of our documentary series Ahead Of Their Time. The series looks at coaches and players who did something radical for their era and were later proven right by analytics. The third episode, coming on Thursday, is about the stathead who helped ruin English soccer. You can find the previous two episodes here. Links to what we discuss:

• Rob Arthur says even the data thinks the Cubs may have been cursed.
• Neil Paine writes that all it took for the Cubs to win the pennant was great hitting and pitching.
• Ben Lindbergh at The Ringer thinks the only way to beat Andrew Miller is to avoid him.
• Neil Paine writes that superteams like the Warriors usually underperform their numbers.
• Nate Silver explains what’s new in FiveThirtyEight’s NBA projections this year.
• You can find our CARMELO NBA projections here.
• ESPN’s Kevin Pelton gives us the reasons that we won’t see a Warriors-Cavs rematch this year.
• Significant Digit: 528,000. That was the average viewership figure for Game 5 of the WNBA Finals. More people actually watched Game 1 than the deciding game.

You’re reading Back of the Envelope, an experiment that aims to bring shorter, quicker content to FiveThirtyEight.

Do I want — really, actually, genuinely want — the Cubs to win the World Series? It’s a question I grappled with at length after a couple whiskeys with my best friend from back home as they marched toward the pennant. I love the Cubs. I’ve always loved the Cubs. There is little else (some humans excluded) I love more than the Cubs. So what’s my problem, anyway?

The Awl addressed the paradox with a cautionary tale from a Red Sox fan: “Without all the losing, the Red Sox are now just another pretty good team. The aura of mythology that swirled constantly around them was gone.” And that’s a big part of it. Losing is what the Cubs are known for. But we bleed-blue fans don’t root for lovable losers for the sake of it. We don’t do it because we’re proud of the title drought or miserable seasons. We don’t happily bask in the black-magic glow of curses or take masochistic joy in the outstretched arms of Bartmans.

We root for them because eventually they will win, they just have to! It’s math! Curses aren’t real! And when they do win … my God, it will be ecstatic bliss. Angels will sing. Fathers, sons, mothers, daughters will sob tears of joy. Bill Murray will be there. Etc.

The question is when do we want to cue the messianic chorus. Maybe Cubbie fandom is something like holding an American option — a piece of paper we Cubs fans carry around in our pocket and turn in at the bliss counter one day when they Win the World Series. In exchange we receive some number of singing angels. The longer this takes — the more heartache we bank — the more angels. That’s just math, people. If the Cubs had won it when I was, say, 3 years old, the rest of my fandom wouldn’t have been imbued with a greater, Sisyphean meaning. So, on my deathbed, yes, I should want nothing else than to cash in. If I’m watching from my high chair, I’d probably like to wait a while. To bide my time until 8:08 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday night, I hastily sketched a chart of how my 31-year-old self should weigh these priorities, complete with an “exercise boundary” that tells me when I should want the Cubs to win so I can cash in my pain for those angels.

So what does my analysis reveal? Will I be rooting for the Cubbies? Of course. I just can’t not. In late October, math no longer applies.

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When is a loss just a loss, and when is it a harbinger of things to come? On Tuesday night, the Chicago Cubs and the Golden State Warriors took hard losses in very different settings: Game 1 of the World Series (a 6-0 Cleveland Indians win) vs. Game 1 of the NBA season (a 129-100 drubbing by the Spurs). Weirdly, FiveThirtyEight’s Elo projections say each game had a similar effect on the Cubs’ and Warriors’ chances of winning a championship:

The stakes didn’t match at all, but the fallout did. That’s uncommon for two teams at opposite ends of their season but makes sense when you dig into why. Both of these swings reflect when these games were played: For the Cubs, the World Series is essentially a seven-game season, so every game will shift championship odds quite a bit. The Warriors, meanwhile, had a preseason championship probability that rested entirely on team rating (since the team didn’t have a record). That meant the odds could take a big swing early in the season.

The road back to being more than 50 percent likely to win the championship is quite different for the two teams. All the Cubs need to do is win Game 2, and their deeper roster will seduce the model again. The Warriors have further to go. While 38 percent is still an absurdly high probability to win the title one game into the season, they’ll need to break off an impressive run before they can convince the model, and the league, that they’re the overwhelming favorites they once appeared to be.

CHICAGO — The Cleveland Indians won a 1-0 nail-biter on Friday night in Game 3 of the World Series. Two number-three starters succeeded in shutting down two strong offenses, allowing the game to come down to the final at-bat. But while the relievers were overpowering as usual, the most significant influence on this game wasn’t the wind, a single Indians hitter or managerial cleverness, but a seemingly inconsistent strike zone.

Home plate umpire John Hirschbeck has a reputation for calling balls and strikes erratically, and that was on full display last night, creating shifting strike-zone boundaries that bedeviled both offenses.² For the Indians, Josh Tomlin turned in an unexpectedly solid line, allowing only two hits. At times, Tomlin was burned by bad calls, leading, for example, to a fourth-inning walk by Kris Bryant. But when the strike zone is called inconsistently, hitters tend to strike out more often and make weaker contact. That’s because pitchers can choose to target inconsistently called areas of the zone when it benefits them, while hitters can only decide whether to swing or not at what’s offered. When they’re uncertain, batters often opt to swing at pitches outside the zone, resulting in glancing contact and easy outs.

Chicago Cubs starter Kyle Hendricks, who usually gets favorable strike calls due to his impeccable command, struggled mightily in allowing six hits and two walks in only 4.2 innings. The shifting zone did aid him in racking up six strikeouts, above what you’d expect based on his regular-season stats.

Even as the inconsistent strike zone helped the pitchers, neither was overpowering. And with bullpens fresh after the day off, both starters were pulled before the 6th inning with the score 0-0, an event that has never happened before in MLB postseason history. That handed the game to the relievers, including an early appearance from Andrew Miller. They were as commanding as expected, except for one lapse by the Cubs’ Carl Edwards Jr., who allowed Coco Crisp to single in the lone run of the night.

The Cubs came close to evening the score in the bottom of the ninth. With two runners in scoring position and two outs, Chicago dynamo Javy Báez was up to bat against Cleveland closer Cody Allen. He struck out whiffing to end the threat, leaving the Indians up 2-1 in the Series.

The outlook for the Cubs is worrisome going forward: Their series win probability by Elo is down to only 37 percent.³ In his last start, Corey Kluber looked invincible, and the Cubs will have to face him in Games 4 and 7 of this Series (if it goes that far). That means they will need to pull off at least one upset against the 2014 AL Cy Young winner to clinch the series. While such a feat appears difficult, the Cubs managed an even more surprising performance against Clayton Kershaw in the NLCS, so it’s certainly possible. Nobody said ending a 108-year title drought would be easy.

CORRECTION (Oct. 29, 12:05 p.m.): An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Corey Kluber. He was the 2014 AL Cy Young winner; he is not the reigning winner.

CHICAGO — With a 2-1 World Series deficit and home-field advantage slipping away, the Cubs needed this game. Instead, the Indians soundly defeated the Cubs 7-2 on Saturday night in Game 4, silencing the normally raucous Wrigley crowd and drastically decreasing Chicago’s chance of taking home the championship. In a World Series marked by low scores, Cleveland has shut down the Cubs’ bats more than ever this year.

Pitching has defined this World Series. The average number of runs per game so far has been only 5.5, which is tied with 2015 and 2011 for the lowest total since 1983. Offense is down even more when you take into account the higher regular-season scoring in 2016: This year has seen the largest gap between World Series runs scored and the regular-season average since 1966.

Paradoxically, neither team’s pitchers have been altogether overpowering. In Game 3, an inconsistent strike zone kept both teams from plating many runs. On Saturday, the Indians batters managed to capitalize on mistakes while Corey Kluber kept the Cubs quiet. Kluber’s final line (6 IP, 1 ER) is somewhat deceptive: Throwing on only three days’ rest, his stuff seemed to lack the crispness and velocity that usually characterizes one of the best pitchers in the American League.

But Kluber’s 81 pitches went through the sixth inning, enough to hand the game over to the invincible Cleveland relievers. Outside of a solo home run allowed to Dexter Fowler, the Indians bullpen stopped any further scoring. Between the shaky starters and overpowering relievers, the Indians have totally controlled the Cubs offense. The four World Series games so far have seen the Cubs score only 7 runs, which is a lower total than they’ve racked up in any four consecutive games in the 2016 regular season.

Part of the problem was bad luck and sloppiness on the part of the Cubs. That included two errors by Kris Bryant, the Cubs’ normally sure-handed third baseman. Another problem was a gusting wind that turned at least one probable homer into a double.¹ But credit must be given where due: The Indians are executing their gameplan to perfection, getting small but reliable leads and then deploying their absurd bullpen to maintain them.

It will be hard for the Cubs to come back from this 3-1 deficit. As the Cavaliers taught us earlier this year, a 3-1 lead isn’t insurmountable, but Elo rates the Cubs’ the total chance of winning the Series at a measly 15 percent. (That’s a smaller chance than FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast model currently gives Donald Trump to win the White House.) But if Chicago is going to have any chance of a Series win, they’ll have to awaken their bats in Sunday’s game.

It only took 108 years, but our sports podcast Hot Takedown finally got to discuss a Chicago Cubs World Series win. We break down the strange managerial decisions in Game 7, discuss whether this year’s Cubs or the 2004 Boston Red Sox are Theo Epstein’s crowning achievement, and FiveThirtyEight’s Oliver Roeder joins us to discuss the legacy of this year’s Cubs team.

BOSTON — For the second-straight chilly night in Fenway Park, Los Angeles Dodgers reliever Ryan Madson faced one of baseball’s great psychological performance tests. And for the second-straight night, Madson failed.

A pitcher, the defense, dictates the action in baseball, which makes the game unusual. Standing alone in the center of the infield, a pitcher can get in his own way — and he can single-handedly let a game get away. And for a second-straight World Series game, Madson checked both of these boxes as he couldn’t command the ball. With each miss outside the strike zone, the pressure and decibel levels increased in the cramped, 106-year-old ballpark.

Madson inherited two base runners on Tuesday in Game 1 of the World Series and three on Wednesday in Game 2. All five scored. They were the decisive runs Tuesday and again Wednesday in Boston’s 4-2 victory. The Red Sox now enjoy a 2-0 lead in the series, which heads to Los Angeles for Game 3 on Friday.

When Madson entered Wednesday with two outs in the bottom of the fifth inning, it was the most crucial point in the game. Leverage index is a stat designed to weight the importance of every plate appearance in a game as it relates to potential win expectancy swings, with an average plate appearance at a mark of 1.0. A plate appearance in a one-run game in the ninth inning has a greater leverage-index value than that of a one-run game in, say, the second inning. The leverage index of facing Steve Pearce with the bases loaded and two outs, leading by one run, was 4.17 — the highest of the game and second-highest of the series.

Madson, who walked just 16 batters in 52⅔ regular-season innings, began his Game 2 outing by missing badly above the zone with his first two pitches against Pearce. The crowd roared. Red Sox fans began chanting his last name, perhaps sensing weakness. Wearing just a short-sleeve T-shirt under his game jersey, Madson jumped up and down at the back of the mound to try to warm himself in temperatures that had dipped into the low 40s, feeling colder with the wind chill. But he missed twice again above the zone to walk Pearce on five pitches, forcing in Christian Vazquez and tying the score at 2-2.

“I really liked him against Pearce,” said Los Angeles manager Dave Roberts. “He’s done it time and time again for us.”

Madson also entered, and faltered, in a high-leverage situation Tuesday. His first pitch in Game 1 was a wild pitch against Pearce, whom he walked on four pitches.

“The ball is not going where I want it,” Madson said after the game. “It’s kind of a crapshoot with inherited runners. You can be good at it for a long time and then a bloop hit, or a walk like tonight, it’s not automatic. I don’t know if it’s mechanical or physical or emotional. There is a lot of elements going in there. You just have to regroup and start over again.”

Among Dodgers pitchers, Madson has pitched four of the five highest-leverage situations through two games. The Dodgers’ best reliever, Kenley Jansen, hasn’t pitched in the series. While teams have been aggressive in employing relief pitchers this postseason, Roberts has not yet used his best reliever when there have clearly been crucial situations. Instead, a pitcher the Dodgers had claimed off waivers and traded for on Aug. 31 — who had a 5.28 ERA in Washington and a 6.48 mark in a limited sample in L.A. — got the call.⁵

After walking Pearce on Wednesday, Madson missed with his first pitch to the following batter, J.D. Martinez, and then Madson threw a fastball that found the zone. But Martinez, hobbling on a right ankle he injured Tuesday, sliced it down the right-field line for a two-run single. Boston took a 4-2 lead that held as the final score. The leverage index of that plate appearance? 3.6. It marked the second-greatest leverage index of the game after the Pearce at bat.

Madson told reporters before the game that the cold weather affected his grip in Game 1, referencing the sticky stuff that has become a sticky subject this season.

“Grip is essential, obviously, in a breaking ball,” Madson said before Game 2. “And a lot of times with the cold weather, I’m not saying anybody uses anything, but if you use anything, a lot of times it’s not as effective in cold weather.

“I didn’t use anything [Tuesday], but I didn’t throw any breaking balls. But [Wednesday], I’m going to make sure I’ve got what everybody uses, the essentials out there again. I didn’t think it was going to be as difficult as it was [Tuesday].”

Whatever he did, Madson had a tough time again Wednesday.

Interestingly, Madson’s four-seam fastball had an average spin rate of 2,289 rpms on Tuesday and 2,196 on Wednesday, and that pitch’s velocity was 95.5 mph on Tuesday and 94.8 on Wednesday — not far removed from his regular-season averages of 2,250 rpms and 95.9 mph. So while his command wavered, his underlying stuff was nearly the same.

The Red Sox had no trouble with the cool conditions Wednesday as their relievers again dominated, averaging 98.4 mph on all fastballs. Starter David Price and the bullpen retired the final 16 Dodgers they faced.

Price took another step toward shedding his reputation as a postseason choker after burying some of his postseason demons in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series — his first win in 12 career postseason starts. He did it by adopting a new plan, throwing his change-up at a career-high rate and shelving his cut fastball. He used a similar approach Wednesday and did not allow a hit through the first three innings. He often went in with his fastball and down and away with his changeup.

He gave up two runs in the fourth but returned for a scoreless fifth — going where no starter had gone in Game 1 — and even posted a scoreless inning in the sixth.

Price now has two postseason wins in his last two starts. A week ago, Price couldn’t win in the postseason. So there’s hope for Ryan Madson.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

In the celebration Sunday after Boston pitcher Chris Sale struck out Manny Machado to end Game 5 of the World Series, clinching a title for the Red Sox, much was made about this being the best Boston team ever. That’s a topic we covered as well going into the series, but this team was also an all-time great squad, period. After all, the Red Sox won 108 regular-season games and went a scorching 11-3 during the playoffs.¹

So, we must ask: How does this Boston squad stack up against history’s greatest champions? Let’s put the Sox to the test using the same metrics we employed to judge another recent all-time champ, the 2016 Chicago Cubs. There, we looked at teams according to a handful of criteria:

• Winning percentage. With a regular-season mark of .667, Boston ranks 17th all-time among eventual World Series winners. MLB hadn’t seen a 108-game winner since the 2001 Mariners, and no team that had won so much had captured the World Series since the 1998 Yankees. In other words, on wins alone, seasons like that of the 2018 Sox are exceedingly rare in baseball history.
• Pythagorean record. Perhaps a better judge of a team’s performance than raw W-L record is its underlying run differential, as measured by the Pythagorean expectation. And by this standard, the 2018 Red Sox do drop down a bit — falling to 30th among all-time champs. According to Pythagoras, Boston really “only” played like a 103-win team that saw somewhat good fortune in close games.
• Wins above replacement. Digging deeper into a team’s performance, we can also look at WAR (averaging together the versions found at Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs) to get a sense of how well its roster played at a player-by-player level. For Boston, WAR per game splits the difference somewhat between winning percentage and Pythagorean record, ranking the 2018 Sox 27th among champions. Their 53.3 total WAR during the regular season was almost exactly the same as Houston’s last season.
• Elo ratings. Here at FiveThirtyEight, we also have our own pet metric for judging a team’s performance — the Elo rating. In a nutshell, it tracks a team’s estimated skill level over time, updating after every game and accounting for things like home-field advantage and starting pitching in each contest. Just as my former colleague Reuben Fischer-Baum did when rating MLB teams a few years ago, here I’m blending a team’s final end-of-playoffs Elo with its peak and average daily Elo from throughout the season.² As we noted before the game, Boston ranks ninth all-time in final Elo, and its blended Elo comes in 12th among historical champs. Elo is the category in which Boston looks best, since it gives credit for both wins and margin of victory while also crediting the Red Sox for their outstanding playoff run.

Pulling it all together, we can add up a team’s ranking in each category — winning percentage, Pythagorean record, WAR and blended Elo — to get a master ranking of world champs since 1903:

According to this measure, the 2018 Red Sox just edge out the 2016 Cubs (a team built by former Boston general manager Theo Epstein) to take 18th place among all-time champs. That also puts them right next to the 1975 Cincinnati Reds — the best version of Cincy’s “Big Red Machine” dynasty — and makes them the second highest-ranking World Series winner since the ’70s, trailing only the 1998 Yankees.

Sure, you can complain about tanking having helped to produce an imbalanced era where the elite teams are vastly better than the bottom-feeders. But even so, this Red Sox season was historic. And unlike its two championship predecessors — the Cubs and Astros — Boston didn’t really bottom out to help get there. The Red Sox finished with a truly bad record only once since last winning the World Series in 2013, and even that was only an ordinary-bad season (71 wins), not the sub-60-win atrocities some of today’s tankers are forcing their fans to endure.

But maybe the greatest testament to the team built by Dave Dombrowski, Boston’s president of baseball operations, was how many different contributions it received along the way to the title. At the top, there was American League MVP favorite Mookie Betts, who had 10.6 WAR during the regular season — one of the best individual performances ever by a player on an eventual championship club:

Yet, before Betts homered to give Boston a 3-1 lead in Game 5, he was hitting .200 in the postseason and was 4 for 21 in the World Series. Boston was so deep, top to bottom, that it didn’t even need its MVP to play like an MVP. J.D. Martinez, who would have contended for MVP himself if Betts and Mike Trout were not so historically dominant, had an .881 OPS in the World Series. Reliever Joe Kelly appeared in every game of the series, refusing to yield a single run in six important innings. Much-maligned starter David Price turned around a disastrous beginning to his postseason with four straight rock-solid outings,³ earning his second victory of the World Series with a win in Game 5.

And none of those guys were even named series MVP! That nod went to journeyman hitter Steve Pearce, who didn’t join the Red Sox until a June 28 trade brought him over from the Toronto Blue Jays. After murdering the Yankees in both the regular season and the playoffs, Pearce took home World Series MVP honors with a 1.667 OPS and three homers against the Dodgers. Even in a universe where Edgar Renteria and Pat Borders have won that award, Pearce might be the single most random player ever to emerge as World Series MVP, in terms of just how little he’d done in his career before shining on the game’s biggest stage:⁴

None of that matters now, though. Pearce and the rest of the 2018 Red Sox are champions, and they can take their rightful place among the best World Series winners in history. As my ESPN colleague Bradford Doolittle wrote last week, Boston’s performance in 2019 and beyond will help further tell us where this group belongs in the context of all-time great team runs. But in terms of one-year performances only, this Red Sox season stands right up to the best the game has had to offer.

This year’s MLB playoffs are rife with juicy storylines and potential rematches. It’s one of the deepest fields of great teams ever — a record four ballclubs won 100 or more games in 2019. And in the World Series alone, five of the six most likely matchups (according to our prediction model) would feature a repeat of an iconic playoff showdown from relatively recent history.

While something like Astros-Nationals — which has never happened in the postseason but is our fifth-most likely World Series matchup — might eventually be in store for us, there’s a 77 percent chance that this Fall Classic will give us a playoff rematch of some kind and a 64 percent chance of pairing teams that have faced each other since at least the 1980s. So here’s a breakdown of the past and present for the five most common championship rematches in our model’s simulations:

Houston Astros vs. Los Angeles Dodgers

19 percent chance of happening

Then: 1981 Division Series, 2017 World Series

Although these teams also played in the 1981 Division Series, the rematch on everyone’s minds came just two years ago — when Houston beat L.A. in a seven-game homerfest that ranks among the most exciting ever (Game 7 notwithstanding). That series was packed with signature moments, highlighted by the seesaw battles Houston won in Games 2 and 5; according to The Baseball Gauge, the Dodgers had a 71 percent chance of winning the World Series as late as the fifth inning of Game 5 and were above 50 percent going into Game 7 at home, but the Astros eventually prevailed to secure the franchise’s first title.

Now: Some of the key characters have changed — Houston now has Gerrit Cole and Yordan Álvarez instead of Dallas Keuchel and Marwin González; L.A. has Max Muncy and vastly improved versions of Cody Bellinger and Walker Buehler but a less effective Clayton Kershaw and no Yasiel Puig. The core of the matchup remains the same, however, and this time these are probably the two best teams in baseball, ranking Nos. 1 and 2 in wins above replacement (WAR),⁸ compared with Nos. 3 and 4 in 2017. Our model would give the Astros a slight edge to win again in this hypothetical World Series battle of two teams that seem to have been on a collision course all season.

Los Angeles Dodgers vs. New York Yankees

14 percent

Then: 1977, 1978 and 1981 World Series

The Yankees and Dodgers have faced off in 11 total World Series, dating back to the Subway Series days when the Dodgers played in Brooklyn. But the instances most younger fans would know came in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when L.A. played New York three times in a five-year span. Reggie Jackson created the legend of “Mr. October” with his MVP performance (1.792 OPS, 5 HR) in 1977, while Bucky Dent, Ron Guidry and Goose Gossage powered another Yankee win the following year. The Dodgers got one back in the split season of 1981, which was the last true N.Y.-versus-L.A. championship battle for 21 years — until the Sparks beat the Liberty for the 2002 WNBA title.⁹ Despite having the best records in their respective leagues this decade, the Dodgers and Yankees haven’t met in the World Series since that ’81 clash — but that could change this season.

Now: Alongside Astros-Dodgers, Yankees-Dodgers is the other titanic World Series collision we’ve been anticipating all season long. And it would be every bit as star-studded as its precursor from 38 years ago. Instead of Fernandomania, the current Dodgers have … caught the Bellinger Bug? The Ryu Rage? The Muncy Madness? (Sigh.) New York’s modern analog to Jackson, meanwhile, is a lineup that has twice broken the pre-2018 record for home runs in a single season. Los Angeles has a decided advantage in starting pitching over the Yankee staff, but the pinstriped bullpen corps has been superior this season. And the amount of position-player talent on each side would rank among the best in World Series history. It feels like this showdown has been simmering in the background for three years now, and the possibility of Rob Manfred’s dream pairing of America’s top two media markets may finally come true this season.

Houston Astros vs. Atlanta Braves

8 percent

Then: 1997, 1999, 2001, 2004 and 2005 Division Series

This is no World Series rematch, but the Astros and Braves have plenty of playoff history from Houston’s time in the National League. Over the nine postseasons played from 1997 through 2005, Atlanta and Houston met up five times. At first, the dynastic Braves had the Astros’ number, winning nine of the first 10 matchups across three series, including the sequence above — wherein the Astros had the bases loaded and nobody out, at home, in extra innings, only to not score and eventually lose the second-to-last game ever played at the Astrodome. But after that inauspicious start, Houston’s fortunes eventually changed against the Braves, with the Astros prevailing in 2004 and again in ’05 — en route to the franchise’s long-awaited first World Series appearance.

Now: Houston and Atlanta had a remarkable amount of star power in those late-’90s battles, including Hall of Famers Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Greg Maddux, Chipper Jones, John Smoltz and Tom Glavine. But this year’s crop could eventually rival that group, boasting the likes of Ronald Acuña Jr., Alex Bregman, Justin Verlander, Ozzie Albies, José Altuve, Freddie Freeman, Zack Greinke, Josh Donaldson and Cole. Despite the relative evenness of big-name talent, our model would install the Astros as somewhat substantial favorites in the World Series, and with good cause — the only area of the game in which Atlanta didn’t run relatively far behind Houston in WAR this season was base-running. Still, this is the strongest Atlanta has been (according to Elo) going into the playoffs since, ironically enough, the 2004 team that lost to Houston in the NLDS.

Houston Astros vs. St. Louis Cardinals

7 percent

Then: 2004 and 2005 NL Championship Series.

Think back to a time before the Astros changed leagues, switched back to their original logo, pioneered NBA-esque tanking and became perennial championship contenders. Back when Houston’s outfits looked like this and the team was in the NL Central, its rivalry with the Cardinals was always one of baseball’s premier division skirmishes. St. Louis got the better of Houston in the seventh game of the 2004 NLCS — thanks to the Scott Rolen home run above — before the Astros returned the favor with an NLCS win of their own in 2005. Although the AL champ beat the winner in the World Series both years, the road to the NL pennant still went through St. Louis and Houston. It was the best both clubs had been at the same time in their shared history … until now.

Now: It’s been a while since the Cards and Astros were meaningful on-field rivals; their most memorable clash this decade came away from the diamond, when St. Louis hacked into Houston’s information network using Astros GM Jeff Luhnow’s old passwords. But the baseball part of the rivalry could be reignited quickly, too, if the teams end up in the World Series. Houston’s current squad is more talented than its mid-2000s counterparts, though the same might not be said about the 2019 Cardinals: St. Louis ranks 13th in WAR this year, compared with No. 2 in both 2004 and 2005. The current team doesn’t quite have stars on the same order as Rolen, Albert Pujols and Jim Edmonds, though it does have plenty of depth. And it should definitely be noted that the Cardinals have a long history of winning championships despite looking less-than-stellar on paper.

New York Yankees vs. Atlanta Braves

6 percent

Then: 1996 and 1999 World Series.

After the Braves made the World Series in 1991 and 1992, then won it in 1995 and returned again in 1996, the question of which team owned the 1990s seemed open-and-shut. The Braves especially appeared to be in command once the 1996 Series began against the Yankees, with Atlanta taking the first two games on the road and grabbing a 6-0 lead in Game 4, up 2-1 in the series. The Baseball Gauge estimates that Atlanta had an 86 percent chance of winning the World Series at that point, but everything unraveled for the Braves from there — exemplified by Jim Leyritz’s huge home run off fireballing closer Mark Wohlers (see above). The Yankees eventually won in six, took another title over San Diego in 1998 and thoroughly outclassed Atlanta in the 1999 rematch, sweeping the Braves and stealing away key ammunition in the Team of the ’90s argument.

Now: Perhaps surprisingly, given their success by century’s end, neither the Braves nor Yankees have dominated the new millennium. New York has won only a single World Series since 2000, appearing only three times, while Atlanta hasn’t been back to the Fall Classic since that 1999 defeat. But as we noted above, the Braves have rebuilt some of the star power of their ’90s heyday. The Yankees are rounding into roughly the same situation, between their once-injured headliners back at full strength (Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Didi Gregorius) and those who stepped up to carry the team most of this season (DJ LeMahieu, Gleyber Torres). Our Elo model would consider the Yankees only marginally smaller favorites over Atlanta than Houston would be, but perhaps these Braves can finally turn the tables after the letdown of 1996.

Other fun potential rematches:

• Cardinals-Yankees (5 percent) — 1964 World Series: MVP Bob Gibson outdueled the favored Yankees in Game 7.
• Dodgers-Twins (5 percent) — 1965 World Series: Sandy Koufax (0.38 series ERA) painted his masterpiece in a Game 7 shutout.
• Dodgers-A’s (4 percent) — 1988 World Series: Kirk Gibson set the tone for L.A. victory with his Game 1 blast off Dennis Eckersley.
• Twins-Braves (2 percent) — 1991 World Series: Minnesota prevailed in one of history’s best Fall Classics.
• Twins-Cardinals (2 percent) — 1987 World Series: The Twins used their home-field advantage, outlasting St. Louis to overcome a 3-2 deficit.
• Braves-A’s (2 percent) — 1914 World Series: The “Miracle Braves” stormed back from last place at midseason to sweep Philadelphia for the title.
• Yankees-Brewers (1 percent) — 1981 ALDS: Back when the Crew were in the AL, Gossage, Dave Righetti and the Yankees survived Milwaukee over a full five games.
• Cardinals-A’s (1 percent) — 1931 World Series: In a rematch of the 1930 Series, Cards ace Bill Hallahan and center fielder Pepper Martin helped beat Philly in seven games.

Most likely first-time matchups:

• Astros-Nationals (6 percent)
• Yankees-Nationals (5 percent)
• Dodgers-Rays (3 percent)
• Astros-Brewers (2 percent)
• Twins-Nationals (2 percent)

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

The only time a baseball team based in Washington, D.C. won the World Series, the great Senators pitcher Walter Johnson was on the mound. Johnson — who would go on to be part of the first Hall of Fame class — was still effective at age 36, winning 23 games in 1924, and would be named the AL MVP. He won Game 7 of the World Series with four shutout innings in relief to close out the game, delivering the last baseball title to the nation’s capital.

Ninety-five years later, a Washington team has another Series win in its sights — and it has a historic amount of pitching talent behind it. But the Nats’ aces are matched by their counterparts on the Astros, who boast an elite top of their rotation. This World Series will be the first in modern history featuring five starting pitchers who produced 5 or more wins above replacement for the Series opponents during the regular season.⁷

The Nationals are one of 13 teams since the first World Series in 1903 to have three starting pitchers on their roster who produced 5 or more WAR — Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin — for that club in the regular season. They are the fourth such staff to reach the World Series, joining the 1991 and 1996 Atlanta Braves and 2005 Houston Astros. The 2019 Astros are one of 25 teams to have two starting pitchers exceed 6.5 WAR in the same season. This World Series pitching matchup is rivaled only by the 2001 Series, in which Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling of the victorious Diamondbacks faced Roger Clemens and Mike Mussina of the Yankees. Potential matchups of Cole versus Scherzer in Game 1, Verlander versus Strasburg in Game 2 and Greinke versus Corbin in Game 3 could mark some of the best Series matchups in history.

These staffs have also led a comeback in starting pitcher workload this October. There have been 16 outings of 101 pitchers or more made by starting pitchers, and the Nats and Astros have combined for 11 of them, nearly as many as the past two postseasons combined.

But while the Astros and Nationals have similar levels of elite pitcher talent, they built their rotations in very different ways.

Houston acquired Cole and Verlander via trades that so far have given the Astros much more than they gave away. The Astros helped Verlander fine-tune his slider to return him to peak form, and Cole has gone from so-so to unhittable. This season, Verlander and Cole joined Johnson and Schilling (2002) as the only pair of teammates to top 300 strikeouts in the same season. They figure to be competing against each other for the AL Cy Young Award.

The Nationals drafted Strasburg first overall in 2009, and even with Tommy John surgery under his belt, he has been the 10th-most valuable pitcher in baseball since his debut. In 2015 the Nats signed Scherzer, who has been the most valuable arm in the game since 2012. And from a pitching standpoint, it worked out well for the club when Bryce Harper turned down a reported $300 million deal to stay in Washington — the Nats subsequently signed Corbin and Aníbal Sánchez. Corbin outproduced Harper this season, in terms of WAR.

The Nationals finished first in the majors in starting pitching production, while the Astros ranked fourth this season. And Scherzer and Co. will have to be great to give the Nats a chance against the heavily favored Astros, who have a 60 percent chance to win the Series, according to FiveThirtyEight’s MLB predictions.

While the Nationals bullpen has been better in the postseason, only the Baltimore Orioles had a poorer bullpen ERA in the regular season. Even if one of the Astros’ better relievers, Ryan Pressly, isn’t 100 percent healthy, they figure to have an edge after the starters are out of the game. And though the Nationals have star bats like Juan Soto, Anthony Rendon and Trea Turner, the Astros are basically the 1927 Yankees. In fact, according to weighted runs created plus (wRC+) — a metric that adjusts for ballpark and scoring environments, with 100 representing league average — only the ’27 Yankees were a more efficient offense than the ’19 Astros.

Though the Astros and Nationals may have similarly dominant starting pitching, the Astros are stronger everywhere else. The Nats’ historically talented group of arms — along with their star position players — faces a nearly unprecedented challenge in returning a title to Washington.

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As soon as New York Yankees reliever Bob Wickman heard the ball leave Larry Walker’s bat, he knew it was trouble. Walker, the Montreal Expos’ 27-year-old right fielder, had been hitting well enough in the World Series before the bottom of the 11th inning in Game 7. But he’d also been held homerless until coming up in this crucial spot, with two runners on base in the bottom of the 11th inning of Game 7. As the championship hung in the balance, one swing changed everything. A year after Joe Carter won the 1993 World Series for another Canadian team with a walk-off home run, Walker crushed Wickman’s pitch over the wall in right for a title-clinching blast of his own. As he circled the bases at Stade Olympique, confetti raining down, Walker relished in knowing he had created one of the most indelible feel-good moments in the history of the game.

The Expos were 1994 World Champions.

None of that actually happened, of course. When the team formerly known as the Expos — now called the Washington Nationals, after moving from Canada to D.C. back in 2005 — took the field in Tuesday’s World Series Game 1, it was the very first Fall Classic appearance in franchise history, regardless of home city. But fans of the club’s earlier incarnation, Les Expos, will always wonder about the one that got away 25 years ago. The 1994 baseball season ended with a players’ strike on Aug. 12, and with that, countless what-ifs were launched. So let’s talk about them. What if the season hadn’t ended? What if, instead, ’94 had been allowed to play out as scheduled? Would Roger Maris’s home run record have been broken early? Would Tony Gwynn have hit .400? Would the Expos, owners of an MLB-best 74-40 record when play ceased, have actually won the World Series?

To help find the answers, we reached out to the makers of Out Of The Park (OOTP), a baseball simulation game we’ve partnered with before on such topics as Bryce Harper’s free agency and designated hitters in the National League. This time, we asked them to run a bunch of simulations of the 1994 season, from the moment of the strike through the end of the World Series, and track how often various significant individual and team accomplishments happened. (For example, the Walker home run from above came from Simulation No. 55 of the World Series matchup between the Expos and their most common World Series simulation opponent, the Yankees.)

If the 1994 season couldn’t exist in reality, at least many versions of it can play out on the virtual diamond. What follows is a rundown of what OOTP thinks was most likely to have happened in an alternate universe where the season could be played to completion.

Let’s start with the regular season. Here is what OOTP’s simulations think the standings — which newly included a wild-card playoff slot for teams that didn’t win their divisions — would have looked like if the season was allowed to play out normally:

In the American League, the playoff field would very likely have included the Yankees out of the East — thus snapping a 12-season drought for the Bronx Bombers — plus the White Sox (who had lost the League Championship Series the previous year) and the Indians from the brand-new Central division. And somebody had to win the abysmal four-team AL West, although OOTP thinks the winner — whether it was Oakland or Texas, or maybe even someone else — would very likely have carried a below-.500 record, probably joining the 1981 Royals as the only team in baseball history to make the postseason with a losing regular-season mark.

As for the NL, the Expos would almost certainly have made the playoffs, probably as East champs over the defending West champion Braves, who’d been realigned into a more proper geographic bucket when the third division was added. (Incidentally, this would probably have interrupted Atlanta’s real-life streak of consecutive division titles, which reached 14 only on the technicality that play was suspended in 1994.) But the Braves were very likely to have won the wild card, joining the West champion Dodgers and either the Reds or Astros out of the Central to round out the playoff field in ’94.

In terms of individual performances, Maris’s record of 61 home runs was broken 188 times in the 1,000 simulations OOTP ran — 145 by Giants third baseman Matt Williams (who had 43 homers when play ceased), 24 by Mariners center fielder Ken Griffey Jr. (who had 40) and 19 by others — and tied another 102 times. Because it’s possible that more than one of these performances could happen in the same season, there was about a 27 percent chance that somebody would have at least tied Maris’s record in 1994 and an 18 percent chance the record would have been outright broken.

The record would eventually go down anyway thanks to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s home run chase in 1998, which itself had a tremendous ripple effect on baseball history through the subsequent steroids scandal. We don’t know how later seasons would have played out if the record had been broken in ’94, but we can say there was a not-insignificant chance that Maris’s mark would have been surpassed in a universe without the strike.

Meanwhile, the other big historical chase of note in 1994 was obviously Chuck Knoblauch’s pursuit of the all-time doubles record, 67, set by Earl Webb in 1931. Just kidding. (Although OOTP thinks there was a 3.1 percent chance Knoblauch would hit 68 or more doubles, and a 1.1 percent chance for Craig Biggio as well.) The actual marquee pursuit belonged to Gwynn, the legendary Padres outfielder who had his eye on becoming MLB’s first .400 hitter since Ted Williams did it in 1941. Gwynn was hitting .394 when the strike happened and had been at .400 as recently as May. (He was also heating up right before the strike, hitting .475 in the first 11 days of August.)

According to OOTP’s simulations, there was about a 31 percent chance that Gwynn would finish the season with a batting average of at least .400 — including one incredible simulation that had Gwynn hitting .430, which would have been the highest average by an MLB hitter since 1894 (and the third-highest ever).

(There was even another stray simulation in which Yankees right fielder Paul O’Neill, who sported a .359 mark at the strike, ended the season with an average of exactly .400. That would truly be the .400 season nobody saw coming.)

But the biggest what-ifs around the 1994 campaign involve its lost postseason and whether a team like the Expos would have actually been able to win the World Series if it hadn’t been canceled. Here’s how OOTP’s simulations set the odds of each potential playoff team reaching each round of the 1994 postseason:

The Yankees were the most probable pennant winner in the AL, despite the rule at the time that would likely have pitted them against the formidable Indians (who would go on to play in two of the next three World Series) in the Division Series.⁵ Following somewhat further behind them in World Series odds were the star-studded White Sox (of Frank Thomas and Jack McDowell) and Indians (Kenny Lofton; Albert Belle) as well as the last vestiges of the Rickey Henderson-era Oakland A’s. There was about a 64 percent chance that either the Yankees or White Sox would have represented the AL in the 1994 World Series.

Over in the NL, it was a close race for the most likely pennant winner. Despite having the league’s best record, OOTP gave the Expos only the second-best probability of making the World Series (25 percent), trailing the division-rival Braves (27 percent). Why? Atlanta had a slightly higher-rated group of players — including a number of eventual Hall of Famers — after making two of the previous three World Series, while Montreal had taken a more recent quantum leap forward over the previous two seasons. And the Reds were in the NL pennant conversation, too, at 23 percent, not having been too far removed from winning the 1990 World Series. (Top players Barry Larkin and José Rijo were the cornerstones of that team as well.) Further, about 75 percent of OOTP’s sims had either Atlanta, Montreal or Cincinnati making the World Series out of the NL. Combining all of these numbers together, here’s a matrix of what the most probable World Series matchups would have been in 1994:

(Unfortunately, an Expos-Astros World Series that season would have been impossible — both were in the National League at the time. How things change!)

Based on these combinations, here’s what OOTP’s simulations would have seen in store for the four most likely 1994 World Series matchups:

• Yankees vs. Braves: We’d get to see a version of this one two seasons later, when the Yankees came back from a mere 14.2 percent chance of winning the World Series (at their low point) to capture the proud franchise’s first championship since 1978. This hypothetical World Series’s cast would have featured many of the same characters as in ’96, except with Buck Showalter managing New York, Don Mattingly still in pinstripes, and no Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera or Derek Jeter for the Yankees or Marquis Grissom for the Braves. OOTP thinks the Yankees would have the edge, tagging the vaunted Braves rotation for a .314 batting average and 5.7 runs per game.
  Chance of happening: 10 percent
  Favorite: Yankees (55 percent)
  Most Likely Outcome: Yankees in six (21 percent)
  Most Likely MVPs:⁶ Atlanta 1B Fred McGriff (15 percent); New York RF O’Neill (13 percent)
  
• Yankees vs. Expos: Although I chose to dramatize the Expos’ win in Simulation 55 for the lede of this story, OOTP has the Yankees beating Montreal in more simulations than not. The Expos did have the superior pitching staff (either by WAR or OOTP’s player ratings) in 1994, and they hit more home runs and stole more bases than the Yankees in the head-to-head simulations. But New York played better defense and ultimately scratched out more runs per game on average, led as they were by a deeper group of position-player talent. Then again, this just makes the Expos underdogs — and what better way for Montreal’s storybook season to end than in an upset victory over the Yankees?
  Chance of happening: 9 percent
  Favorite: Yankees (57 percent)
  Most Likely Outcome: Yankees in six (24 percent)
  Most Likely MVPs: New York CF Bernie Williams (15 percent); Montreal RF Walker (15 percent)
• Reds vs. Yankees: The Reds haven’t been the most successful of teams recently, having won only five postseason games since 1990. But if the strike hadn’t happened, there’s a chance Cincinnati could have added a second title of the 1990s to its trophy cabinet. In this head-to-head matchup with the Yankees, the Reds muscled past New York more often than not, thanks to the superior power of left fielder Kevin Mitchell — and the superior power pitching of starter Rijo and the rest of the Cincy rotation. Outhomering the Yankees by an average of 6.9 to 4.9 per series, Cincinnati victimized N.Y. starters Jimmy Key and Jim Abbott alone for 2.3 of them on average.
  Chance of happening: 8 percent
  Favorite: Reds (55 percent)
  Most Likely Outcome: Reds in six (18 percent)
  Most Likely MVPs: Cincinnati LF Mitchell (20 percent); New York RF O’Neill (19 percent)
• Braves vs. White Sox: The most interesting potential 1994 matchup could be the one nobody ever talks about: the Bravos versus the Pale Hose. In OOTP’s simulations of the matchup, it was a perfectly even split in terms of who would win — the Braves swept more often, the ChiSox won in six more often, and the teams were dead-even in terms of winning in either five or seven games. The star power in this one goes unappreciated, between the Braves’ staff of aces, actual 1994 AL MVP Frank Thomas and a bunch of other supporting talent (McGriff, Robin Ventura, etc). The showdown of starters would also have ranked among the best in World Series history, with each rotation ranking among the Top 4 in both WAR and OOTP’s rankings. Cumulatively, the Braves won more total games across all of the simulated series, so you could call that an edge for Atlanta. But if it had happened, this World Series would probably have been a closely matched thriller.
  Chance of happening: 7 percent
  Favorite: PUSH! (50-50 split)
  Most Likely Outcome: White Sox in 6 (16 percent)
  Most Likely MVPs: Atlanta SP Greg Maddux (24 percent); Chicago 1B Thomas (20 percent)

All told, here’s who OOTP’s reconstructions of the 1994 stretch run and playoffs think the most likely World Series winners that year would have been:

Perhaps surprisingly, many fans’ default belief — that the strike cost the Expos a certain title, and maybe even their future in Montreal — isn’t fully supported by OOTP’s simulations. Instead, it thinks the bigger victims were three teams who would each win titles within 11 years of the lost ’94 postseason. And in that sense, maybe it’s better that we don’t know who would have won. The romance of Montreal’s missing championship will exist forever in fans’ minds, even if it wasn’t actually as likely as it seems in hindsight. And hey — it also existed in 12 percent of the computer’s simulations, including Walker’s heroics in OOTP alternate universe No. 55.

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CORRECTION (Oct. 25, 2019, 4:30 p.m.): A previous version of the final table in this story incorrectly listed the Houston Astros as being in the American League in 1994. Although Houston is in the AL today, it was a member of the National League in 1994.

CORRECTION (Oct. 29, 2019, 3 p.m.): A previous version of this article gave the incorrect number of postseason wins by the Cincinnati Reds since 1990. The team has won five postseason games since then, not two.

WASHINGTON — On the Astros’ charter flight to Washington, D.C., last week, after they had fallen to an 0-2 deficit in the World Series, Houston hitters held discussions at 30,000 feet about how they had tried to do too much as individuals in the first two games of the series. If any team should trust that the next player in the lineup can meet the demands of the game, it’s these Astros.

In Washington, the Astros got back to being themselves. They outscored the Nationals 19-3 in their three-game sweep and are one win away from their second title in three years. They feature one of the most loaded lineups in major league history, performing something like the Yankees’ Murderers’ Row of the 1920s. In fact, by some measures, the only more effective offensive club in the history of the sport is the storied 1927 New York club.

The Astros finished the regular season with the second-best mark in weighted runs created plus (wRC+), which adjusts for era and ballparks, of all time. The ’27 Yankees produced a 126 mark as a team, meaning they were 26 percent above league average run-production efficiency. The ’19 Astros finished at 125 — and that’s the top of the list. For context, erstwhile Nationals star Bryce Harper produced a 125 wRC+ for the Philadelphia Phillies this season. The Astros are a team of Harpers. MLB has rarely seen anything like it.

While Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg were momentarily able to quiet the Astros’ bats in Houston, the Nationals ran out of elite-level performances back on their home turf. Another top Washington starter, Patrick Corbin, faltered in a crucial spot against the Astros’ lineup on Saturday, and Scherzer’s Game 5 start the following day was scratched because of neck and back spasms. Scherzer struggled to turn toward reporters during a pregame press conference on Sunday, and his status for the remainder of the series is unclear. The Nats sent their No. 5 starter, Joe Ross, out against the Astros on Sunday night, and the ballpark knew what he was up against: Ross received a standing ovation as he walked to the bullpen to warm up. The outpouring was not enough — the Nats were overmatched.

Legend has it that the 1927 Yankees intimidated the Pittsburgh Pirates with their batting practice display before Game 1 of the World Series en route to a series sweep. The Astros have plenty of power, ranking third this season in home runs. But the Astros offense doesn’t intimidate only through home run displays — it also features a nonstop barrage of quality at-bats. There are no breaks in the lineup. There are rarely easy outs. The Astros had the lowest strikeout rate in baseball this year and led MLB in on-base percentage (.352) — ahead of the No. 2 Nationals by 10 points. They rarely chase pitches, and that has continued in the playoffs.

The Astros are so deep that the Nationals, in the sixth inning of Game 3, elected to load the bases with an intentional walk to Michael Brantley so Nats reliever Fernando Rodney could instead face Alex Bregman, an AL MVP candidate. Bregman grounded out, but the following night he again faced Rodney with the bases loaded. Though Rodney made the pitch he wanted — a down-and-in, 93 mph sinking fastball that caught the corner — Bregman barreled it and sent it out to left for a grand slam that gave the Astros an 8-1 lead.

Bregman said he had been working on some mechanical tweaks that began to come together Saturday. “The one, I was trying to get the ball in the air and just drive in a run,” Bregman told reporters afterward. “I just think we’re better when we have fun, and we had fun the last two days.”

Make it three days. The Astros seemed to be loose and enjoying the moment on Sunday. Bregman was seen smiling and laughing on the field for batting practice before Game 5 with rookie teammate Kyle Tucker, who was part of his hitting group. On many teams, Tucker — who produced 38 home runs and 35 steals between Triple-A and the majors this season — would already be a staple. On the Astros, he’s a pinch hitter.

Even Robinson Chirinos, part of a catching timeshare in Houston, is an above-average hitter. He launched a home run in Game 3 out of the eighth spot in the batting order.

Washington’s Juan Soto isn’t the only elite-level young player in the Series. While 22-year-old Houston wunderkind Yordan Álvarez had struggled for much of October, he launched a two-run homer in the second inning on Sunday — one of three two-run homers crushed by the Astros in their 7-1 win — and would add two other hits.

“He’s done this the whole year, but this postseason, as he’s tried to find his way, it was nice to see him stay within himself,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said.

And batting seventh — seventh — for much of October has been Carlos Correa, who hit a two-run homer in the fourth on Sunday. The club’s shortstop posted a 143 wRC+ in the regular season — elite production for any hitter, let alone one manning the most athletically challenging position. He has the most home runs, RBIs and extra-base hits in postseason history before age 26.

“On the way here from the plane, I was talking to [teammate José Altuve], and I was like, José, we need to get our swagger back,” Correa said.

Even the Astros’ relatively weaker links are stars. And that’s a big reason why one of the great lineups in MLB history flew home to Houston, one win from a World Series title.

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One of MLB history’s most improbable championship runs ended Wednesday night the only way it could — with an indestructible, indomitable Washington Nationals squad celebrating on the road after its World Series-clinching 6-2 victory over the Houston Astros in Game 7.

It was Washington’s fourth win in Houston during the Fall Classic, making the Nats the first major men’s pro team to win four road games in any best-of-seven playoff series. And that only scratches the surface of just how remarkable the Nats’ run has been. At almost every stage of the season and playoffs, they had to grind against ridiculously long odds. Few champions ever fought harder for their title than this Nationals ballclub did.

We’ve written before about Washington’s early-season struggles, but it’s impossible to overstate how resilient the team was in digging out of a 19-31 hole in the standings on May 23. The Nats were 12 games below .500 — the second-deepest pit any World Series winner has ever climbed out of, trailing only the 1914 Boston Braves (who went 12-28 to start their championship season):

Washington also faced multiple moments of crisis in the playoffs. Perhaps the most memorable came in the Nationals’ very first game of the postseason, trailing late in the wild-card contest (with a mere 13 percent chance of winning, according to The Baseball Gauge) until Juan Soto’s single — and an ill-timed error by right fielder Trent Grisham — helped propel them past the Milwaukee Brewers and into the NL Division Series. Once there, the Nats faced an 11 percent chance of winning the series at their low point in Game 5 before once again coming up huge against Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers to advance.

An NLCS sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals went more smoothly, with Washington’s series win probability never dropping below 50 percent after the opening few innings of Game 1. But the Nats made up for that with one of the most back-and-forth World Series seesaws in history.

Despite going in as one of the heaviest betting underdogs in World Series history, the Nats stunned the Astros at first. At their initial high point in the first inning of Game 3, Washington had a 2-0 Series lead and was at home for the next three games — which gave it an 83 percent chance of taking home the first championship in franchise history. But things could never be that easy. As the Series unraveled over the next three games in D.C., the Nats’ championship win probability fell to a mere 22 percent by the end of Game 5.

The last of that trio of games was perhaps the most crushing, as presumptive starter Max Scherzer was scratched late because of neck spasms, leaving Joe Ross on the hill instead. Our Elo pitcher ratings thought the drop-off from Scherzer to Ross caused the Nats’ probability of winning the game to fall by 8 percentage points, a big swing as far as starters go. And things got even worse in the initial stages of Game 6, with Washington falling behind 2-1 early. Midway through the do-or-die road contest, the Nats’ chances of winning the World Series were down to 14 percent.

But this team specialized in high-pressure comebacks — and in playing its best with the season on the line. So it should have been no surprise to see Washington storm back to win Game 6, then rally from down 2-0 (and another 13 percent World Series win probability) in the sixth inning of Game 7. All the Nats did this postseason was orchestrate clutch comebacks.

Including World Series Game 7, the Nationals went 5-0 in elimination games this postseason — and all of them were come-from-behind victories. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, Washington is the first team in MLB history with five comeback wins when facing elimination in a single postseason. And that doesn’t even get into the caliber of teams the Nats had to go through, including the 107-win Astros (with their ridiculously stacked pitching staff) and the 106-win Dodgers. They battled — and beat — the likes of Kershaw, Walker Buehler, Miles Mikolas, Gerrit Cole, Justin Verlander and even Zach Greinke (who was rolling Wednesday night) along the way.

Add it all up, and we just witnessed one of the most improbable postseason runs in baseball history by one of the most entertaining teams in recent memory. In a season of supercharged megateams, the eventual champion was the one nobody saw coming — the team that simply couldn’t be killed, no matter how high the odds were stacked against it.

Major League Baseball umpires heard their job approval ratings plummet in Washington, D.C., during this World Series, culminating with chants of disdain from Nationals fans after missed calls on Sunday in Game 5. And that was before the controversial runner interference call on Washington shortstop Trea Turner in Game 6. Every decision, every call, every mistake is amplified in postseason baseball — and when the work behind the plate could affect the outcome of the game, everyone notices.

To be human is to be imperfect. Deciphering borderline pitches traveling at 100 mph and breaking balls that move more than ever is not easy. And there will always be errors made behind the plate unless humans are replaced with an automated zone (which MLB began experimenting with this past summer in the independent Atlantic League).

But one study tells us that MLB might do a better job of getting balls and strikes called correctly simply by employing different umpires in the postseason. Mark Williams, a professor in Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, looked at called pitches from 2008 to 2018 and compared the more than 4 million pitches against ball-location data provided by MLB tracking cameras.² He calculated ball and strike accuracy performance for each umpire, producing a bad-call rate per umpire per season, and has launched an app that evaluates and updates umpire performance.

“Baseball has a problem behind home plate, too many ball-strike calling errors,” Williams told FiveThirtyEight.

MLB has disputed Williams’s findings. League spokesman Michael Teevan noted that the missed-call rates MLB uses internally differ from those of the Boston University data and that MLB’s methodology “takes into account the margin of error of the tracking system.” (Williams says that, via Statcast and PITCHf/x, he is using the same underlying pitch-tracking and zone data as MLB, and maintains that umpires miss far more calls than the league is willing to admit.) Teevan also said factors other than just ball-strike calls are important in determining which umpires are used in crucial postseason games.

In the postseason, there were 252 pitches called strikes outside the zone and 195 called balls that were in the strike zone. That’s 447 missed calls out of 5,459 called balls and strikes, a missed-call rate of 8.2 percent. That’s better than the regular-season miss rate of 9.1 percent,³ but those are still hundreds of errant calls influencing game outcomes.

Only three umpires who received an assignment behind the plate during LCS and World Series play ranked in the top 10 this season in missed-call rate, according to Williams’s data, though Nos. 11 and 12 did work home plate in the World Series. Three umpires who called LCS games ranked in the bottom half of MLB’s 76 full-time umpires, as did three umpires assigned to the World Series. And the postseason has featured four of the worst 15 game-calling umpires behind home plate.

Many of the game’s best ball-strike umpires are invited to the playoffs and placed behind the plate, but not all of them. Why not? Teevan said assignments are “merit based” but that the evaluation criteria goes beyond ball-strike accuracy. “A variety of factors [are taken] into account, including experience, skill sets, communication and situation-handling,” he told FiveThirtyEight.

That experience might be part of the issue. Williams found that less-experienced umpires often performed better than veterans in ball-strike performance. Moreover, Williams found that there was typically little change in an umpire’s year-to-year missed call rates, suggesting that improving umpiring skills is difficult. The average service time of all MLB umpires this year was 16 years. The umpires in the LCS who called games from behind the plate had slightly less experience, averaging 14.6 years in the league. But the average crept up again among World Series umpires, to 16.4 years.

Ball-strike calls are incredibly important. Offensive performance in the majors is tied to the count, and just one missed pitch can have a significant effect. During the regular season, hitters had a .351 batting average on a count of two balls and one strike, versus a .161 batting average on a count of one ball and two strikes — a difference of nearly 200 points in batting average. Moreover, umpires are responsible for calling more and more balls and strikes as fewer balls are being put in play because of the record strikeout levels of recent years. This season marked a record for pitches thrown in a season,⁴ and a record for the number of called strikes in a season.

As long as humans — and not robots — are behind the plate, a certain number of calls will be missed. But on baseball’s biggest stage, it’s more important to get them right.

Stealing signs has been part of baseball since signs existed. The spycraft is generally accepted so long as the efforts are not aided electronically. Yet as early as 1900, there were technology-aided attempts to steal signs. The 1951 New York Giants used a telescope and an electrical buzzer to relay opposing catchers’ pitch calls in games at the Polo Grounds. In 2017, the Boston Red Sox were fined for using Apple Watches as part of an in-game reconnaissance scheme.

Earlier this month, major league pitcher Mike Fiers blew the whistle on his former club, telling The Athletic that the Houston Astros stole signs in 2017, a season in which they won the World Series. Fiers said the team monitored opposing catchers’ signs from an outfield camera, which was linked to a monitor in a hallway near the home dugout. There, a hidden Astros staffer allegedly alerted hitters to certain pitch types by banging on a trash can. MLB is investigating.

The Astros have also been accused of whistling to convey pitch information; during a game on Sept. 3, 2017, in which suspicious thumping could be heard, there was also whistling in advance of some pitches, including on a Cameron Maybin home run.

But if the Astros did use video to steal signs, how effective could such a practice be for the club? If there was an advantage, and it was consistently executed throughout the season, can we measure some effect? Perhaps we can.

If you know what pitch is coming, you’re less likely to miss it and also more likely to drive it. So FiveThirtyEight examined the change in strikeout rate and isolated power for all 30 MLB teams between the 2016 and 2017 seasons. The use of those two metrics would also help us evaluate whether teams were perhaps trading contact for power or vice versa. But we also needed to look specifically at home and road games, since Minute Maid Park was where the Astros allegedly used their sign-stealing scheme. There, the Astros were an outlier in 2017.

There was significant carry-over among Astros hitters from 2016 to 2017, the year the scheme supposedly started. Of the 13 batters to record at least 100 plate appearances for the Astros in 2017, eight were players who had recorded at least 100 plate appearances for the club in 2016.¹ And the Astros also added power while striking out less often.

But what complicates matters is that the Astros also improved away from home in 2017.

Overall, at home and on the road, the Astros cut their team strikeout rate from 23.4 percent in 2016 to 17.3 percent in 2017 — going from the fourth-worst in the majors to the best.

While it’s possible that the Astros’ alleged sign-stealing scheme, or a modified version, traveled with them, improving plate discipline was a focus of team management when it came to hiring hitting instructors throughout their organization. The Astros might just have had really good instructors and talented players.

Or perhaps they had really good instructors, talented players and shortcuts.

Astros rivals have been concerned about the potential of a sophisticated reconnaissance operation. In the World Series, the Washington Nationals went to extraordinary lengths to prevent their signs from being stolen, with pitchers and catchers employing laminated cards, like quarterback wristbands, to signal in five sets of signs for each pitcher.

The Astros have maintained their performance gains since the end of the 2017 season. In that time, Houston has enjoyed the lowest strikeout rate in baseball and the third-best slugging mark. That efficiency helped them to the most productive lineup since the Murderer’s Row Yankees. Maybe they are that good, but they may have also had some help along the way.