Tonight’s Matchup Is the Greatest of All-Time

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.

The only other matchup in World Series history featuring 100-win teams occurred way back in 1931 between the Philadelphia Athletics and the St. Louis Cardinals. Of course, the 100-win threshold isn’t an entirely fair line of demarcation for historical teams: measuring team strength strictly by win totals ignores the fact that, before 1961, teams played only 154-game schedules. There are a handful of Series that went to Game 7 and featured clubs with winning percentages just a bit higher than this year’s clubs. The scatter plot below illustrates the point.

There are only five World Series Game 7 matchups that featured teams with an average winning percentage higher than this year, and every one of those matchups came before integration, in a time when there were roughly half as many teams and beating seven teams over the course of the regular season meant an automatic pass to the World Series. Since expansion in 1961, the only other years in which teams with a winning percentage of at least .600 (97-win pace) faced each other in a Game 7 of the World Series are 1972 (A’s and Reds) and 1979 (Pirates and Orioles).

Perhaps in a strict sense, some of those Game 7s from 70 to 100 years ago featured better teams, but that doesn’t really account for the way the game has changed due to expansion, a larger pool of talent, and the degree of difficulty caused by having to navigate extra playoff series.

Not only did the Astros and Dodgers dominate the regular season, but they’ve also won an extra 10 games against the best teams in baseball to reach this point. There probably isn’t an easy way to account for the difficulty across eras, but consider: even if a club has a 60% chance of winning their first two series, that still only gives them a one-in-three shot of making it to the World Series. While raw win totals might not do justice to the best teams of yesteryear, it’s also important to note that, during the period when clubs played 154 games, they had fewer obstacles. The extra postseason series now make it even tougher to qualify for the championship round. For these purposes, let’s just compare win totals heading into Game 7.

Viewed in this way, there’s really no comparison between this year’s Series and every other one to occur before it. The Dodgers and Astros have both won at least 111 games. The next-closest Series in terms of sheer victories occurred in 1912, when the Red Sox and Giants each had at least 106. There’s no perfect way to account for eras, but totaling up wins probably isn’t the worst way to do it, and that makes this Series the best we’ve ever seen before even considering the incredible games of the past week.

We could also factor in the pitching matchup for Game 7, but that doesn’t really do much to help or hurt this year’s case. Below, we see every Game 7 starter matchup with the average and geometric mean of the two starters’ regular season WAR.

Tonight’s matchup between Yu Darvish and Lance McCullers sits somewhere in the middle of these Game 7s by this measure. We could discount Darvish a little due to the way he pitched in his last game, but then we might want to elevate McCullers, who accumulated three wins despite missing one-third of the season and who’s been excellent in the postseason, as well. In terms of starters, this is a good matchup, but not a great one. Seeing Clayton Kershaw in relief wouldn’t be too bad, either. We could come up with a way to combine the starters and the teams, maybe take the ranks among Game 7s, weighting team winning percentage two-thirds and the pitching matchup one-third, but — and I did actually do this — we would still end up with roughly the same configuration at the top of the list just by averaging the teams’ winnings percentages.

Any Game 7 of a World Series is going to have a claim as best matchup of the season, as it’s the one that decides the year’s champion. Looking back on all of the Game 7s in history, there are a handful of games from nearly a century ago, or more, that saw superior teams relative to that level of competition. However, given the increased nature of competition in the last 70 years and the added difficulty of navigating multiple rounds of playoffs, this affair between the Astros and Dodgers is basically unprecedented, this Game 7 is quite possibly the single-greatest matchup in the history of baseball.