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When the accolades are being given out for this 2017 Astros championship, they’ll deservedly go to the club’s young core. They were spectacular. World Series MVP George Springer led the way in the final seven games with an OPS over 1.400, five home runs, and enough exuberance to exhume the dead. Possible regular-season MVP Jose Altuve led the club with a 1.021 postseason OPS and seven home runs. Alex Bregman and Carlos Correa combined for nine wins this year. Indeed, no team club received as many wins from players aged 28 or younger than this Houston Astros team.

We shouldn’t forget the veterans on this squad, though, a collection of players who not only offered important production but supported their younger teammates all the way to the end.

The Astros hitters over 30 — led by Brian McCann, Carlos Beltran, and Josh Reddick — compiled the 17th-most wins among 30-somethings across the league. It doesn’t look like a lot, but that group may have helped change what had been a losing culture in Houston most recently.

“There was a lot of concern about where this thing was going,” said general manager Jeff Luhnow after the game, “and culture is a hard thing to quantify. From the young guys that we’ve had here — Altuve, [Carlos] Correa, Springer, [Alex] Bregman — they were developing their own culture, and the thing that we were missing was the McCann, Beltran, been there, done that, been in every situation and can help these guys through it, and that was useful.”

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Last night, with the franchise’s first championship hanging in the balance, Astros manager A.J. Hinch handed the ball to Charlie Morton. He never asked for it back, and four innings later, the Astros mobbed Morton on the mound. They are champions today in part because of Charlie Morton, and there was perhaps no more fitting player to get the last out of the 2017 season, because Charlie Morton embodies so much of what baseball is today.

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Symbolism is useful, but it’s also overused. The Astros just won the World Series, and George Springer just won the World Series MVP. Are there ways in which Springer is a symbol for what the Astros are, and for what they’ve achieved? Sure, if you need him to be. He’s a good young player. Homegrown. Seems like a leader. Thrived on the biggest stage. Springer could serve as a symbol, because he is great, and the Astros are great. Look how easy this is!

But while it’s appropriate that Springer won the award, I don’t think that’s because the Astros made a point of following his lead, or anything. I don’t think the Astros made themselves in George Springer’s image, any more than they made themselves in Jose Altuve’s. A winning team is a collection of a whole lot of talent. It’s appropriate that Springer won the award because of this.

You thought you were seeing a lot of this before. You haven’t seen anything yet. You’re going to hear about this from your dentist.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the historic nature of the 2017 World Series and discuss World Series Game 6, including Josh Reddick’s record in clutch situations, David Roberts’ Rich Hill hook, a Justin Verlander decision, and the Astros’ and Dodgers’ different approaches to pitcher usage, then analyze Game 7’s pitching predicaments and the Clayton Kershaw question before answering listener emails about heavily used playoff relievers, starters pitching on short rest in the postseason, the significance of shutdown innings, Chris Taylor’s value, clutch defense, the timing of MVP voting, and more.

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The drama of the World Series — and perhaps this World Series, in particular — renders everyone a little prone to hyperbole. Under the influence of the present moment, one has a tendency to forget the great moments of the past. In the wake of a crucial play or big game, it’s not uncommon to make declarations that, upon further examination, fail to hold up to scrutiny.

Having acknowledged all of that, I would like to use this post to explain why tonight’s baseball game is the single-greatest matchup in the history of baseball.

Before 1961, Major League Baseball featured just 16 teams, separated into two leagues. Each team’s regular-season schedule consisted of games against just the seven other teams in their respective league. The team with the best record in each league at the end of the year moved on to the World Series.

Because of the way in which the schedule was constructed, it was easy for teams to beat up on the dregs of the league and come away with a strong record. It also meant that the good work of the regular season couldn’t be undone in the playoffs: because winning the league meant an immediate spot in the World Series, the notion of a “playoff upset” didn’t really exist.

By 1969, there were 24 teams in the majors. Another round, the Championship Series, was added to the postseason at that time. Expansion brought the league to 28 teams by the early 90s. The 1995 season marked the debut of the Division Series. Then, a few years later, Arizona and Tampa Bay joined the league. The degree of difficulty for reaching the World Series was greater than ever. Even teams that excelled in the regular season had to navigate a gauntlet.

That degree of difficulty is, in part, what makes the matchup between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros in the World Series so rare. Add to that the prospect of a Game 7, and you’re left with a decent argument for the greatest World Series matchup of all time.

Since 1903, the World Series has featured 39 winner-take-all games. Not all of these matchups took place between regular-season titans. In fact, two matchups of recent vintage — in 2002 between the Anaheim Angels and San Francisco Giants and 2014 between the Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants — both featured a pair of clubs that had failed to win their respective divisions.

This season, on the other hand, we have two juggernauts. The Dodgers won an MLB-best 104 games. As for the Astros, their 101 wins ranked second in the American League, although that maybe doesn’t fully account for their accomplishment. Consider: in the 10 years before the 2017 season, the 101-win threshold had been reached only three times.

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A few hours from now, Yu Darvish will throw the first pitch of Game 7 of this year’s World Series. Shortly thereafter — or, less shortly thereafter, if the Astros are lucky — Lance McCullers will take the mound. I don’t need to tell you what Game 7 means. Nobody does. It’s plainly evident: This game is everything. It’s everything that anyone plays for.

Because of the stakes, and because there’s no tomorrow, patterns you might be used to no longer apply. Both teams will employ an all-hands-on-deck approach, hoping for sufficient adrenaline to counteract fatigue. Darvish, of course, will want to go as long as he can. The same goes for McCullers. They’ve probably both dreamed of going the distance. But that’s almost certainly not going to happen. The Dodgers and Astros are likely to dip into their bullpens. And that’s where it gets extra fun.

Both teams have their full complement of arms. The Dodgers might have more faith in their relievers than the Astros do, but the Astros’ relievers also ought to be more rested. Yet there’s an additional twist. It’s hard to find a writer who doesn’t expect to see Clayton Kershaw. It’s just as hard to find a writer who doesn’t expect to see Dallas Keuchel. There’s also been chatter the Astros might make brief use of Justin Verlander. Kershaw and Keuchel would be on two days’ rest. Verlander, zero. With one game remaining, one game that means more than all others, we should examine the playoff history of this.

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The Dodgers’ reward for having the best record in the majors this year, for recording three more wins than the Astros during the regular season, is this: they host the final game of the 2017 major-league campaign, Game 7 of the World Series, tonight.

Home-field advantage is a real phenomenon. In the game’s history, World Series Game 7 victors have been split evenly, 19-19, between home and road teams. But that’s a fairly small sample. In baseball, the home team typically wins 54% of regular-season games, and that rate holds up as a constant decade after decade, era after era.

Conventional wisdom suggests that home-field advantage is the result of multiple advantages enjoyed by the home team: the right to bat last, the ability to tailor a roster specifically to the park, a certain comfort with the surroundings, and the absence of travel-related fatigue (such as might be experienced by the visitors). All of those elements, perhaps, play a role. But the salient factor behind home-field advantage is umpire bias, particularly regarding borderline strike-ball calls. University of Chicago behavioral economist Tobias Moskowitz and Sports Illustrated writer L. Jon Wertheim documented convincing evidence in support of that observation in their book Scorecasting.

The authors used pitch-tracking data to quantify this concept.

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