In Case You Need a Reason To Watch the World Series

Brad Penner and Wendell Cruz-Imagn Images

You are allowed to be sad. You do not have to be psyched about watching two gigantic legacy franchises smash everything in their paths and then start smashing each other in the Godzilla vs. King Kong World Series. You can be bummed that both of the obvious favorites made the World Series even though you also would have been bummed if some undeserving Wild Card team had sneaked in. Anyone who expects you to be rational in your rooting interests is being completely unreasonable. This a matchup designed specifically for fans of hegemony. You do not have to be good. You are allowed to cheer for Team Asteroid.

That said, there’s still a lot to be excited about in this matchup. The World Series offers itself to your imagination. I doubt that there’s one person reading this who doesn’t enjoy watching Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Juan Soto, or Freddie Freeman play baseball, who doesn’t thrill at the thought of seeing them on the biggest stage the game has to offer. It’s just inconceivable that a baseball fan could be so hopelessly lost.

Judge hit 58 home runs this season. He led baseball with a 218 wRC+. That’s the seventh-best qualified offensive season since 1900. The only players who have topped it: Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams. Judge is blasting his way onto Mount Rushmore in front of our eyes. Ohtani’s 181 wRC+ ranked second. While rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, he put up the first 50-50 season in history. When you combine his offense and baserunning, Ohtani was worth 80.7 runs this season, the 35th-highest total ever. Over 11 postseason games, he has a .434 on-base percentage with 10 RBI and 12 runs scored, and somehow his offensive line is worse than it was during the regular season. Soto was right behind Ohtani at 180. In seven big-league seasons, he’s never once been as low as 40% better than average at the plate, and he is still getting better.

In case you hadn’t noticed, those are the top-three qualified hitters in baseball this season, and they’ll all be in the World Series. I wondered whether that had ever happened before, so I pulled the numbers. I’ll tell you what I found, but first we need to acknowledge Kyle Tucker, who put up a 175 wRC+, broke his leg, then came back and hit even better. Tucker was more than 60 plate appearances short of qualifying, but he did edge Soto by 0.35 points of wRC+, so he deserves some acknowledgement.

Okay, we have acknowledged Tucker. Has any previous World Series included all three of the best hitters in baseball? I pulled the data for every qualified player since 1903, ranked them all based on wRC+, then created a whole clusterbiff of vlookups and if/and/or formulas to see whether the top-ranked hitters played for the teams in the World Series. For any Excel sickos out there, here’s what that looked like.

Did the 1903 World Series between the Pirates and the Boston Americans feature all three of that season’s qualified hitters? The answer’s as simple as IF(AND(OR),(OR),(OR))). Also, the answer is no. This has never happened before. Never have the three best hitters in baseball all made it to the World Series in the same season. This is something new! In your face, Ecclesiastes.

Over the 119 World Series that have been played so far, just 16 featured two of the top-three hitters. The table below lists them all, along with the hitters and their ranks. The rows highlighted in yellow show seasons in which both of the top-two hitters in baseball made it to the World Series.

World Series With Two Top-Three Hitters
Year Teams Player 1 Player 2
1909 DET-PIT Ty Cobb (1) Honus Wagner (2)
1927 NYY-PIT Babe Ruth (1) Lou Gehrig (3)
1928 NYY-STL Babe Ruth (1) Lou Gehrig (3)
1929 PHA-CHC Rogers Hornsby (1) Jimmie Foxx (2)
1932 NYY-CHC Babe Ruth (2) Lou Gehrig (3)
1936 NYY-NYG Mel Ott (1) Lou Gehrig (2)
1941 NYY-BRO Joe DiMaggio (2) Pete Reiser (3)
1943 NYY-STL Stan Musial (1) Charlie Keller (2)
1946 BOS-STL Ted Williams (1) Stan Musial (2)
1956 NYY-BRO Mickey Mantle (1) Duke Snider (3)
1975 BOS-CIN Joe Morgan (1) Fred Lynn (3)
1980 KCR-PHI George Brett (1) Mike Schmidt (2)
1989 OAK-SFG Kevin Mitchell (1) Will Clark (2)
2004 BOS-STL Albert Pujols (2) Jim Edmonds (3)
2012 DET-SFG Miguel Cabrera (2) Buster Posey (3)
2018 BOS-LAD Mookie Betts (2) J.D. Martinez (3)

There’s a whole lot of Yankees on there, Ruth and Gehrig specifically. There are also two Yankees-Dodgers matchups, in 1941 and 1956. Take a look at the last row. In 2024, Betts wouldn’t have ranked as a top-three batter even if he’d made enough PAs to qualify, but he ranked second in 2018, when he was playing against the Dodgers.

Here’s how rare this season’s top-three feat is: Only four World Series have ever featured three of the top-five hitters in the game, and all of them happened at least 80 years ago. Two of them featured the Murder’s Row Yankees, in 1927 and 1928. In 1931, Ruth and Gehrig were the two best hitters in the game yet again, but the Yankees didn’t make the World Series; even so, the next three spots belonged to Al Simmons of the AL pennant-winning A’s, Chick Hafey of the World Series-champion Cardinals, and Mickey Cochrane also of the A’s. But 1941 is the most interesting for our purposes, both because it featured the Yankees and the Dodgers and because it featured four of the top-five hitters in baseball, both by wRC+ and by WAR.

The Best Hitters of 1941
Name Team HR AVG OBP SLG wRC+ WAR
Ted Williams BOS 37 .406 .553 .735 217 11.0
Joe DiMaggio NYY 30 .357 .440 .643 179 9.7
Pete Reiser BRO 14 .343 .406 .558 164 7.5
Dolph Camilli BRO 34 .285 .407 .556 163 6.9
Charlie Keller NYY 33 .298 .416 .580 159 7.3

Nobody was going to catch Williams, who was putting up the last .400 season in AL/NL history, but that DiMaggio guy was pretty good too. So how did things go in the 1941 World Series, the only World Series that featured the top-five hitters in baseball, along with two of the game’s top-three offenses? Nobody could buy a hit, of course. The two teams combined to bat .215 with three home runs. They grounded into nine double plays in five games. Their .298 slugging percentage, 10.7% strikeout rate, and 28 total runs all rank in the bottom 15 in World Series history. There weren’t any shutouts, but Game 4 was the only game in which either team scored more than three runs.

Keller was the only member of the big four who had a good Series, batting .389 with two doubles. DiMaggio went 5-for-21 with no extra-base hits. Camilli, who ran a 163 wRC+ during the regular season, ran a nice, juicy 17 during the World Series. Reiser batted .343 during the regular season and .200 during the Series. Both Camilli and Reiser struck out six times each. All four players grounded into a double play.

This season, both the Yankees and the Dodgers slugged their way into the World Series. They had the best batting lines in baseball during the regular season. The Yankees scored at least five runs in every Championship Series game, while the Dodgers’ 46 runs were the second most in CS history. Maybe these two kaiju will keep smashing in runs in the World Series, or maybe it will be 1941 all over again.





Davy Andrews is a Brooklyn-based musician and a contributing writer for FanGraphs. He can be found on Twitter @davyandrewsdavy.

78 Comments
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sadtromboneMember since 2020
1 month ago

The opening of this article was aimed squarely at me. This is the most dull matchup I could imagine.

Jorge Soler vs Train (UNEXPECTED)Member since 2022
1 month ago
Reply to  sadtrombone

Well the good news is…nobody goes back to back champs anymore?!?! Next year will be different!

cowdiscipleMember since 2016
1 month ago
Reply to  sadtrombone

Leaves me cold as well. I don’t actually know if I’m going to bother to watch.

sadtromboneMember since 2020
1 month ago
Reply to  cowdisciple

Almost all the compelling teams got eliminated in the wild card round. The Padres put up a good fight but by the LCS it was pretty dull.

Dave T
1 month ago
Reply to  sadtrombone

As a neutral (Cardinals fan), I enjoyed the ALCS. Games 3, 4, and 5 were all exciting games. And I adopted a rooting interest, cheering for the Guardians against the Yankees.

NLCS was less interesting simply because none of the games were all that close. I could muster some interest in rooting for Mets over Dodgers.

I’ll watch the WS, but I can’t summon a lot of interest in supporting either team.

I also have a nagging feeling that this WS is going to end up being very lopsided one way or the other. Maybe even similar to the NLCS, with a lopsided win or two for the loser, but no close games.

frankenspock
1 month ago
Reply to  sadtrombone

This is a wildly stupid opinion to have.

mikejuntMember
1 month ago
Reply to  sadtrombone

I generally don’t like the Yankees to do well because their fans can be so insufferable, and I also tend to root for potentially weaker opponents for the Dodgers, but I have come around a bit on this series: it is an iconic historical matchup that more or less entirely existed before my lifetime (I was 7 months old during the 81 series). The Brooklyn-era matchups are basically the same as the Jackie Robinson era. The 1960s matchups were the Koufax era. The 1970s matchups were the source of the Reggie Jackson legend. 1981 was the completion of Fernandomania. The only series these two teams have played that isn’t a really important part of baseball history is 1941.

I think it is actually pretty cool that it is happening again – and that two of the best and most visible players in MLB are playing when it does.

Judge and Stanton are likeable enough that I would have listed them pretty high on my list of guys I’d like to see get rings if the Dodgers didn’t win. And Ohtani getting there in his first season in LA is a hell of a story.

So, yes, its the historical juggernauts and perennial contenders. But it’s probably the best version of that we could have had in the last 10 or so years where both teams have been competitive. In 2024, with Ohtani and Betts, adding Soto to Judge, with Kershaw still present, etc, is about as good as this matchup can get – a throwback to Dodgers/Yankees with a bunch of obvious hall of famers on both sides.

I think it’s worth appreciating for what it is, even if a lot of fans will be insufferable about it.

marcusthelionMember since 2020
1 month ago
Reply to  sadtrombone

Yankees v. Dodgers is the only time I root for LA… less than thrilled by the teams but I’d prefer it if there were pitchers of the same quality as the hitters in this matchup.
If peak Kershaw was part of the equation; if Ohtani or Mariano Rivera were penciled in as closers…
Hard to get excited about matchups when the “starting pitcher” is some reliever who’s all but anonymous.
Fernando & Luis… we miss you guys!

joe_schlabotnik
1 month ago
Reply to  sadtrombone

aren’t half your comments on this website about how much you are in awe of judge?
I too, would have preferred to see david fry in a tense duel with jose quintana with the world series on the line… somehow, ill have to settle for this boring, ordinary series

mikejuntMember
1 month ago

This is the 4th time in recent history that I’ve had a direct personal interest in the World Series (as a Dodger fan), but in general in the years that they haven’t made it, while I certainly pay less attention, I also generally just end up having a preference on the basis of which player(s) I’d most like to see get a ring. Heck, that once got me to the point of feeling good about the Astros winning because of Dusty Baker.

I have also made that decision on the basis of a bunch of players I liked a lot less than Aaron Judge. I would say he’s probably comfortably in my top 5 or 10 non-Dodger players I’d like to see get to win a title, and Giancarlo Stanton isn’t too far behind. (some other names in my list include Jose Ramirez, Lindor, Yu Darvish, Mike Trout, etc)

At this point you just have to find something, anything in which you can be a little invested because it’s quite unlikely that your natural rooting interests are going to be in play.

si.or.noMember since 2017
1 month ago
Reply to  sadtrombone

Living up to your moniker! 🙂