The Dodgers were luckier than the Blue Jays.

That’s all that needs to be said.

You can blather all you want about the cliches like “good hitting beating good pitching, and vice versa”, or intangibles like “grit” and “resiliency”, but when you play more than eight games worth of innings in a seven game series, it’s going to come down to some pure random chance.

A ground ball hits a lump of dirt on the infield, takes a crazy hop to elude a fielder, and a game-winning rally is ignited.

On a blustery day, a gust of wind comes in at just the right time to turn a home run into a flyout on the warning track.

A ball smashed to left field with “run scoring triple” written all over it jams itself into the space between the padding and the ground on the fly for a “stuck ball, runners advance only two bases” ground rule double, and the Dodgers get out of the inning with their lead intact.

Yes, the Blue Jays had their share of lucky moments, too.

But the Dodgers had just enough more to give them the championship.

Congratulations to everyone on both teams.

There’s a truism in two-player strategy games that the winner is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake. The Dodgers and Yankees proved it in Game 5.

Given that the Dodgers won the first three games, it was almost guaranteed that they’d win the Series (a 15 out of 16 chance without taking anything special into account). But it can also be argued that since Game 1 went to extra innings, Games 2 and 3 were both decided by the score of 4-2, and Game 4 was intentionally a “bullpen game” for the Dodgers (where they used the four “least good” pitchers on their roster), that the teams were evenly matched and the series could just as well gone into Game 5 tied at two games each.

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With the introduction of the “wild card” in the playoffs, it became more likely that a mediocre team could make it into the World Series just by getting hot at the right time. While it is true that there are more “meh” Series now 2006), there are still plenty of all time Classics (2016) to provide some deserving winners of this award.

1995: Atlanta Braves 4, Cleveland Indians 2

Reliever Jose Mesa got the win in Game 3 and a save in Game 5.

1996: New York Yankees 4, Atlanta Braves 2

John Smoltz got the win in Game 1, and gave up only a single run in eight innings in Game 5. Continue reading →

This is actually more difficult a decision than the regular MVP Award. With the “Willie Mays World Series Most Valuable Player Award presented by [this space for rent]”, it’s almost always obvious who should get the award.

But picking an honoree on the losing team? There’s a reason they lost. If you can find someone who might be deserving, do you go with the player who had the best overall performance, or the one who came up big in key moments that won a game for his team? And what’s the cutoff for deciding that a “No Award” is called for?

Good thing this is just an exercise….

1977: New York Yankees 4, Los Angeles Dodgers 2

Reggie Smith hit three home runs while scoring seven. Only WS MVP Reggie Jackson had more of either.

1978: New York Yankees 4, Los Angeles Dodgers 2

Davey Lopes hit .308 with three home runs and seven RBIs.

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Several months ago, I was involved in a discussion about the most valuable players in the World Series. I made a passing comment wondering about the best players on the losing teams. Someone who contributed a great deal, but it wasn’t his fault that his team lost. Someone suggested it should be called “The Bobby Richardson Award”, for the only player who won the World Series MVP despite being on the losing team.

Well, I finally got around to doing the research and writing it up.

You’ll note that I allow for a “No Award” – sometimes, there just isn’t a player who performs well enough above the level of his teammates to justify it (or the team just stinks overall, and no one deserves it).

Also, keep in mind that these are subjective. If I did this again in a few years, more than a few of these are likely to change. And I’m starting it in 1955, when the World Series MVP award began. You can do it for all the previous World Series if you want.

1955: Brooklyn Dodgers 4, New York Yankees 3

Whitey Ford won Games 1 and 6.

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Well, that was set of games.

Look, they can’t all be stone-cold classics like 2016 or 2017. Sometimes you wind up with a pair of “meh” teams (2006), or one team that got hot / lucky at the right time, and then was totally overmatched in the Series (2007). This was a case of the latter – the Diamondbacks were a streaky team that barely made it in to the playoffs, and then got just hot enough to take advantage of their opponents’ weaknesses in the first three rounds. Then they ran into the best offense in the American League: the Rangers were first in batting average, on base percentage, slugging percentage, and tied for first in home runs. They didn’t really stand a chance. The Rangers also had six players selected for the summer’s All Star Game, so we shouldn’t have been surprised at how far they made it. Continue reading →

Well, that was a set of games. At least, in the opinion of this writer, the “proper” result was achieved. I really don’t think it would have been “right” for the team with the worst regular season record of all the playoff teams – one that could only finish third in their division – to have won the Championship. Yes, the Phillies showed that they can compete with the best. But does that make them The Best?

One of the things that annoyed me quite a bit about the coverage was the very frequent mention that this was the Phillies’ first World Series appearance in thirteen years, as if that was somehow a huge “drought”.

Well, you know which teams are in a longer “drought”? Here they are, with the last time they appeared in a World Series:

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Well, that was….. a “best of seven” series.

We can’t expect every Fall Classic to be a Fall Classic, but this one was still rather dull. Half the games were pretty much over by the fourth inning. Only two could be considered interesting. Would the Astros ever get a base hit in Game 4, and holy crap did the Astros find their offense in Game 5!

But that was it.

One of the problems was that the announcers continued to include the stats from the earlier playoffs in a “Post-Season” bucket. This made the World Series seem like just another round of playoff games and NOT the Championship Series. I can understand doing it in the first two games, when the players haven’t accumulated enough appearances for any stats to be meaningful, but once Game 3 starts….

It would have also been nice to mention which players were appearing in their first World Series, or who was in their third or more WS.

You want to make the World Series a special event – treat it like something special.

Another problem – that wasn’t anyone’s fault – was the lack of “star power” on the teams. When the biggest names on the teams are Freddie Freeman and Jose Altuve, you’re not going to get much interest from the casual fan.

Much press attention was given to how the Braves added a bunch of outfielders at the trade deadline, and then turned out to have an incredible impact on the team’s playoff run. But isn’t that pretty much the same as “buying” a championship? In past years, we’ve looked down on teams that grab “free agents to be” at the trade deadline in order to secure a playoff spot – why are we giving the Braves a bit of a pass this time?

Speaking of free agents, I don’t recall hearing much about how a good number of prominent Astros will be free agents this year, making it pretty much the end of a dynasty that won three pennants in five years. Well, there was mention of the free agency thing, but not about the dynasty. They’d won four divisional titles in five years, but that’s somehow not a “dynasty”. But the San Francisco Giants, who won three WS in five years, despite having won their division in only two of them, and even having losing records in the non-WS years, ARE a “dynasty”.

Well, that’s all for baseball for this year. The awards will be given out in the next week or so, and then the collective bargaining agreement is going to expire, so that may be all the real baseball for much longer than just the winter.

It’s a lot of fun at this time of year to reminisce about the great World Series. The great games, the great players, the upsets…

But not every World Series lives up to the expectations.

Sometimes, one team totally overpowers the other, and the Series is done in four or five games. In the era of divisional play, a team with a poor regular season record can get hot at the right time and sneak into the Series. Sometimes, you just have two uninspiring teams with no one to root for. And sometimes, the games themselves are devoid of any interest or excitement.

Here are some (in chronological order) that were the opposite of a “Fall Classic”.

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