In Case You Need a Reason To Watch the World Series

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.

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.

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.