On September 29, 2014, after the last out of the MLB regular season was recorded but before the wild-card games began, the World Series odds of the 10 playoff teams looked like this:
2014 WS Odds at Start of Postseason
Yes, five years ago the Tigers were World Series favorites, the Orioles, Royals, and Pirates made the playoffs, and no team in baseball won (or lost) more than 98 games. Life comes at you fast. While you’re chewing on that, though, look at the bottom of that table. Statistically speaking, the longest shots in that playoff field were the Royals and Giants. Both had to win wild-card games to advance, and neither had excelled en route to October: According to Baseball Prospectus’s third-order winning percentage, which calculates a team’s expected winning percentage based on its underlying statistics and adjusted for the quality of its opponents, the Giants and the Royals were the seventh-best and 15th-best teams, respectively, during the 2014 regular season.
Naturally, the two playoff teams with the worst World Series odds both made it to the World Series. The Giants won.
Putting aside the identities of the teams involved, and assuming no direct rooting interest, which would you prefer: the 2014 upset scenario, or the outcome from the preceding season, when the teams with the best 2013 records and run differentials during the regular season (the Red Sox and Cardinals) faced off in the World Series, and the team with baseball’s best run differential won? Do you breathe a deeper sigh of satisfaction when the World Series winner is the biggest underdog entering October (the 2014 Giants), or the biggest favorite (the 2016 Cubs)?
There’s no objectively accurate answer; this is a matter of personal preference. On the one hand, “Everyone loves an underdog” became a cliché for a reason; predictability is often the enemy of entertainment, and there’s something wondrous about watching a team that isn’t expected to win beat the odds over and over. If we wanted to award the title to baseball’s best team, we would end the season in September or turn over October to a best-of-27 series between the top two finishers. The playoffs are inherently subject to small-sample randomness, so why not steer into the skid and pull for complete chaos?
On the other hand, teams just spent six months fighting for every win and revealing their relative strengths. Don’t we want sustained success over 162 games to be recognized, rewarded, and remembered more than knocking off three to four opponents over 11-20 games? Shouldn’t the 16-win gap between this year’s division winners with the best and worst regular-season records count for something more meaningful than home-field advantage in postseason play? Isn’t there a tidiness to history, an order to the world, when the pennant winners are also a season’s most dominant, defining teams? And don’t we want the highest caliber of play possible to be on display in the sport’s signature series?
Maybe odds and regular-season records hold no significance for you once October begins. Maybe you pick a postseason bandwagon based on your fondness or antipathy for particular players, or on which teams are trying to end the longest title droughts, or on which wear the prettiest uniforms or employ the most sonorous radio broadcasters or travel with the best beat writers or play in the most convenient time zones. Maybe you couldn’t care less, because you stop paying attention as soon as your hometown team is out of contention.
If the idea of watching the best teams duke it out at the end does hold some significance for you, though, then the choice of ideal World Series matchup is clear: It’s the Astros against the Dodgers. Not only are the Astros and the Dodgers the most overpowering teams of 2019, they’re two of the best teams of the post-integration era, and they’re historically superior to the closest competitors in their respective leagues. They’re arguably the game’s most advanced organizations when it comes to talent development, and together they feature a few of the season’s most likely individual award winners, as well as a handful of the era’s most accomplished, high-profile players. Plus, they have head-to-head history: They played a classic, seven-game World Series in 2017. And they’re both better now than they were then.
The 107-55 Astros and the record 106-56 Dodgers made 2019 the second season ever to boast two teams with at least 105 wins, after 1998, when the Yankees and Braves won 114 and 106, respectively. But wins and losses don’t always accurately reflect a team’s true performance. Baseball Prospectus’s archive of third-order records extends back to 1950, encompassing 70 seasons and 1,742 teams. (The complete list is here.) The Astros and Dodgers rank first and third all time, respectively, in third-order winning percentage, with only the 2001 Mariners placing ahead of L.A.
Best Third-Order Winning Percentages, 1950-2019
This was a season of extremes: Eight teams finished with triple-digit win or loss totals, surpassing the previous record of seven. The standings were extraordinary on the high side alone: Never before had four teams won at least 101 games. But we shouldn’t simply lump the Astros and the Dodgers together with the Yankees, the Twins, and the other excellent teams of 2019; they’re in rarefied air of their own. The table below lists the largest differences in third-order winning percentage between the best and second-best teams in either league in any season since 1950. The Astros and Dodgers are the only two teams in that time to finish at least 105 points ahead of the next-best team in their circuit.
Biggest Leads in Third-Order Winning Percentage by Top-Ranked Team in League, 1950-2019
Houston and L.A. fare almost as well relative to their peers in other team-performance measures: They also finished 76 and 124 runs, respectively, ahead of their closest leaguemates in run differential, and 68 and 93 points in BaseRuns record. (The Yankees have this year’s walking wounded, but they’ve also led the majors in cluster luck; third-order record and BaseRuns look a little more favorably on the Twins and the Rays, with the A’s and the Nats in the neighborhood.) There’s always a best team in each league, but in some seasons the difference is modest or so small as to make it a toss-up. This year, the gap is unusually large, even though the records don’t show it; there’s everyone else, and then there are the Astros and Dodgers. They’re two Terminators sent from the future of the sport, and no matter how entertaining the alternative matchups, it would be a disappointment not to see them scrap.
As one would imagine, given the degree to which they’ve lapped their respective leagues, the Astros and Dodgers excel at almost everything. They’re first and second in batter WAR, and third and fourth in pitcher WAR. In the second half of the season, the Astros, bolstered by June promotion Yordan Álvarez (who outhit everyone except Mike Trout on a per-PA basis) and trade-deadline addition Zack Greinke, have led the majors in hitter and pitcher WAR. The Astros and Dodgers are first and second in non-pitcher offense; the Dodgers have been better at hitting high-octane heat, which might be of some aid in October, when hitters face faster stuff. By BP’s wins above replacement player, they’re two of the three teams (along with the Twins) to be above average at every offensive position. They’re first and third in pitcher strikeout rate and strikeout minus walk rate, and the Astros are the first team ever to have the highest strikeout rate on the mound and the lowest at the plate, which comes in extra-handy in a year when batted balls have turned into homers at a record rate.
The two teams don’t just do a good job of preventing balls in play; they also induce weak contact and put players in position to gobble up batted balls. The Astros and Dodgers are first and second in defensive efficiency (park-adjusted or otherwise), which means they’ve been the best at converting balls in play into outs. That’s partly because their pitching staffs have allowed lower-quality contact than any other teams’, partly because they shift more aggressively than any other team—on more than half of all pitches, in fact—and partly because, according to Baseball Info Solutions, their fielders rank first (Dodgers) and fourth (Astros) even after accounting for positioning. The closest these clubs come to a weak point is in the bullpen, where they rank eighth and ninth in WAR.
What may be most impressive about the Dodgers and Astros’ standout seasons is how long they’ve played at an elite level. The two teams rank first and second in wins over the past five regular seasons; the Astros won a title in 2017, and the Dodgers have won back-to-back pennants. Yet both clubs appear to be peaking now. The Dodgers, who’ve had only one losing season (barely) in the last 14, have been winning since before Houston hired Jeff Luhnow and embarked on an extreme rebuild. The Dodgers have secured seven consecutive division titles, and they’ve improved with almost every successive season.
The scariest thing for the rest of the league is how hard it is to imagine either team tailing off; when I said the word “window” to Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten in March 2015, he immediately dismissed the idea that the club’s window could close, declaring, “No, we’re the Dodgers. We should be contending every year, period.” Four and a half years later, it’s no easier to imagine an end to the team’s glory days. The Dodgers debuted a host of promising rookies this season—Gavin Lux, Dustin May, Tony Gonsolin, Will Smith—and FanGraphs still rates their farm system third best in the game. Alex Verdugo and Julio Urías are 23; Cody Bellinger is 24; Corey Seager and Walker Buehler are 25. If there’s an argument against another Astros-Dodgers series, it’s that we’ve already seen plenty of these teams in the playoffs, and we might get sick of seeing them before they finally fall apart.
Teams can’t count on a playoff berth if they excel in only one aspect of roster construction; the Rangers have gotten great production from free agents, and the Mets have made the most of players obtained via the draft, but neither team made it to October. The Astros and Dodgers are rich in homegrown talent, but they’ve also done well with free agents, and Houston in particular has repeatedly struck gold with its trade targets (including Álvarez, whom they stole from Los Angeles in 2016). Both teams are at the forefront of the ongoing revolution in data-driven player development, which has helped them remake free-talent finds like Max Muncy and under-the-radar trade acquisitions including Chris Taylor and Ryan Pressly. The Dodgers are historically versatile, and the Astros are uncompromising in pursuit of an edge; most teams are issuing fewer intentional walks, but only the Astros have eliminated them entirely. Both teams are intelligent, disciplined, and capable of competing for high-priced players. It’s a combo that’s tough to beat.
If the two titans do meet up again, the series would have star power to spare. If Alex Bregman beats out Mike Trout for the AL MVP award, Justin Verlander or Gerrit Cole claims the AL Cy Young award, Cody Bellinger edges out Christian Yelich for the NL plaque, and Dave Roberts gets his wish for MLB ERA leader Hyun-jin Ryu to win the NL Cy Young award, the Astros and Dodgers could become the 20th and 21st teams to win both the MVP and Cy Young in the same season. Ryu probably won’t win, but if Bregman does, the Astros should be the first team to win the MVP, Cy Young, and Rookie of the Year awards all at once, which seems almost unfair.
In Bellinger, Bregman, Buehler, Seager, Carlos Correa, and Álvarez, an Astros-Dodgers rematch would feature several of baseball’s best talents 25 and under, not to mention past postseason studs George Springer and Justin Turner and hot-hitting former MVP José Altuve. But it would also shine a spotlight on the three active pitchers with the most career WAR, Verlander, Greinke, and Clayton Kershaw. Kershaw, of course, is perpetually trying to make his playoff performance match his regular-season results, and the Dodgers, despite all of their October opportunities, are nursing the second-longest championship drought in this year’s playoff field (not counting the Nationals franchise’s Expos era).
The nature of postseason play is such that the field is still slightly favored over the Astros and Dodgers. (The Astros, who’ll have home-field advantage in any matchup, earn playoff odds equal to the next two teams combined.) If you want to watch the world burn this October, root for the Brewers, who outscored their opponents by three runs on the season but—aided by their soft schedule and the Cubs’ collapse—won a wild card by finishing 20-7 in September and 14-5 after losing Christian Yelich. That’s a great story, but Milwaukee’s not a great team. In baseball, it’s rare for both the best team and the best narrative to triumph. But in a year when the Astros and Dodgers ran roughshod over the rest of the sport, there may be no greater attraction than those two juggernauts going toe to toe again.
An earlier version of this piece misstated the previous record number of teams with triple-digit win or loss totals.
Thanks to Lucas Apostoleris of Baseball Prospectus for research assistance.
