The Dodgers are a great bet, it would be a big upset if they don’t make the World Series with this team. But Houston has many flaws that can be exposed in the post season and while maybe the favorite I would not say they are a more than a 1 in 3 chance. They will need their bullpen and it is suspect.
That’s more of an excuse than a fact - chance favors the prepared - but it’s also a different discussion.
I’m calling it now; the Dodgers will not win the NL pennant.
Sure, but the best team clearly doesn’t always win the world series. It’s a fun tournament but it’s not great at crowning the best team.
The team with the best regular season record only rarely wins the World Series. Since divisional play started in 1995, the team with the best regular season record has won the Series only five times.
Though some of those cases involve teams that only have two or three more wins than their top-level peers failing to make it through.
Just went through and checked the teams that were 5 or more wins better than the next-best team since 1995:
1995 CLE +10, no WS
1998 NYY +8, WS
2001 SEA +14, no WS
2009 NYY +6, WS
2011 PHI +5, No WS
2016 Cubs +8, WS
So that’s six instances of a team really standing out from the crowd, and in three of them they won the World Series. That’s a pretty narrow set of criteria but the Dodgers’ chances certainly look better based on this. A slightly broader category would be to list teams that had at least 100 wins and had the best record in the majors - in addition to the six above, we can add:
1997 ATL 101, no WS
1999 ATL 103, no WS
2002 NYY 103, no WS
2004 STL 105, no WS
2005 STL 100, no WS (but they won it all in 2006 with just over 80 wins!)
2008 LAA 100, no WS
2014 STL 100, no WS
Add those and it’s only 3 out of 13, or slightly worse than chance. (There were also several years in there with no 100-win teams, and one year when two teams were tied for the best record at 101-61 - neither of those teams won the World Series that year).
That’s a hard argument to make because who defines ‘best’ at the time the playoffs begin? It’s true that the team with the best record often fails to win the WS but that could be for any number of reasons.
Some teams, like the Nationals for example, play in weak divisions. Now I haven’t actually looked at the Nats W-L record in and out of the division, but just using that example, it’s entirely possible for a team to rack up wins against the rest of their division. Their W-L might look good, but compare the Nats against the Dodgers who play in a division with at least 2 other strong teams.
Also, sometimes the team that plays after the trade deadline is completely different than the one that plays before it. I remember in 2005 the Cardinals won their division by 11 games over the Astros, but lost to them 4-2 in the NLCS. It wasn’t just a fluke either; the Astros clearly had a better record and played superior baseball beginning sometime around mid summer that year. But because the Cardinals had jumped out to such a big lead early and because they were consistently good against teams they should have beaten, the Cardinals were able to end up with an 11 game division lead at the end.
Obviously nobody can predict how things will unfold but the Dodgers play in a better division than most teams and they’ been playing consistently the best baseball of any team over the last 2 months. It’s hard to see how they aren’t a clear favorite at least in the NL. WS is a different beast.
Pitching is a bit of a question mark for the Astros, but overall (excepting the Dodgers) the contending teams are fairly tightly bunched in the stat department (the Astros’ maligned pen is holding opposing batters to a .228 average). They’re still clearly favorites in the AL.
Still it wouldn’t be shocking to see neither the Astros nor Dodgers in the World Series.
Oddly, there *is *a way of determining the best team, and that’s who gets the big parade. The best team is the one that wins when it matters, isn’t it?
You’re describing the victorious team in a best-of-nineteen-ish-games 10-team invitational. If all 30 teams were invited to the same tournament, it’s possible that someone outside of the qualifying 10 could win it. So I don’t think there’s an objective way to define “best” no matter how you spin it. All we can say for now is that the Dodgers have shown the “best” or most consistent ability of the 30 teams to beat their competition over the first roughly 110 games of the season. That may not be true over the last 50 games of the season. It may not be true during the playoffs. We’ll see.
But winning the playoffs makes you the best at winning the playoffs. And I’m not sure that’s what everyone in this thread is trying to define as the “best.”
Baseball has this little tradition over 100 years old that the best team is the team that wins the World Series. Why try to re-define it when the system works so well. The goal of baseball teams is to put together a team that can get through both the regular season and the post-season to the final goal of winning the World Series to determine the best team.
Yes, it takes some good luck and usually a lot of health and the ability to shore up weak spots through trades but it works well enough. Statistics in this case should be considered a distant second to actually winning the trophy.
Winners win. Losers make excuses.
It has ever been thus.
Houston is 10-16 against playoff contenders Cleveland, Boston, KC, NY and Tampa. I don’t consider them overwhelming favorites in the AL.
The Astros’ starters are probably pretty good when healthy, though they probably lean on their lineup to win games. As a Cardinals fan, I remember that this was true of some of their teams in the early to mid-2000s. Their lineup was good enough to batter teams with less than stellar pitching but they’d hit a wall when an opposing staff didn’t serve up pitches over the fat part of the plate. A team can possibly get to the Series with merely good pitching if they can score runs but by the time the Series comes around, usually one of the two teams has balance.
That’s why the two most recent Cardinals championships in 2006 and 2011 were among the more unlikely, and perhaps even a bit fluke-ish. Both teams had good lineups with power, with the 2011 probably being the better situational hitting team. But the rotation was Christ Carpenter and…Chris Carpenter. In 2006, Jared Weaver and Jeff Suppan turned in some of their better pitching performances of their entire careers in the post-season. In 2011, I think Carpenter was the only pitcher to make it past the fifth inning. The next year, the Cardinals had an improved rotation but the Giants were just wicked in the final three games of the NLCS.
I don’t necessarily put a lot of stock in regular season records, particularly early in the season. Look at what happens in late August through late September when wins become more crucial and the rosters that are likely to be in the playoffs are playing. The W-L records from August 1 toward the end of the year are probably more predictive of who will do well in October.
I don’t have stats to back up any of this, but it seems to me that it helps if a team is competing and playing meaningful baseball late in the year. When I look at the runs of Kansas City in 2014, the Rockies of 2007, the Giants of 2014, the Cardinals of 2011, it seems like there’s an added benefit of being locked in and having to play in situations that simulate the playoffs, as opposed to being 14 games up and trying to decide whether to rest certain players to safeguard against injuries. In any sport, turning on ‘the switch’ (to use the cliche) is difficult, and in a sport like baseball where timing and rhythm are especially important, it just seems that much more difficult. Though there’s absolutely no proof that I know of, I suspect this is one reason why some teams flop in the post-season despite all the expectations. Certainly not the only reason though.
It was redefined when playoffs were put in place.
That’s it. There’s been a cultural change. Before divisions, the Big Thing was to win the pennant, and the World Series was just a bonus. Now, the pennant is just another round of playoffs, and the Big Thing is to win the Series.
So teams need to be set up based on matchups against the other contending teams in a 5 or 7 game series. Three dominant starters, a top setup guy, and a top closer are all the pitchers they need, for instance. They all have to be mentally tougher than average, too. That’s who you have to get. The other pitchers and the bench hitters don’t help you win when you need to; they only fill in gaps during the six-month-long round-robin qualifiers.
I would say refined and not redefined but that is nitpicky on my part. But even the playoff system has been in place 44 years now.
It still comes down to build a team that can both win the long grind and win the short intense post-season.
Absolutely it’s just that team isn’t always the best team. Sometimes it is. Just not always.
Expand the final series from 7 to 25 games and you might get closer. Eliminate divisions and wild cards and interleague play and unbalanced schedules and you get closer.
But right now, the series is fun. It’s important. It’s good for ratings. It’s a lot of things. But one thing it isn’t is a good way to pick the best team.
Aren’t you off by a few years? This is the 49th season with the playoffs, right?