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.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

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.

After a big comeback in one league’s championship series — and an even bigger comeback that wasn’t in the other — the World Series is finally set, with the Tampa Bay Rays and Los Angeles Dodgers meeting up for Game 1 tonight in Arlington, Texas. Here are some of the biggest factors that jump out as we look ahead to the Fall Classic:

These are legitimately the two best teams in baseball …

Sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but the World Series doesn’t always feature MLB’s two best teams. (Scandalous, I know.) In this case, though, it’s hard to argue that we aren’t seeing the true cream of baseball’s crop on the game’s biggest stage. During the regular season, Tampa Bay and Los Angeles each had the best records in their respective leagues, which is only the fourth time that has happened in a World Series matchup since the wild-card era began in 1994. (The other series that fit the description came in 2013, 1999 and 1995.) That used to occur every year, of course — by definition — but it’s only happened a little over 25 percent of the time since the League Championship Series was introduced in 1969.

According to our team rankings, the Dodgers and Rays also rank first and second in Elo rating, respectively. That makes this only the ninth time that baseball has seen a college-football-esque No. 1-vs.-2 championship matchup in the past 35 years:

… but the Dodgers are pretty sizable favorites.

In the list above, the No. 1 team actually lost just as often as it won — sometimes in an unexpected sweep, even. Weird things can happen in baseball’s postseason … but don’t necessarily count on that this time around. With a gap of 45 Elo points separating them from the Rays, the Dodgers are the 15th-biggest favorite in World Series history and are tied for the fifth-biggest since 1969:

Again, this being baseball, some of the biggest underdogs ended up winning. (Cincinnati’s sweep of the 103-win Oakland A’s in 1990 has to go down as one of history’s most stunning routs, and the Reds were the underdog by just a bit wider Elo margin than the Rays are currently to the Dodgers.) Accordingly, our prediction model gives Los Angeles a 69 percent chance of winning its first title since 1988 — big by baseball standards, but far from a sure thing.

The matchup is a fitting commentary on team-building in 2020.

The Dodgers had baseball’s third-largest payroll this season, according to Baseball-Reference.com’s salary data, trailing only the Houston Astros and New York Yankees. The Rays, meanwhile, had baseball’s third-smallest payroll, ahead of only the Miami Marlins and Pittsburgh Pirates. Going back to 1998 — when MLB expanded to its current 30-team structure — that 25-spot difference in salary ranking between L.A. and Tampa Bay is the biggest for any World Series:

Traditionally, these big salary mismatches haven’t gone well for the poorer team. Of the 10 most lopsided battles on the list above, nine were won by the club with the more expensive talent — the only exception being the 2003 World Series, in which the then-Florida Marlins outdueled the favored Yankees in six games.

But in a larger sense, the Dodgers and Rays both tell us about where the sport has headed over the past few decades. When Tampa Bay made its big leap into contention in 2008, “Moneyball” (the book) was only 5 years old, and the use of analytics for team-building was still more the province of small-market teams like the Rays than big-market ones like the Dodgers. Tampa’s general manager back then? A 31-year-old former financial analyst named Andrew Friedman — who happens to now be the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations.

Not coincidentally, the Dodgers typify the way big-market clubs have subsumed the lessons learned by smaller teams scraping for every edge. Where the late-2000s Rays had Ben Zobrist, Los Angeles now has an army of multi-positional fielders; where ex-Rays manager Joe Maddon was hailed for helping reintroduce the defensive shift to baseball, no team in the regular season shifted more in 2020 than the Dodgers. To the credit of Tampa Bay’s current brain trust, it still managed to build an exceptional all-around team on a shoestring budget. But the Dodgers built one of those, too — while paying Clayton Kershaw, Mookie Betts, Justin Turner and Kenley Jansen more than the Rays’ entire roster combined.

The Rays are relying on slick defense, timely pitching — and the Randy Arozarena Show.

The Rays were not an elite pure hitting team in the regular season, and they’ve struggled to consistently get on base in the playoffs — among the eight teams that made the division series, Tampa Bay ranks seventh in postseason batting average, on-base percentage, slugging and OPS. Only three regular Rays hitters have an OPS over .780 in the playoffs: Ji-Man Choi (.952), Manny Margot (.967) and — of course — ALCS MVP Randy Arozarena (1.288). Arozarena’s seven home runs set a new rookie record and are tied (behind Nelson Cruz in 2011, Carlos Beltran in 2004 and Barry Bonds in 2002) for the second-most ever in a single postseason. But the Rays have arguably relied too much on Arozarena and the long ball; 72 percent of their runs in the playoffs have come via the home run, the largest share ever for a pennant-winner going into a World Series, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.

Tampa Bay could stand to get more from some of its flagging hitters — most notably second baseman Brandon Lowe, who carries a dismal .366 postseason OPS after posting a .916 mark during the regular season. But the Dodgers’ pitching won’t be easy to overcome. Among division-series contestants, L.A. pitchers easily have the best fielding independent pitching (FIP) this postseason, with the second-best rates of strikeouts and home runs allowed. Though Arozarena also had great numbers (1.023 OPS) in limited playing time during the regular season, he’ll probably regress to the mean some in the World Series. Will his teammates pick up the slack?

On the other side of the ball, the Rays have relied on their defense to make plays and get the key out at the right moment. Tampa’s pitchers have stranded a playoff-high 85.5 percent of runners on base, and only the Astros had a larger gap than the Rays have had between their ERA (3.36) and FIP (4.65) in the postseason. Both of those stats tend to regress to the mean as well — though we’d also expect the quartet of Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Nick Anderson and Ryan Yarbrough, who combined for a 3.69 regular-season FIP, to do better than their collective 5.75 postseason mark. The real question is how much they can limit the damage from an L.A. lineup that led the majors in regular-season scoring and produced an .850 OPS against the Atlanta Braves in the NLCS, with four regular hitters (Corey Seager, Kiké Hernández, Max Muncy and Joc Pederson) above .970 in the series.

This is another major chapter in Clayton Kershaw’s complicated story.

After losing his lone start of the NLCS, it looked like 2020 might be the latest in a long line of postseason disappointments for Clayton Kershaw. But L.A.’s comeback gives him another shot at redemption. And one start shouldn’t define his playoffs as a whole, anyway. Over the entire postseason, Kershaw is 2-1 with a 3.32 ERA and 3.14 FIP in 19 innings … pretty solid numbers, all told. (For comparison, he had a 3.31 FIP during the regular season.) That’s kind of par for the course, though: Kershaw has not been as bad in the playoffs as we’re often led to believe — he has the same career postseason FIP (3.74) as legendary money pitcher Jack Morris, for instance — yet he has also faltered in some pretty high-profile games. His legacy is complicated, without a doubt, and that fact is certain to come into play sooner or later in this World Series.

Perhaps the bigger postseason question for Kershaw is just how many prime chances he’ll have left to win a ring after 2020. Though he had his best season in three years according to WAR per 162 games, Kershaw will be 33 next season, an area of the aging curve in which pitchers typically see their strikeouts drop and their FIPs rise. And while the Dodgers should still be plenty good next year, more than a few familiar faces from this current quasi-dynasty¹¹ are set to be free agents after this season, including Pederson, Hernández and Turner. (Kershaw himself has a contract that expires the offseason after next.) It’s hard not to think that this is one of the last, best championship opportunities remaining for the Kershaw-era Dodgers.

It should be a very good World Series.

According to ESPN Stats & Info, the Dodgers and Rays’ combined .692 winning percentage is the highest for any World Series in history. That’s in part due to the fact that league-leading records will be more extreme in a smaller sample — and the 2020 season was baseball’s shortest since 1878. But these teams also look good if we look at metrics that are theoretically regressed to account for such a short schedule. If you take the harmonic mean of both teams’ Elo ratings in each World Series, this matchup shows up as the 13th-best in history and the third-best since 1953:

That also squares with the thrills both teams have already provided so far in the postseason. If the twin seven-game league championship series were any indication, we should be in for a treat as the Rays and Dodgers take the field over the next week or so.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

In honor of the start of the 2020 World Series, we spend almost this entire episode talking about baseball. We first break down how the Los Angeles Dodgers and Tampa Bay Rays made it to the Fall Classic. The matchup favors the Dodgers — our model gives them a 69 percent chance to win the World Series. There certainly is pressure on them to end a 32-year championship drought, as well as on stars like Clayton Kershaw and Mookie Betts to prove their worth when it really counts. But the Rays need many more things to go right for them to win: They need their bullpen to keep them out of trouble instead of bailing them out of trouble, and they need Randy Arozarena to keep hitting home runs at an incredible rate. All our hosts love the Rays’ style of play but remain unconvinced that their underdog narrative is as scrappy as Tampa makes it sound. What the hosts are convinced of is that this year, finally, belongs to the Dodgers. (Though they also acknowledge that their predictions have not been all that accurate this year.)

But there are other questions being asked about this World Series, including whether the Rays’ low-budget approach to team-building is exciting or actually somewhat detrimental to players — and even to baseball fandom itself. As this is FiveThirtyEight, we are unsurprisingly fans of efficiency-driven decision-making on the part of front offices. While the Rays are an extreme example of what small-market teams have to do in order to compete year in and year out, it’s not like the Dodgers aren’t also using sabermetrics. The Rays’ success playing Moneyball is much better for Tampa’s fans and the league as a whole than if the Rays resigned themselves to constant disappointment — as small-market, midtable teams in the English Premier League do. The solution to the resentment some fans are feeling probably isn’t a misguided form of player-club loyalty on the part of the Rays. It’s baseball owners opening up their books and showing us all which teams are maximizing their efficiency out of necessity, and which are actually being cheap.

Finally, in the Rabbit Hole, Neil takes a look at how home-field advantage has (or hasn’t) changed over the course of 2020. The results are inconclusive. Baseball and football, which had the use of their stadiums but fewer fans, remained very close to their avenge home winning percentages at full capacity. The NBA and the WNBA, which competed in bubbles, saw clearer differences in favor of home team victories, despite playing at neutral sites. Is home-field advantage all about material amenities? Is it more psychological? We would need to wait for another pandemic to completely shut down sports in order to collect more sample data, so we hope this stays a mystery for a good long while.

What we’re looking at this week:

• What to watch for in the World Series.
• Why No. 1 seeds meeting in the World Series is an anomaly.
• Billy Beane’s indelible mark on baseball.

Through two games of the World Series, the Los Angeles Dodgers — owners of the best record in the majors — and the Tampa Bay Rays, possessing the best record in the AL this season, have each won a game. While the Dodgers have been our favorite to win the World Series since the preseason and remain a heavy favorite according to our model, the Rays are a talented and creative team that won the second-most games this season with the majors’ third-lowest payroll. Such meetings of the MLB’s two best teams in its championship series are rare, so what have we learned about this matchup through two games? And what does it mean for the World Series going forward as play resumes today?

The Dodgers lineup is absurdly deep

After he helped send the Dodgers to the World Series with a memorable home run in Game 7 of the NL championship series, Cody Bellinger homered again Tuesday. While he’s coming off an uneven season, he was still a better-than-league-average hitter, according to Baseball-Reference.com’s OPS+ metric. Through his age-24 season, he’s already won an MVP (2019) and Rookie of the Year Award (2017). According to Baseball-Reference.com, the most similar batters to him through age 24 include Darryl Strawberry, Giancarlo Stanton and Manny Ramirez. What was also remarkable about Bellinger’s soaring home runs was his place in the batting order when he slugged them: sixth. It’s remarkable the Dodgers have such a hitter in the bottom half of their lineup. In the following inning Tuesday, Chris Taylor, batting seventh, singled home Max Muncy to give the Dodgers a 5-1 lead. Enrique Hernández — who came off the bench to hit in the eighth spot — followed with an RBI single to blow open the game.

The talent and depth of the Dodgers’ lineup is rare and a great advantage. This season, the Dodgers’ lineup posted above-league average OPS marks for eight out of nine lineup positions. Their No. 6 hitters this season combined to be 31 percent better than league average for that spot. The Dodgers’ seventh, eighth and ninth hitters combined for a sOPS+ number of 136, or 36 percent above league-average production for the bottom third of a lineup. The Dodgers’ 7-8-9 spots combined to tie for the 18th best such production ever recorded in the game. For opposing pitchers, the threats must seem endless.

Ice-cold bats need to warm up for the Rays

While rookie Randy Arozarena is having an all-time great postseason, a number of Rays regulars have not hit well this postseason, batting .213 as a team through Game 2. Those slumping Rays included Brandon Lowe, who led the team in home runs and WAR in the regular season but entered Game 2 batting just .107 in the playoffs.

So that Lowe smashed a first-inning home run Wednesday, and homered again in the fifth to stake the Rays to a 5-0 lead, is exactly the type of bat the Rays need to get going. The Rays advanced to the World Series with regulars Lowe, Austin Meadows and Willy Adames all batting less than .200 with OPS marks of .549 or worse entering Game 3. The Rays need them to break out.

Kershaw is changing his story

Longtime Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw has been criticized for years about his postseason performance. For his career, Kershaw has a 2.43 ERA in the regular season (175-76 record) compared with a 4.22 ERA in the postseason (12-12 record).¹⁰

But if he can follow up on his excellent Game 1 outing and help the Dodgers to a title, he can end questions surrounding his ability to perform in the playoffs. Kershaw is putting together an excellent postseason, with a 3-1 record and 2.88 ERA over 25 innings, the most in the postseason field.

Kershaw has a couple of performance trends that are working in his favor. His velocity has increased this season after setting career lows in 2018 and again in 2019. He’s also relying on his slider at a 42 percent rate in the playoffs, the second most often he’s thrown it in a postseason, and up from his rate in the regular season, which has increased in recent seasons. He’s throwing it more often than his fastball (41.7 percent) this October. Kershaw threw 35 sliders in Game 1, nearly 45 percent of his total offerings, inducing 21 swings and 11 whiffs. He’s thrown 145 sliders this October, and opponents are batting just .200 in those instances. The slider might be Kershaw’s narrative-changing ace card.

The Rays’ pitching gives them a chance … if they don’t stray from their plan

The Rays have excelled in limiting their starting pitchers’ exposure, averaging the fewest pitches per start this season (71). For instance, in Game 7 of the ALCS, Rays pitcher Charlie Morton was pulled after throwing 66 pitches despite having allowed just two hits over 5⅔ shutout innings. The idea is that pitchers generally perform worse each cycle through the opposing lineup. Those practices, coupled with an elite bullpen and backed by one of the game’s best defenses, have allowed the Rays to be nearly the equal of the Dodgers in preventing runs this season — despite operating with just a fraction of their payroll.

So it was surprising to see Rays manager Kevin Cash allow Tyler Glasnow to throw a career-high 112 pitches in Game 1. Glasnow wasn’t particularly sharp, surrendering four of his six total walks before the fifth inning, when the Dodgers blew the game open.

In Game 2, Cash managed more as he had most of this season, pulling starter Blake Snell after 88 pitches, in line with his season average. The Rays’ bullpen held the lead, and the formula that worked so often in the regular season — and during the playoffs in the run-up to the World Series — was successful again. The Rays likely need to stick with the plan and for it to stay effective if they hope to deliver a Dodgers upset.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

The Los Angeles Dodgers could have imploded after a historic series of miscues allowed the opposing Tampa Bay Rays to tie the World Series at two games apiece Saturday night. Game 5 starter Clayton Kershaw could have lived down to his less-than-perfect postseason reputation, and the Dodgers could have let yet another title shot slip away. Instead, though, they got back to work and produced a businesslike 4-2 victory Sunday night, showcasing all of the myriad reasons why Los Angeles is just one win away from its first championship in 32 years.

Tampa Bay’s win in Game 4 was an all-timer — and an all-time gut-punch of a loss for the Dodgers, who had fought hard to stake themselves to a 7-6 lead with two outs in the bottom of the ninth before all hell broke loose. According to win probability added (WPA), the single by backup Rays outfielder Brett Phillips (and the two Dodger errors that followed) swung the odds of Game 4 by 81 percentage points, making it one of the most game-changing plays ever in a World Series. And if we take into account the leverage of the game itself, that play lowered Los Angeles’s championship odds by 29.7 percentage points, making it probably the costliest set of errors in baseball history.

Again, you might have thought the way that game went down would weigh heavily on the Dodgers going forward. But all L.A. had to do was glance at the stat sheet to realize the balance of the series was still tipped in its favor. Entering Sunday’s game, the Dodgers had a 158-point advantage in OPS during the World Series, a 1.20-run advantage in fielding independent pitching and a 6.2-point advantage in defensive efficiency ratio.⁹ That it took a historic sequence of events for Tampa Bay to even tie things up also spoke to how well Los Angeles had played for the vast majority of the series.

And the Dodgers got back to that formula in Game 5. Though they were held to just six hits — after banging out 25 in Games 3 and 4 combined — three went for extra bases (including two home runs), and they managed five walks. L.A. jumped out to an early lead, scoring first for the fourth time in five games, further adding to Tampa Bay starter Tyler Glasnow’s postseason frustrations. After allowing four earned runs in five innings Sunday, Glasnow has a 6.28 postseason ERA (including a 9.64 mark in this World Series). As is customary at this point, L.A.’s deep lineup also delivered RBIs from the Nos. 2 (Corey Seager), 4 (Max Muncy), 6 (Cody Bellinger) and 8 (Joc Pederson) slots in the batting order.

But the biggest factor to turn the tide of the series back toward the Dodgers was their pitching. Kershaw shrugged off his past failures to give the team a solid 5⅔ innings in Game 5, allowing just two runs and setting up the Dodger bullpen to close the door late. On a night he set the new all-time postseason strikeout record, L.A.’s ace outdueled Glasnow for the second time in the series. Meanwhile, the Dodgers’ relievers found redemption 24 hours after a disastrous performance in which they allowed six runs in four innings (including one unearned during the comedy of errors at the end).

Tampa Bay had its chances, particularly with runners on the corners and no outs against Kershaw in the fourth (which ultimately yielded no runs after Manuel Margot was tagged out when trying to steal home), and when Randy Arozarena, the new single-postseason home run king, came up as the potential go-ahead run against lefty Victor González in the eighth (he harmlessly flied out to center). But the Rays were unable to muster any runs from the fourth inning onward.

And so, the Dodgers now have a chance to clinch their long-awaited championship in Game 6 on Tuesday. Our prediction model gives them a 59 percent chance of wrapping things up then and an 83 percent chance overall. L.A. is up 3-2 and, statistically, it has done a thorough job of outclassing the Rays across pretty much every key metric during the series so far:

Of course, lest we coronate the Dodgers too early, Game 4 reminded us that baseball fortunes can turn in an instant, on the wildest of plays. But at the same time, it also proved that those are the kinds of improbable plays it will take to beat a team as deep and talented as the one Los Angeles has assembled this season.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

We start with the World Series, which is the Los Angeles Dodgers’ to lose despite the Tampa Bay Rays pulling off some wild surprises, especially in Game 4. But all our hosts approve of the Rays’ aggressive play. It’s exciting to watch, and with a pitching staff as stacked as L.A.’s, the Florida team needs to force key players like Walker Buehler and Julio Urías to pay if they’re not perfect all the time. This leads to a discussion of who the nerdiest team in professional sports is, currently. The Rays are up there, perhaps only surpassed by the Houston Rockets, but as we talked about on the show last week, sabermetric geekery has triumphed in every corner of sports. The Dodgers are an incredibly nerdy team: They just also happen to be super rich.

Next we turn our attention to the NFL, and in particular to the struggles of the New England Patriots. A lot of the Pats’ problems do center on how out of step (if still fashion-forward) quarterback Cam Newton looks. But Newton’s lack of offensive weapons and the complete erosion of the Pats’ defense are the root of the problem — a fact made all the more clear by how Tom Brady is thriving on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It’s not that Brady has some secret elixir of youth (probably) — he has Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, a resurgent Rob Gronkowski, a functional defense and an offensive line that hasn’t been horribly battered. The real question is: Can Bill Belichick turn things around? We’d never count him out, but given how Newton seems to be playing, we struggle to see which assets he could activate or what he could change.

Finally, in the Rabbit Hole, FiveThirtyEight designer Emily Scherer brings her expert eye to helping us evaluate championship patches across sports. From the delightful to the experimental to the just plain boring, she and Neil evaluate how the major leagues handle the extra flare of marking championship teams’ jerseys. The NFL and NBA are pretty uninspired, all things considered, but MLB and the WNBA have done some interesting things, and the NHL makes up for its laser focus on the Stanley Cup with the sheer volume of patches you can put on hockey jerseys.

What we’re looking at this week:

• The Dodgers responded to a stunning loss with a businesslike win.
• The New York Times on what went wrong for the Patriots.
• Nate Silver with memorable advice: Send Alex Gordon!

On Tuesday night on a neutral field in Arlington, Texas, the Los Angeles Dodgers ended one of the longest title droughts in Major League Baseball, defeating the Tampa Bay Rays 3-1 in Game 6 of the World Series. It was the Dodgers’ first World Series title since 1988. And while it was a bizarre, pandemic-shortened season — encapsulated almost perfectly in Dodgers’ third baseman Justin Turner being pulled in the eighth inning because he had tested positive for COVID-19 — the Dodgers are a deserving champion according to our MLB ratings, which ranked the club as the league’s top team for nearly the entire season.

The Dodgers had the highest World Series win probability in the preseason, per our forecast. They had the top chances at the end of August and again at the end of the regular season. In fact, the Dodgers’ 54 percent World Series chances early in the division series round was the highest such mark for any team at that point in the playoffs since we made our Elo ratings a permanent fixture in 2015. Los Angeles really had only one scary moment: when the Atlanta Braves took a 3-1 lead over them in the National League Championship Series. It was the only time LA fell from owning the best World Series chances week-over-week in 2020.

The Dodgers were finally able to celebrate with the The Commissioner’s Trophy at Globe Life Field as an unusually complete team. They had already established themselves as a dominant power in the NL, winning eight consecutive division titles and three of the last four NL pennants. But this season they enjoyed their most efficient offensive performance in franchise history in terms of weighted runs created plus (wRC+). Their lineup was one of the deepest in MLB history and wore out opponents throughout the playoffs. They also had one of the best bullpens in the game and their starting pitchers posted the second lowest ERA in the majors. This October, their long-time ace Clayton Kershaw ended his personal postseason struggles. I could go on. Suffice to say, the Dodgers excelled in about every way in 2020.

LA’s success, moreover, was not merely the product of a large payroll (though that helps, of course). The Dodgers have become a model for player development within the industry. A number of their star players who each excelled in the playoffs — Cody Bellinger, Walker Buehler and Corey Seager — were all drafted and developed by the club. Turner and Max Muncy were acquired for little cost and developed into key players. Game 6 starter Tony Gonsolin transformed from a ninth-round pick into one of the NL’s best pitchers this season. The Dodgers are not only the new champs, but they have the No. 3-ranked farm system, according to FanGraphs.com. They won’t be going away any time soon.

Randomness plays a big role in baseball, so there’s always a danger in ascribing success to specific factors and strategies. Sometimes the same decision that’s labeled as genius in one context is labeled as foolish in another, depending on the way the ball bounces. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that this Fall Classic was something of the Andrew Friedman Bowl, as the Dodgers’ baseball operations chief faced the small-market, analytically inclined “monster he created” in Tampa Bay, where he was the general manager from the 2006 season through 2014. Friedman’s approach to building a team certainly looks smart at the moment.

“It’s pretty much the same style play,” former Rays player Carlos Peña told the Tampa Bay Times. “And as I’ve often said, the Rays and the Dodgers are both playing chess while the rest of the league is playing checkers. Except the Rays are playing on a wooden board, and the Dodgers are playing on a golden one.”

Indeed, the Rays have excelled with some of the smallest payrolls in Major League Baseball, and Friedman brought many of those analytical practices to Los Angeles. While the Dodgers and Rays look for every data-based edge and have developed plenty of talent, Los Angeles is where Friedman can acquire and lockup a superstar like Mookie Betts, who signed a 12-year extension with the Dodgers after being acquired from the Boston Red Sox. Betts’s eighth-inning home run Tuesday gave the Dodgers an important insurance run. The Dodgers also have a $30-million-per-year ace in Kershaw.

The Dodgers also perhaps benefited Tuesday from too strict an adherence to data, in arguably the most second-guessed decision of the postseason: Tampa Bay manager Kevin Cash electing to pull his ace, Blake Snell, after he allowed just two hits and threw 73 pitches over 5⅓ innings. Snell was rolling, striking out nine Dodgers while not allowing a run, but Cash and the Rays were extreme in limiting starting pitchers’ exposure to opposing lineups (averaging an MLB-low 71 pitches per start in the regular season) — sticking to the idea that a pitcher’s performance generally drops off deeper into outings. That’s true, too, of Snell throughout his career, though many critics on Tuesday night argued the eye test ought to be consulted along with the numbers. The Dodgers weren’t as restrictive with top arms Kershaw or Buehler in October, though neither exceeded 100 pitches in a game this postseason.

Still, that decision might not have changed the ultimate outcome, as the Dodgers’ pitching was excellent, limiting the Rays to a single run. Like the Rays, the Dodgers had one of the deepest bullpens in the regular season, one of four playoff teams with nine or more relievers enjoying ERA+ marks of 110 or better, meaning these pitchers were performing at least 10 percent better than league average in terms of run prevention. Dodgers starting pitcher-turned-postseason-reliever Julio Urías closed out the World Series with 2 ⅓ scoreless innings to finish with a 1.17 ERA for the playoffs.

From the top to the bottom of their roster, from the beginning to the end of the season, the Dodgers displayed few weaknesses. As a result, they celebrated their first title in more than 30 years — and the wait for the next could be much, much shorter.

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ championship-clinching victory in Tuesday’s World Series Game 6 was a long time coming. That was true literally — before this week, the Dodgers hadn’t lifted the trophy since 1988, one of the longest droughts in baseball — but also figuratively. Over the past decade or so, no team has made more of a concerted effort to win a title than Los Angeles. Since 2012, the Dodgers have won more regular-season games than any other club, spent more money on payroll than all but one team⁶ and consistently built one of the game’s strongest farm systems. They hired one of the largest analytics staffs in sports — under the direction of Andrew Friedman, president of baseball operations — went star-hunting in the trade market and pressed every other advantage they could think of. After years of falling short, everything came together for L.A. in 2020 with the best team in franchise history — and one of the best baseball has ever seen.

The Dodgers have long been one of MLB’s glamour franchises, with a rich history, an iconic stadium, top-notch uniforms and a sizable fanbase in a massive media market. (And, of course, they had the great Vin Scully on the mic until a few years ago.) All that was missing through the 1990s and into the 2000s was a championship, which eluded Los Angeles across seven managers, seven general managers and three ownership changes. It wasn’t for lack of trying; the team has long attempted to leverage its big-market status into perennial contention. But it often struggled to get the formula quite right.

From 1999 to 2003, the Dodgers spent a staggering $478,360,432 (again, second only to the Yankees) on zero playoff appearances. Shortly thereafter, they overhauled their prospect pipeline and hired a proto-Friedman of sorts in general manager Paul DePodesta, of “Moneyball” fame. But then-owner Frank McCourt pulled the plug on DePodesta’s tenure after barely two seasons. The immediate post-DePodesta Dodgers under Ned Colletti were more successful, with three postseason berths in his first four seasons, though that was followed by another multi-year playoff drought with an aging roster.

The tide truly started to turn for L.A. after McCourt was forced to sell the team as part of a messy divorce and bankruptcy saga. In 2012, the Guggenheim Baseball Management group purchased the Dodgers for $2 billion, at the time a record price tag for a sports franchise. With Los Angeles Lakers icon Magic Johnson among the investors, the new ownership group — helmed by veteran executive Stan Kasten — set about turning the Dodgers into the winning (and money-making) machine it always seemed like it should have been.

It started with investing a huge amount of money into upgrading Dodger Stadium — and also the on-field product. In 2013, Los Angeles set an all-time MLB record (which still stands) by spending $259,856,000 on its payroll, eclipsing even the Yankees’ notoriously spendthrift ways under former owner George Steinbrenner. That Dodgers team didn’t win it all, losing to the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Championship Series, but it did represent the closest L.A. had come to the World Series (two wins away) since 1988. Then the Dodgers lured Friedman away from the Tampa Bay Rays to become their president of baseball operations, and they hired Farhan Zaidi — another analytics visionary from the Oakland A’s, just like DePodesta — to be general manager. From then on, the Dodgers effectively became the model MLB franchise, a big-market club that wasn’t afraid to spend but also focused on developing players and creating a constant pipeline of talent.

Of the 690 team-seasons since 1998, only 60 have seen a team rank among the top 10 in both total major-league payroll and Baseball America’s organizational farm system rankings. The two factors so seldom coexist because there is a natural push-and-pull between loading up on talent for the future and spending to win in the here and now. In the traditional cycle of rebuilding and contending, a rebuild consists of shedding payroll and focusing on the farm system, then ramping up spending (and gutting the supply of prospects in trades) when a core is in place to contend.

But the beauty of these Dodgers is that they don’t exist in that continuum between contending and rebuilding. They rebuild and they contend, all at once, which is why they have pulled off the double-top-10 feat in each of the past six seasons — the longest streak since the Atlanta Braves did it from 1998 to 2005.⁷

Those Braves never got enough credit for being a player-development machine, but that was a crucial part of Atlanta’s dynasty-era streak of 14 consecutive division titles. Similarly, the Dodgers have used the formula to complement their big-ticket pickups — like outfielder Mookie Betts — with a constant supply of homegrown talent that includes World Series MVP Corey Seager, 2019 NL MVP Cody Bellinger and pitchers Walker Buehler and Julio Urías, who combined for a 1.50 ERA in 48 innings this postseason. (And, of course, a certain 2006 Dodgers draftee who has been through L.A.’s entire renaissance: future Hall of Fame starter Clayton Kershaw.)

The Braves never won a World Series during that streak of top 10 prospect-and-payroll seasons, a cautionary tale about the limits of machine-building in a sport as random as baseball. And Los Angeles was also looking like a warning sign for those hoping to win through sheer talent accumulation: Only two teams (one of which was that Atlanta squad) ever won more games in a seven-season span with zero titles to show for it than the 2013-19 Dodgers did.

But the 2020 Dodgers came up big where their predecessors had failed. In its previous two World Series losses, 2017 and 2018, L.A. hit fewer home runs than the eventual winners (23 to 16), struck out more (121 to 107), had an inferior batting average (.193 versus .226) and lost the on-base plus slugging battle (.728 to .617 on average). Against the Rays in 2020, though, the Dodgers flipped those numbers around, winning all of the key battles — including a commanding .819 to .672 OPS edge.

As part of that, Kershaw overcame his reputation for postseason miscues, winning both of his World Series starts with a sterling 2.31 ERA. His story — trying again and again (and again) to convert stellar regular-season promise into championship success — was a microcosm of the whole franchise’s battle to reach the pinnacle of the sport this past decade. So too was the tale of manager Dave Roberts, who was often criticized for in-game decisions in L.A.’s previous losses but pushed all the right buttons down the stretch of the 2020 World Series (in stark contrast with his counterpart for Tampa Bay, Kevin Cash). In steering the Dodger ship to a title, Roberts did what plenty of other well-regarded skippers (such as Joe Torre, Don Mattingly, Jim Tracy and Davey Johnson) couldn’t over the past three decades.

Maybe, in the end, this team was simply too good to not win. Across the regular season and playoffs, Los Angeles went 56-22 — which works out to a 116.3-win pace per 162 games, better than the record for single-season victories set by the Seattle Mariners in 2001. They had a +136 run differential in 60 regular-season games, the fourth-best per-game margin ever.⁸ And according to our Elo ratings, the 2020 Dodgers finished the season with a rating of 1612.4, which makes them the seventh-best team of the entire World Series era (since 1903) in terms of final, end-of-season Elo:

It may have come at the end of an imperfect season, but the 2020 Dodgers’ championship was the culmination of a long, expensive effort to create the perfect baseball machine. Along the way, L.A. proved that if a franchise invests enough, innovates enough, acquires enough talent and — perhaps most importantly — tries enough times, it can finally engineer a championship breakthrough.

We love our sports forecasts here at FiveThirtyEight, but one of the things that make the games great is when a team comes along and takes prognosticators by surprise. So along with our Hall of Pretty Damn Good Players, we want to appreciate these unsung teams that nobody saw coming, in a series we’re calling the Little Teams That Could.

Before their magical playoff runs of 2014 and 2015, the Kansas City Royals had not exactly been a fixture in baseball’s postseason.

OK, talk about huge understatements …

Although K.C. had ranked among baseball’s best from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the 1990s and 2000s were not kind to the franchise. Team cornerstones like George Brett, Willie Wilson and Frank White gave way to stars who didn’t stay long — Carlos Beltrán, Johnny Damon, Zack Greinke, etc. — and a host of lesser players who filled in the gaps. After winning the 1985 World Series, Kansas City missed the playoffs for the next 28 seasons in a row.¹ And worse than merely being mediocre, Kansas City was almost always straight-up bad. From 1997 through 2013, the Royals finished better than 20th in our final Elo rankings just three times (19th in 2000, 18th in 2008 and 14th in 2013).

The mid-2010s weren’t supposed to change that. Though an impressive prospect pipeline and a surprising 86-76 finish in 2013 had raised expectations some, Kansas City was not viewed as a serious contender going into 2014. FanGraphs gave K.C. just a 2.7 percent chance of making the World Series, and the Vegas odds implied only a slightly better 4.7 percent probability. With few household names (did Alex Gordon, James Shields and Salvador Pérez count?) and no recent history of playoff success to call upon, there was little reason to think the Royals would suddenly turn into a powerhouse.

And yet, the Royals started out steady in 2014 and exploded in the second half of the season — going an MLB-best 52-27² from July 22 onward (including playoffs). K.C. got an All-Star-level season (4.4 wins above replacement)³ from the late-blooming Lorenzo Cain in center field and an improved rotation, to go with manager Ned Yost’s core Royals formula: contact hitting, great defense, blazing speed and a lights-out bullpen. Kansas City made the playoffs for the first time since that 1985 championship and knocked off the A’s in an unforgettable wild-card game, then swept the Angels and Orioles to give themselves a perfect 8-0 postseason record en route to the World Series.

Granting that the postseason was expanded by an extra round in 2012, no team had ever won each of its first eight playoff games until the 2014 Royals visited the World Series, nor has it happened since. (The 1976 Cincinnati Reds won all seven of their postseason contests.) And they did it mostly out of nowhere. According to our Weighted Average Loss Total (WALT) metric, which looks at a team’s average losses per 162 games over the 20 preceding seasons — placing more emphasis on recent seasons — the Royals were the fourth-most-unsung pennant winner since the divisional era launched in 1969. And only one team in that span (the 1995 Cleveland Indians) had gone straight to the World Series on the heels of a longer playoff drought than Kansas City did in 2014.

Though the Royals lost to the dynasty San Francisco Giants in the Fall Classic, they came about as close as a team can get to winning without hoisting the Commissioner’s Trophy — falling in seven games with the tying run stranded 90 feet away in the bottom of the ninth, after Gordon had delivered one of the most iconic near-game-changers in baseball history.

With that unfinished business in mind, Kansas City reloaded for another run in 2015. But despite coming off a World Series appearance, they carried only +3300 championship odds at the end of spring training, according to Sports Odds History — which was tied for just 18th-best in baseball. (After adjusting for the cut, +3300 odds would translate to a mere 2.2 percent chance of winning the World Series.) Since 1985, only two World Series teams were ever disrespected so much by the oddsmakers going into the following season: the fire-sale 1998 Florida Marlins (+8000) and the 1999 San Diego Padres (+5000).

Most of the other teams on that list had good cause to be dismissed. The Marlins sunk to an abysmal 54-108 record a year after their 1997 championship, and the Padres fell to 74-88 after their 1998 World Series bid. But the Royals beat their odds yet again — this time, even more convincingly than before. They improved by six games in the standings, more than tripled their run differential from 2014 and had an MLB-high seven players named to the All-Star Game (thanks in part to some fun balloting shenanigans). Rather than regressing to the mean like most teams do after a meteoric rise, Kansas City just kept getting better.

(We should note that the statistical systems fared no better than Vegas in predicting the 2015 Royals — to the point that we wondered whether they had broken our beloved projection algorithms.)

And the Royals did it their way, playing small ball even as the rest of baseball moved away from that style. We can measure just how “Royals-y” the 2014-15 Royals really were by looking at their percentile rankings in contact rate, speed, and defensive and relief-pitching WAR,⁴ and adding them up to create what we’re calling an ESCOBAR⁵ Rating, after speedy shortstop Alcides Escobar (who perhaps most embodied the Royals’ brand of winning baseball). With an ESCOBAR of 397 (out of a possible 400), the 2015 Royals were indeed the Royals-iest team in baseball during the expansion era (since 1961), while the 2014 Royals’ 393 ESCOBAR ranks second on the list:

Armed with more talent than the year before — like starters Johnny Cueto and Edinson Vólquez, and all-purpose icon Ben Zobrist — the Royals thrived again in the 2015 postseason. They outlasted the Astros in the AL Division Series, sprinted past the favored Blue Jays in the ALCS and finally took care of the upstart Mets in a five-game World Series, coming from behind to force extra innings in the deciding game thanks to a heads-up, aggressive base-running gambit by first baseman Eric Hosmer:

That play — Hosmer’s Mad Dash, as ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian later immortalized it in this oral history — represented everything special about Kansas City’s playoff runs in 2014 and 2015. Nobody saw it coming, and by the time they did, it couldn’t be stopped. “That’s what I’m most proud of, how aggressive and fearless [Hosmer] was,” Yost said. “He was not afraid to make a mistake. He played to win. He saw a way to win the game. That is what we do here — we play to win.”

When the Royals scored five in the top of the 12th inning and shut down the Mets with lights-out closer Wade Davis a half-inning later, Kansas City had gone from an out-of-nowhere playoff oddity to world champions.

“The way the Royals defied the projections is almost without precedent,” my colleague Rob Arthur wrote at the time, noting that Kansas City was no fluke, either — its core simply began playing better all at once, maximizing the potential of its playing style (and, like most champions, excelling during the most important moments). It didn’t last beyond 2015 — K.C. is currently mired in a five-year postseason drought — but for two magical seasons, the Royals were one of the quintessential Little Teams That Could.

Sara Ziegler contributed research.

A year ago, the Houston Astros and Atlanta Braves came oh-so-close to meeting in Arlington, Texas, for MLB’s COVID-19-bubble World Series. Both teams took their respective league championship series to do-or-die Game 7s, but each fell short. This time around, nothing could get in their way: The Astros turned around the ALCS in a hurry against the Boston Red Sox, outscoring Boston 23-3 over the final three games, while the Braves got revenge for last season’s NLCS collapse against the Los Angeles Dodgers, thanks in no small part to the hot bat of Eddie Rosario all series long and the gutsy pitching of Tyler Matzek in Game 6.

And so the 2021 season will come down to Atlanta and Houston, in what looks on paper like one of the closest matchups in World Series history. According to our pre-series Elo ratings, only 5.3 rating points separates the two clubs, the 15th-narrowest gap going into any World Series:

Astros-Braves is a tightly matched World Series

Smallest differences in pre-series Elo ratings for World Series opponents, 1903-2021

	Higher-Rated Team		Lower-Rated Team
Year	Team	Elo	Team	Elo	Elo Diff.	Winner ?
1991	Braves	1550	Twins	1550	0.1	Twins
1918	Red Sox	1547	Cubs	1546	0.3	Red Sox
2005	Astros	1558	White Sox	1557	1.5	White Sox
1930	Athletics	1582	Cardinals	1580	2.3	Athletics
1997	Indians	1537	Marlins	1535	2.7	Marlins
1962	Yankees	1558	Giants	1555	3.1	Yankees
2012	Tigers	1551	Giants	1548	3.1	Giants
1972	Athletics	1559	Reds	1556	3.8	Athletics
1922	Yankees	1566	Giants	1562	3.9	Giants
1951	Giants	1578	Yankees	1574	4.1	Yankees
1931	Athletics	1589	Cardinals	1584	4.2	Cardinals
1960	Yankees	1559	Pirates	1554	4.4	Pirates
2013	Red Sox	1576	Cardinals	1572	4.7	Red Sox
1979	Pirates	1578	Orioles	1573	4.8	Pirates
2021	Astros	1571	Braves	1565	5.3	???
1910	Cubs	1595	Athletics	1589	5.4	Athletics
1923	Giants	1572	Yankees	1566	6.0	Yankees
1999	Braves	1588	Yankees	1582	6.0	Yankees
1966	Dodgers	1554	Orioles	1547	6.6	Orioles
2015	Royals	1549	Mets	1542	6.9	Royals

Not only that, but our forecast model pegs the series odds at exactly 50-50 after accounting for probable starting pitchers, home-field advantage, rest and travel distance. By that standard, this matchup almost literally couldn’t get any closer. The keys to winning, then, will probably be found in the small edges each team can gain around the margins — the kinds of advantages these two clubs have evolved to press expertly throughout the year, and especially in the postseason.

At this point, Atlanta’s 2021 arc is well-known. The team was struggling early in the year even with superstar right fielder Ronald Acuña Jr. in the mix, and it seemed completely doomed when Acuña tore his ACL in July. Instead of folding, however, the Braves pulled off a series of shrewd moves that helped cover for the MVP-sized hole in their outfield — then caught fire down the stretch of the season to win the NL East and, ultimately, make the World Series.

The Braves had a recent template for a team starting slow before surging to the pennant: the 2019 Washington Nationals. That team was 12 games under .500 at its lowest point, still the fourth-biggest hole any World Series team dug out of (and No. 2 among winners). The Braves’ comeback can’t match that — Atlanta’s low point was just five games under .500 — but in other ways it was even more impressive than Washington’s recovery. 

During the 2021 regular season, Atlanta spent a total of 101 game days with a record below .500, second only to the 1973 New York Mets’ 114 sub-.500 game days among World Series teams. (By comparison, the 2019 Nats were below .500 for only 67 game days.) The 2021 Braves’ seasonlong record was also below .500 as late as its 107th game of the schedule — again, second only to the 1973 Mets (who, remarkably, were below .500 as late as their 153rd game of the year) among all-time World Series teams. Since those Mets ended up losing the World Series to the dynasty Oakland A’s in seven games, Atlanta could be the leader in each category among champions if it wins the World Series.

The Braves spent most of the season under .500

All-time World Series teams with the most total game days spent under .500 during the regular season

Year	Team	Last Game # Under .500	Game days Under .500	Won WS ?
1973	Mets	153	114
2021	Braves	107	101
1914	Braves	90	90	✓
2005	Astros	92	77
2003	Marlins	83	72	✓
2007	Rockies	91	67
2019	Nationals	79	67	✓
2018	Dodgers	61	56
2012	Tigers	83	49
1924	Senators	52	42	✓
1992	Braves	55	42
2014	Royals	99	42
1969	Mets	45	41	✓
1979	Pirates	42	39	✓
1983	Phillies	94	38
1985	Cardinals	39	37
1991	Twins	49	37	✓
1906	White Sox	50	36	✓
1930	Cardinals	97	34
1951	Giants	37	33

But that’s all ancient history. The Braves are now peaking at the perfect moment, thanks in large part to the stellar hitting of Rosario (who boasts a ridiculous 1.313 postseason OPS) and Freddie Freeman (1.072), to go with some timely contributions from the likes of Joc Pederson, Adam Duvall, Austin Riley and Ozzie Albies.

Even more importantly, perhaps, is the fact that Atlanta’s pitchers have allowed just 3.3 postseason runs per contest to a collection of teams that averaged 4.9 runs per game during the regular season. With the exception of righty reliever Luke Jackson — who actively hurt the Braves’ chances in each of his last three appearances of the NLCS — every Braves pitcher with at least four postseason innings carries an ERA under 3.80 in the playoffs so far, with five checking in at 2.25 or better (including Matzek at 1.74 in 10⅓ innings). Building on a regular season in which it finished sixth in pitching wins above replacement,⁵ Atlanta’s staff is looking like its best weapon to help deliver a title to the most championship-starved city in major pro sports.

But Houston’s dangerous offense will have a lot to say about that. After leading MLB during the regular season with 5.3 runs per game, the Astros’ bats have become even more explosive in the playoffs so far, putting up an average of 6.7 runs per contest — or 2.4 more than we would have expected from the regular-season averages of the opposing staffs they faced. Designated hitter Yordan Álvarez has led the way, one-upping even Rosario’s performance with a postseason-high 1.329 OPS,⁶ and he’s one of five qualified Astro batters with an OPS north of .800 in the playoffs.

Worse news for Atlanta is that two names not among that group — Michael Brantley and Alex Bregman — still had better OPS marks during the regular season than they have in the postseason, so this Astros lineup offers very few chances for opposing pitchers to relax and catch their breath. According to ESPN’s Stats & Information Group, only one team in the wild-card era (since 1995) entered the World Series scoring more runs per game in the playoffs than the Astros: the 2007 Boston Red Sox, who ended up sweeping away the Colorado Rockies in the Fall Classic.

Houston does have weaknesses, however. As good as its offense has been, it has also done a disproportionate amount of its damage in high base-out leverage situations. In the playoffs, the Astros have a batting average 79 points higher than their postseason baseline with runners in scoring position, 60 points higher than usual with two outs and 187 (!) points higher with both two outs and runners in scoring position. They’ve scored 45 runs (or more than two-thirds of their postseason total) with two outs, which is five more than the Braves have scored at all — and the most ever by a team heading into the World Series, according to research from ESPN Stats & Info. If Houston’s hitting evens out more between normal and high-leverage situations, it will make life a lot easier for the Braves’ pitchers.

And then there’s the matter of Houston’s own staff, which has been all over the place in this postseason. Astros starters have thrown only 38 of the team’s 88 total innings, leaving nearly 57 percent of the workload to a bullpen that ranked just 18th in WAR during the regular season.⁷ Those relievers mostly rose to the occasion, though, with the core of Cristian Javier, Kendall Graveman, Ryne Stanek, Phil Maton and Ryan Pressly combining for a 1.06 ERA in 34 postseason innings. And after allowing a shockingly high 20.25 collective ERA with Framber Valdez, Luis Garcia and Jose Urquidy going to the hill over the first three games of ALCS, Astro starters settled down with a 1.80 ERA in the series’ final three contests — including eight innings with just one run allowed by Valdez in Game 5 and 5⅔ shutout innings from Garcia in the clincher. But with staff ace Lance McCullers Jr. out for the World Series, Houston’s volatile pitching situation is something Atlanta might be able to take advantage of.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/US/video/recognizing-records-legacy-negro-league-baseball-76125282

It’s unquantifiable, but the Braves might also be buoyed by the fact that much of America will be rooting for the Astros to get another October comeuppance. If Atlanta’s narrative is that of the plucky underdog who picked up the pieces of its season after losing its star, the Astros’ path to the World Series is still overshadowed to an extent by the sign-stealing scandal that broke nearly two years ago and has hung over them ever since. We’ve argued before that this season’s success complicates the story around the scandal; how much of the Astros’ previous accomplishments should truly be considered “tainted” if they proved they didn’t need cheating to win? But it’s unlikely that nuance will dull the hate Houston has received over the past couple seasons. Though the Astros have plenty of likeable characters to root for — not the least of whom is manager Dusty Baker, the 72-year-old baseball lifer who played with Henry Aaron on the Braves (of all teams) and is looking for his first championship in 24 years of managing — the prospect of another Houston title would not be at the top of most fans’ rooting wish lists in this series.

Still, the Astros have a real shot at winning this World Series … and so do the Braves. After a long and winding season, we should be in store for a tightly contested championship that looks as close as any we’ve seen in a while. Who will win? Flip a coin, because it’s a 50-50 Fall Classic.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

Going into the World Series, our forecast model offered up a rare prediction: a perfectly 50-50 championship tossup between the Houston Astros and Atlanta Braves. Atlanta disrupted that balance with a 6-2 win in Game 1, overcoming the loss of starting pitcher Charlie Morton (whose leg was fractured on a comebacker in the second inning) to take the series lead — and a 66 percent probability of winning the title. But after Houston struck back with a commanding 7-2 win Wednesday night, the teams are right back where they started: exactly 50-50 to win the World Series. And as unpredictable as this matchup looked going into its opening game, the outcome might be even less certain now.

Part of that has to do with Houston’s historic inconsistency this postseason. Including their victory in Game 2, the Astros have now won seven playoff games by a margin of five or more runs, tying the 2007 Boston Red Sox’s record for most such victories in a single postseason. Yet they also have lost more than a few blowouts: All four of Houston’s playoff losses have come by four runs or more.²

As a result, the Astros currently have the highest game-to-game variance in postseason run differential of any World Series team since MLB’s playoffs expanded in 1995:

The first two games of the World Series have almost perfectly illustrated this up-and-down trend. Behind a shaky Game 1 outing from starting pitcher Framber Valdez, who allowed two home runs and was pulled in the third inning, plus a near-playoff-high nine runners left on base, the Astros fell into an early five-run hole in Game 1 and could not climb out. But just as was the key to their quick-turnaround ALCS comeback against the Red Sox, the Astros received a much better start in Game 2 — this time from righty José Urquidy, who struck out seven Braves — and their bats came alive to drop five quick runs on Atlanta ace Max Fried in the first two innings. When the Astros are firing on all cylinders like that, they are very difficult to beat … but it’s been tough to say whether that will be the case in any given game this postseason.

Things are plenty unsettled on the Braves’ side, too. Between Morton — who’ll miss the rest of the postseason with his injury — and Fried, Atlanta’s two best pitchers from the regular season by wins above replacement³ have provided a total of 7⅓ innings, causing the Braves’ bullpen to cover roughly as much of the team’s workload (57 percent) as the Astros’ relievers (61 percent). With Morton out, whatever rotation advantage Atlanta appeared to have over Houston going into the series seems less decisive than it was just a few days ago. Meanwhile, the Braves’ inability to make contact against Urquidy and company — along with the cooling of postseason hero Eddie Rosario, who went 0-for-4 to end an 11-game postseason hit streak — are sure to renew questions of whether Atlanta’s offense can keep pace with an Astros lineup that just scored at least five runs in a game for the 10th time this postseason, only one off of the 2015 Kansas City Royals’ all-time playoff record.

With the series shifting back to Atlanta on Friday, the Braves will turn to Ian Anderson (who carries a stellar 2.25 ERA this postseason) for a crucial Game 3 start against Houston’s Luís Garcia, the first of three consecutive games at Truist Park. At the moment, the silver lining for Atlanta is that it departed Houston with a split, stealing home-field advantage in the series despite getting so few innings from its aces in Games 1 and 2. And looking forward, Houston’s advantage at designated hitter, where the team has gotten an 1.176 OPS this postseason between Yordan Álvarez and Michael Brantley, will be neutralized in the NL park as well.⁴ Still, the Astros continue to be the world-beating offensive team we all thought they would be heading into the Fall Classic, averaging a whopping 6.33 runs per game throughout the postseason. Would anybody be surprised if Houston kept up the hot hitting in Atlanta while the good versions of their pitchers showed up to confound Braves batters?

Of course, the opposite wouldn’t be too much of a surprise, either — and it’s that uncertainty which continues to define this matchup. While the contours of the series have already shifted some over its first two games, the overall outlook remains the same: This is anybody’s World Series.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/US/video/recognizing-records-legacy-negro-league-baseball-76125282

After a season when things seldom came easy, the Atlanta Braves finally changed that script for good on Tuesday night, dispatching the Houston Astros 7-0 to clinch their first World Series crown in 26 years. The title was a culmination of one of the most mercurial campaigns by any champion, but the Braves also proved an old cliche true: The MLB season is a marathon, not a sprint. And in the end, Atlanta’s credentials landed them in the same conversation with the franchise’s previous champions — even if very few thought they would come anywhere close just a handful of months ago.

With their World Series victory, the Braves completed one of history’s greatest championship turnarounds. Atlanta was still under .500 on the season as the calendar turned from July to August; they seemed to remain on the periphery of the playoff picture thanks only to the mediocrity of the division-rival New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies. But from August onward (including the postseason), the Braves won 66.2 percent of their games — a 107-win pace per 162 — to overtake their rivals and march through the postseason.

Because of this, the 2021 Braves now own the distinction of the MLB champion with the most time spent below .500 during the season, having been underwater for 101 game days in total this year. Only one other champion was even close to Atlanta in that regard — the 1914 Boston Braves (of all teams), who were under .500 for 90 game days that year. Against more modern teams, these Braves crushed the marks held by the 2003 Florida Marlins and 2019 Washington Nationals:

But this wasn’t the case of a fluke team merely catching fire at the right time and riding that hot streak to a title. The version we saw down the stretch run and the postseason was more in line with how experts thought the Braves might perform all season — even though they did it with a slightly different cast of characters than expected. Every baseball fan now knows the story of Atlanta rebuilding its outfield with in-season trades after losing its best player, Ronald Acuña Jr., to a torn ACL in July. But the Braves also became the second team ever to see each of its starting infielders hit at least 25 home runs; they were three Dansby Swanson homers away from becoming the first all-30-HR infield ever. And through all the ups and downs, Atlanta still boasted the sixth-best pitching staff in baseball during the regular season by wins above replacement.¹

In other words, the Braves had no shortage of talent, and they maximized it in October (and November), when the games mattered most. They handled the dangerous Milwaukee Brewers in a four-game NLDS, outlasted the most stacked roster in baseball — the Los Angeles Dodgers — in six for the NL pennant and mostly kept the scary Astros lineup in check during the Fall Classic. While Houston exploded for seven runs in Game 2 and nine in Game 5, it was also shut out twice and scored just one run per game in its losses. Over the whole series, the streaky Astros (who had finished the regular season with a .783 OPS) were held by Atlanta’s pitchers to a .596 OPS — and a .184 batting average with runners in scoring position (down from .341 in the ALCS) — which helped provide the difference in a series that looked as close as can be on paper.

After the win Tuesday night, Atlanta’s Elo rating rose to 1570 — up 36 points from where it was at the end of July. That left them within 7 points of the final Elo for the 1995 Braves, winners of the franchise’s previous lone title since moving to Atlanta in 1966. That team possessed a staggering amount of talent both on the mound (Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, Tom Glavine) and at the plate (Fred McGriff, Chipper Jones), and its overall era was largely viewed as a disappointment for winning “only” a single title. In turn, those letdowns — along with incidents like the Falcons’ Super Bowl meltdown in 2017 — helped fuel Atlanta’s status as the most championship-starved city in major pro sports. Back in July, my colleague Santul Nerkar and I found that Atlanta teams had run 4.75 championships under what we’d expect from their sheer number of seasons fielding MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL and WNBA teams since 1980.

To break that drought, all it took was a team that was under .500 with a couple of months left in the regular season. And despite the impending free agency of team heart-and-soul Freddie Freeman, there could be more to come with Acuña returning from injury and many key players either young or locked into favorable contracts (or both). Improbable as it was this year — and yes, the Braves’ World Series odds were down to 2 percent as July became August — it was also the perfect ending to a season that wasn’t about how the champion started, but how it finished.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/baseball-fan-negro-league-stars-fivethirtyeight-76389391

MLB

Start Spreading The News, We Could Get Another Subway Series

It’s up to you, New York and New York.

By Neil Paine

Jun. 9, 2022, at 11:18 AM

The New York Yankees and New York Mets have both had their moments of glory over the years — OK, fine, the Yankees have had just a few more of those — but seldom have both teams been great at the exact same time. The birth of the expansion Mets made that hard from the start, given their reputation for boundless failure early on. But even after the 1969 Miracle Mets finally shed that losing label, the Yankees and Mets were mostly ships passing in the night: Whether it was the 1970s, ’80s or early ’90s, whenever one was up, the other seemed to be down. It wasn’t until 1999 that both teams made the playoffs in the same season, which laid the groundwork for the first and only Yankees-Mets Subway Series the following postseason. After that, though, it was back to missed connections, and we haven’t been particularly close to getting another all-NYC Fall Classic since.

That is, until this year — maybe. While it’s always premature to make any specific World Series pick, even in October¹ (much less June), the Yankees do have the best pennant odds (31 percent) of any American League team according to our forecast model, and the Mets (14 percent) are second in the NL behind only the star-studded Los Angeles Dodgers. (Minor detail, I know.) That means there’s currently a 4.3 percent chance that the two teams will face off in the World Series — the fourth-highest probability among any potential championship combo.² 

Just as importantly, both New York teams are simply playing great baseball at the same time — a historical rarity that’s necessary to make a Subway Series collision course even remotely possible.

At the moment, the Yankees have the best winning percentage in the AL (.727), and the Mets have the best winning percentage in the NL (.655). Together, they’ve gone a combined 78-35 so far this season, which works out to a scorching 112-win pace per 162 games. (A number that would itself rank among the greatest seasons ever.) Since the Mets came into existence in 1962, we’ve basically never seen the two New York teams collectively run this hot at the one-third mark of the season: Their average winning percentage of .685 was the highest through 54 games³ in the history of the rivalry, and their average runs-per-game differential (+1.59) and Elo rating (1559.7) were both a close second behind the 1998 season.

Even in the hazy memories of a bygone era when New York City was truly the center of the baseball universe, there was never a season in which the Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants combined to win so often early in the schedule. The best start to a season during that period was in 1955, when Brooklyn carried the lot with a .778 winning percentage through 54 games, and the three New York teams combined for a .660 mark — in what ended up being a prelude to the Yankees and Dodgers meeting in the World Series.

A Subway Series was commonplace in those days; it happened seven times in the 10 seasons from 1947 to 1956, usually involving trips between Brooklyn and the Bronx. (Only in 1951 did the Giants win the pennant, before losing to the Yankees in the Fall Classic.) But outside of interleague play, which allowed the Mets and Yankees to face during the regular season starting in 1997, there were no crosstown New York matchups at all between 1956 and 2000. The departures of the Giants and Dodgers for the West Coast in 1957 conspired with the Mets’ early foibles and then the up-and-down nature of the rivalry over the following three decades to prevent a meeting from taking place.

Looking at some of the other top 54-game starts on the list above, the Mets had the best team in baseball in 1986 and one of the best in 1988, but the Yankees were mired in an uncharacteristic 13-year postseason drought, so they didn’t cross paths either year. (The Mets failed to reach the ’88 World Series anyway, losing the NLCS to the Dodgers in seven games.) In 1998, the Yankees were in the midst of setting a new record for most total wins — including playoffs — by a team in a single MLB season (125), but the Mets fumbled away a late wild-card lead with an ill-timed five-game losing skid to finish the regular season 1½ games out of the playoffs. All three seasons serve as reminders that early indicators of strong Subway Series potential don’t always pan out.

And maybe the most notable thing about that list is the season that isn’t there: 2000, the one time the two New York ballclubs actually did end up colliding in the playoffs. Both teams had solid records through 54 games — the Yankees were 31-23, the Mets 30-24 — but there was plenty of competition in their respective leagues that year, so neither team was looking like a commanding favorite. The Yankees were already a dynasty, having won two straight World Series — and three of the previous four — but they coasted to 87 wins during that regular season before turning it on in the playoffs. And the Mets had arguably been better in 1999 — when they narrowly lost the NLCS to the rival Atlanta Braves — than in 2000, when they had a worse winning percentage (.580 versus .595) and run differential (+69 versus +142).

Yet despite fewer indications that a Subway Series might transpire that year, it did indeed happen — giving us this amazingly hammy (but endearing) Billy Crystal intro for the Fox broadcast:

This year, instead of talking about Mike and Derek or Bernie and Fonzie, we would be hyping up Pete and Aaron, or the Flying Squirrel and Nasty Nestor. Will it happen? Who knows! A lot of things can go off course over the last two-thirds of a baseball season. But right now, the Yankees and Mets are making a Subway Series look like a legitimate possibility — and not just the product of big-city bluster and East Coast bias.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

MLB

The Dodgers Are Big Favorites In Our MLB Forecast — But Anything Can Happen In October

By Neil Paine

Oct. 7, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Baseball’s postseason is finally upon us, and that means it’s playoff prediction time for our MLB forecast model. Before first pitch in today’s wild card quadruple-header, let’s run through how our Elo-based projections see the October (and November) action playing out.

The first round of the new expanded postseason will be over in the blink of an eye — by Sunday, we’ll know who gets to keep playing and whose season has gone up in flames. Interestingly, the teams with the best chances to move on in both leagues are not the highest seeds: The No. 4-seeded New York Mets and Toronto Blue Jays each have more than a 63 percent chance to win their wild card series, while the No. 3 seeds in each league — the St. Louis Cardinals and especially the Cleveland Guardians — are facing noticeably lower odds. 

This is part of a theme with the current playoff format; the best wild card teams are likely to be significantly better than the worst division winners, but all of them get tossed into the best-of-three gauntlet right away. If the Mets and Jays do win, their World Series odds would immediately get boosted to 9 percent and 8 percent, respectively. And if the Rays pull off our model’s most likely first-round upset (45 percent), they would pose an interesting matchup in the division series for the Yankees, a team Tampa Bay ousted from the playoffs en route to the World Series two years ago.

Once the wild card chaos clears, we’ll have a slightly better sense of who might capture the pennant. Unsurprisingly, the model sees the Los Angeles Dodgers as overwhelming favorites to come out of the National League, with a 51 percent chance to make the World Series — well ahead of the defending-champ Atlanta Braves (25 percent) and the Mets (12 percent going into the wild card; 18 percent conditional on making the division series). On the American League side, there is more uncertainty: The Houston Astros (35 percent) and New York Yankees (33 percent) are practically in a dead heat to represent the league in the Fall Classic, and there’s a 39 percent chance the two are on an ALCS collision course. Just like their fourth-seeded NL counterpart Mets, the Blue Jays come up next with a 13 percent chance to make the World Series, a number that would rise to 20 percent if they escape the wild card round.

Multiplying all of those various probabilities together, the two most likely World Series matchups are Dodgers-Astros — a rematch of 2017 — at 18 percent, and Dodgers-Yankees — itself a classic rematch — at 17 percent. Next up are a Braves-Astros rematch (9 percent) and Braves-Yankees (8 percent); the only other combo above 4 percent is Dodgers-Blue Jays, at 7 percent. (The much-anticipated Subway Series between the Mets and Yankees has a 4 percent chance of happening.) As we’ve learned from past versions of this exercise, though, anything can (and often does) happen in the MLB postseason, odds be damned.

Finally, we get to the big number — the chance to win it all. Again, the star-studded Dodgers are major favorites (34 percent) after winning 111 games and dominating our Elo rankings for the second half of the season. That’s nothing new; they were favored going into the playoffs in 2021 and 2020 as well, never dipping below third going back to 2016. Obviously, they only have one title to show for all that, and if the 66 percent contingency happens and L.A. falls short, the most likely beneficiaries are the Astros (16 percent), Yankees (14 percent) and Braves (13 percent). As mentioned earlier, the Mets and Blue Jays wouldn’t quite get into that tier even if they survive the wild card round, though they would be the best of the rest.

But it’s worth noting that every team in this expanded postseason field has at least a 1.3 percent chance to win the World Series. That might not sound like much — but in a sport like baseball, far stranger things have happened than any of these 12 teams getting hot and riding that momentum all the way to a championship.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

MLB

The Astros And Phillies Have Showed Off Their Championship DNA In This World Series

By Neil Paine

Oct. 31, 2022, at 10:39 AM

In many ways, the Houston Astros and Philadelphia Phillies are back to square one after two games of this World Series.

That applies at the most basic level; the series is tied 1-1 as it shifts to Philadelphia for the next three contests. It’s reflected in the series odds as well: According to the FiveThirtyEight forecast model, Houston has a 65 percent chance to win, with Philadelphia sitting at 35 percent. (Going into the series, the numbers were almost exactly the same: Astros 67 percent, Phillies 33 percent.) A stunning comeback, a 10th-inning home run, fireworks from one of the game’s deepest lineups … all of it has led us right back to where we started.

Games 1 and 2 did, however, offer glimpses into competing visions of success for the Phillies and Astros, underscoring the paths each team might take to the championship.

For Philadelphia, Game 1 contained much of its postseason winning formula. The Phillies didn’t panic after falling behind 5-0 in the third inning, using their explosive offense to strike back against Houston starter Justin Verlander and tie the game in the fifth. The team’s twin punching bags from earlier in the season then kept Philly in the ballgame: Its bullpen threw 5⅔ scoreless innings — with Seranthony Domínguez and David Robertson bearing down in especially tense moments — and its defense was just good enough, as typified by Nick Castellanos’s sliding, game-saving catch in right field to extend the game to extra innings.

The exclamation point was delivered courtesy of a homer in the top of the 10th by J.T. Realmuto, who is finally getting his due as MLB’s best catcher despite often being overlooked next to Philadelphia’s other stars. Realmuto’s blast added to the team’s postseason-high 1.7 batting win probability added,² and it helped secure the Phillies’ playoff-leading third win after trailing by multiple runs (their 22nd such win of the season overall). It capped off yet another showcase for what this Philadelphia team can do whenever the opponent leaves even a sliver of an opening.

By the same token, Houston’s Game 2 victory epitomized how the Astros have handled their business all postseason long. They got to Philadelphia starter Zack Wheeler early with a trio of first-inning runs and cooled down the Phillies’ hot bats on the strength of an excellent start by Framber Valdez. Along the way, Houston’s runs were driven in by key hitters (Alex Bregman, Yordan Álvarez, Jeremy Peña), and that group didn’t even include the ninth three-hit performance of José Altuve’s postseason career.³

There would be no squandered 5-0 lead for Houston this time around, either (though it was close). Instead, it was the kind of commanding performance that we’ve often seen from the Astros this season, particularly as they were running up a perfect postseason record before dropping Game 1. Relatedly, it followed the ideal blueprint for the team with the better resume and superior roster to follow as it looks ahead to the rest of the World Series. Houston has a much higher OPS in the series so far (.765 versus .629), and it has built five-run leads in back-to-back games. If the Astros simply maintain the status quo, they’ll feel pretty comfortable with their chances from here on out.

Still, there are probably at least a few more twists and turns left in this Fall Classic. Yes, our model gives the Astros a win probability between 54 and 57 percent in each of the next three games, in spite of all three being played on the road. But while the model uses a standard home-field adjustment, it doesn’t know just how dominant the Phillies have been at home (5-0 with a plus-20 run differential) this postseason, for whatever that is worth.⁴ If Philadelphia is going to steal a few more games from Houston, their best chance starts right now. 

And we don’t quite know what to make of Philly’s pitching in this World Series. Its two lead starters — Wheeler and Aaron Nola — have been terrible (8.68 ERA, 1.82 WHIP) thus far, much worse than their Houston counterparts (4.76 ERA, 1.32 WHIP) despite being billed as among the team’s most vital weapons going into the series. At the same time, the Philadelphia bullpen (0.00 ERA, 0.81 WHIP) has outpaced Houston’s (1.17 ERA, 1.17 WHIP), which proved crucial to the Phillies’ victory in Game 1 and even gave them a chance at the comeback in Game 2. Whether each trend holds up is sure to shape the rest of the series.

Noah Syndergaard and Ranger Suárez, the Phillies’ starters in Games 3 and 4, are unlikely to deliver the types of performances the team was expecting from Wheeler and Nola. But if they keep things close enough — and Philly’s lineup puts big numbers on the board at Citizens Bank Park, where the team is averaging 7.0 runs per game this postseason — it would go a long way toward helping Philadelphia follow its prescribed championship path. But if not, and Houston continues going about its business as planned, the Phillies’ magical run could end at the hands of an Astros team that stifles such hocus-pocus — at least, most of the time.

Check out our latest MLB predictions.

MLB

The Phillies Will Need The Long Ball For A Long Shot World Series Comeback

By Robert O'Connell

Nov. 4, 2022, at 4:48 PM

Life comes at you fast in the World Series. Just three days ago, the Philadelphia Phillies were on top of the world, having turned Game 3 into their own personal homecoming party with a 7-0 shellacking of the Houston Astros. But that was before Houston turned the tables: First, a combined no-hitter in Game 4, then a nail-biting win in Game 5 to grab a 3-2 series lead. With two chances to clinch the title at home this weekend, Houston now carries an 83 percent championship probability according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast.

If Philadelphia is going to defy those odds, it will need a healthy dose of its familiar gate-crashing formula — one that has taken it from wild card to World Series in a manner unlike most underdogs. Whereas the typical long shot’s path requires leaning on overlooked edges and making the clean play, this club has taken a different tack. What they’ve done better than every favored opponent they’ve met is to make use of good, old-fashioned brute force. The 87-75 Phillies are two wins away from a title because they hit the home run, plain and simple — and championship or no, they’ve provided baseball’s imperfect hopefuls a new blueprint. Forget zigging where the favorites zag. Zag harder.

Sure, Philadelphia’s long-maligned defense has become slightly less ruinous in October. But it still turns routine grounders into adventures, and first baseman Rhys Hoskins (two postseason errors and plenty more coulda-beens) is still looking for that hole in his mitt. The Phillies’ good-as-anyone top-line starters, Aaron Nola and Zack Wheeler, have over the postseason alternated lockdown performances with big ol’ biffs. And even before they were no-hit by four Astros in Game 4 and held to two runs in Game 5, they didn’t have anyone mistaking them for old-school slap hitters. In 2014, another wild-card-to-World-Series interloper, the 89-73 Kansas City Royals, came within 90 feet of a championship without so much as a single 20-home-run hitter on the roster, instead relying on their collective speed and contact skills, a trio of relievers and a safety net of an outfield. They were a baseball morality play, the small stuff showing up big. 

The 2014 Royals, these Phillies ain’t.

“The desire to do something special, to do something great, is a passion,” Phillies owner John Middleton told the New York Times’ Tyler Kepner in the spring of 2019, after his team had shelled out $330 million for Bryce Harper, a move that foreshadowed in scale and style a subsequent extension for homer-happy catcher J.T. Realmuto and this past offseason’s signings of sluggers Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos. “It’s not grounded in business logic, it’s not grounded in baseball analytics.”

Setting aside Middleton’s narrow definition of the word — total homers is as much an “analytic” as Ultimate Zone Rating — the statement now rings with irony. The 2022 Phillies were neither special nor great for the whole of the regular season, finishing a very distant third in the NL East and sneaking into their first postseason in a decade only via a wild card spot that didn’t exist a year ago. But in the crucible of October and November, they’ve struck a what-Middleton-means-by-analytics gold mine. As impossible velocities abound and contact gets rarer — this postseason has seen a .212 sportwide batting average, down from .243 in the regular season — playoff baseball becomes a question of who can make that contact count most. In a postseason where teams who leave the yard more than their opponents have won at a 78.6 percent clip, the Phillies have done so more than anybody, their 23 dingers sitting seven clear of the Astros’ total. They’ve won all seven games in which they’ve out-homered their opponents. Middleton’s indulgence has taken on “business logic,” becoming an odds-evening efficiency.

With rare exceptions (Wheeler’s 13 innings of two-run ball in the NLCS, Castellanos’ “Solid Outfielder” Halloween costume), the indelible images of Philadelphia’s playoff run are of long parabolas and flung bats. There was Hoskins, two days after misplaying a grounder in a series-tying loss to Atlanta in the NLDS, clubbing a Spencer Strider four-seamer to left for a 4-0 lead in the pivotal Game 3 and spiking his lumber in vindication, getting the Phillies on their way to upsetting the defending champs. There were Harper and Schwarber, in a tense NLCS opener against San Diego ace Yu Darvish, going yard in keeping with their respective characters: the former swiping an outside fastball over the opposite-field fence, the latter Popeye-ing a do-nothing breaker halfway to Mars. There was Harper more or less wrapping up that championship series with another oppo shot, and Realmuto paying off the Phillies’ five-run comeback in Game 1 of the World Series with one of his own.

A highlight reel can’t always render a team’s soul, but that one does; the Phillies go, and will go, exactly as far as the long ball takes them. Philadelphia trails Houston in pretty much every non-tater category; the Astros have the lower postseason ERA (2.38 to 3.17), the higher OBP (.301 to .296) and far fewer errors (three to seven). At present standing, the World Series has the mood of a referendum, the baseball gods rewarding the well-rounded club and punishing the one-note one. While Cristian Javier blew fastballs past the Phillies’ bats in Game 4, the Astros’ offense put up their five-run fifth inning without anything heartier than a double, and when the Phillies threatened late in Game 5, first baseman Trey Mancini speared a sharp grounder to end the inning.

Still, Philadelphia — a team that fired its manager in June and that lost 17 of its last 31 games down the stretch — trails by the slimmest margin possible on the sport’s biggest stage, with an ace on the mound for Game 6 in Wheeler and a lineup full of snoozing giants supporting him. In other words, they have the best chance a team like theirs could hope for. “I don’t give a shit,” Schwarber said after the combined no-hitter on Wednesday night. “Nope. Move onto tomorrow.” It is the confidence of a particular type of underdog, one that knows that, whatever else it lacks, it doesn’t want for a game plan.

The degree to which these faulty, beefy Phillies become a part of baseball lore depends on whether they can bash their way back to two straight wins this weekend. But in a certain sense, their rewriting of the postseason playbook — or at least their adding of a chapter to it — has already occurred. In the offseason to come, a number of just-alright clubs will choose how to allocate their resources in the hopes of contention, weighing bullpen depth against on-base guys, an ace starter against a Gold Glove defender. None can realistically hope to be as great as the Astros. But the Phillies, whether they bring home a trophy or not, propose an alternative to all that fretful tinkering. Load up on the loudest bats you can find, and when they’re turned up you won’t be able to hear anything else.

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MLB

Dusty Baker's Astros Didn't Need An Asterisk

Houston's all-around postseason run put to bed any doubts about the post-scandal version of the team.

By Neil Paine

Nov. 6, 2022, at 1:35 AM

Among the many memorable moments made after the Houston Astros clinched the World Series over the Philadelphia Phillies Saturday night, perhaps the most indelible of all was seeing the team’s players spontaneously mob beloved manager Dusty Baker in the dugout, chanting his name:

On Saturday morning, Baker woke up as the winningest manager in MLB history without a title; by nighttime, he was in a different club entirely.

“This is the greatest bunch of guys,” Baker said after the game. “They told me in spring training they were going to win.”

And his team certainly delivered. With an 11-2 record in the postseason, the 2022 Astros tied the 1998 New York Yankees — arguably the greatest team in MLB history — for the third-best playoff winning percentage by any champion in the division-series era (since 1995), in addition to compiling the third-most games over .500 (plus-9) by any team in the playoffs ever: 

The National League champion Baker’s Astros vanquished, the Phillies, were an interesting adversary with a unique build and a Cinderella backstory. But despite it being a postseason of underdog victories, the ultimate winner was the best and most deserving team — the one that simply had too many weapons for Philadelphia to counteract.

Front and center in that effort was Houston’s pitching staff. Early in the Fall Classic, the Phillies offense had lived up to its dangerous pre-series billing — roaring back from down 5-0 to win in extra innings of Game 1 and, following a Game 2 loss, putting on a 7-0 offensive clinic at home in Game 3. Through that contest, Philly was averaging a scorching 5.14 runs per game in the postseason, while Houston pitchers had 4.67 ERA in the World Series (compared with 3.00 for the Phillies’ staff). Philadelphia had a 57 percent chance of winning the championship, and its lineup of homer-happy bats was leading the way.

And then, everything changed. Starting with Game 4 — which saw a quartet of Houston hurlers throw just the second no-hitter in World Series history — the Astros’ ERA dipped to 1.00 over the remainder of the series, as Philadelphia’s once-mighty sluggers saw their OPS fall from .738 to .403. Aside from Kyle Schwarber, no Phillie mustered an OPS over .667 after Game 3, and the team that averaged two home runs per game early in the series only hit two in total over the final three contests (both coming from the bat of Schwarber). Starters Cristian Javier, Justin Verlander and Framber Valdez combined with a lights-out bullpen (which allowed only two earned runs all series long) to completely short-circuit what had been Philadelphia’s winning formula.

The Astros showcased their deep reserve of big-time contributors in other ways, too. Rookie shortstop Jeremy Peña capped off one of the greatest postseason breakout performances ever (he had a 1.005 OPS in the playoffs) by winning World Series MVP honors. Outfielder Chas McCormick made one of the great all-time World Series catches to preserve a victory in Game 5, leaping at the wall to deny J.T. Realmuto in spectacular fashion. And of course, towering lefty slugger Yordan Álvarez offered the jolt Houston needed to win the clincher, crushing a 450-foot blast to a seemingly inaccessible area high above the center field fence, putting the Astros up for good. (For the game’s most versatile slugger, it was poetic that the homer came off Phillies lefty Jose Alvarado — Álvarez hit 22 points higher against lefties than righties this season, maintaining a blistering .998 OPS against same-side pitchers.)

The Astros are so good top-to-bottom that Phillies co-ace Zack Wheeler could be dealing most of the night — breaking a Mariano Rivera-esque number of bats — but still get undone by the slightest of mistakes: A hit-by-pitch against bottom-of-the-order catcher Martín Maldonado ultimately led to Wheeler’s departure and Álvarez eventually performing his heroics. The rest was history.

For Houston, there will be plenty of meanings to unpack in this victory. Like it or not, as far as referendums go on the post-scandal version of this franchise, it’s hard to do better than rebutting the “they only won because they cheated” crowd with a dominating championship run. Maybe that wasn’t necessary — only five of the 45 players who appeared with Houston this regular season had joined the club in 2017 or earlier — but it can’t hurt the legacies of Alex Bregman, José Altuve and company, either.

And of course, there will be the impact on Baker’s own legacy as one of the game’s greatest managers. He stepped in and helped stabilize the Astros at the peak of the cheating fallout, and he offered credibility when the franchise sorely needed it. As much as anything else, this championship was about adding the missing piece to Baker’s already impressive resume.

As for what’s next? The Astros are not a particularly young team — they ranked 24th-youngest in average age as weighted by wins above replacement¹ — but they do have a core of stars who are either in their primes or not yet there (as led by Álvarez and Peña). Houston will continue to be a force in the American League for a while to come. And that is especially true if Baker — whose contract status for 2023 is somehow not fully nailed down yet — returns to the helm.

And as Baker told the FOX broadcast crew after the game: “I always said if I won one, I wanna win two.”

For a team that has made so many deep playoff runs recently, and just capped off another championship, don’t bet against it.

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