The Braves moved to Milwaukee in '54 (?) and won the WS in '57. Even better, the Dodgers moved to LA in '58 and won in '59.
While this doesn’t beat the aforementioned 1959 Dodgers (how could anyone?), in the “faster than the Nats” category, the Oakland A’s won the series in 1972, having moved from Kansas City in 1968.
Time for an autopsy:
Well, outside of the facts that it was a 7 game series and, incredibly, the road teams won all 7 games, it wasn’t a particularly compelling series. Outside of game one, they were basically blowouts with no real closing inning drama that close, hotly contested games would provide. It was also between two teams that, according to the viewer ratings, not many people give a damn about.
Three of the four Nats wins were come-from-behind victories, and the fourth (game 2) was tied going into the 7th. Plenty of excitement in those games AFAIAC.
I agree that the three Astros wins were blowouts lacking in suspense, though.
Congrats to Nats. The Road Warriors?
Next year, lets give people what they really want, Yanks vs. Dodgers.
Home team loses each and every game. First time in MLB history and I dare say never in any other sport for a 7 game series. If it happened in any other other sport I’d like to know.
Fans in these parts look at Scherzer and Verlander and think: suppose they stayed in Detroit? Don’t know if any other time two future HOF pitchers have been former players for the same team.
I think you need to refine this a little. Do you mean 2 future HOF’ers who came up with the same team and played in the majors together went on to face each other in the World Series?
Nitpick: The Mystics won in 2019.
With both Stras and Rendon maybe walking at the end of this season, I said to my wife at the bottom of the sixth inning that the Nats widow for winning the World Series was three innings long.
I’d like to know how often two future HOF pitchers played in the same era and were traded away from or otherwise left the same team. Assuming Scherzer and Verlander are indeed destined for the HOF, the Tigers would qualify as having essentially lost two HOF pitchers from the same staff. Has any other team had that distinction?
The length of the games was ridiculous. Games by length:
Game 1 - WAS 5 HOU 4 - 3:43
Game 2 - WAS 12 HOU 3 - 4:01
Game 3 - HOU 4 WAS 1 - 4:03 (!!!)
Game 4 - HOU 8 WAS 1 - 3:48
Game 5 - HOU 7 WAS 1 - 3:19
Game 6 - WAS 7 HOU 2 - 3:37
Game 7 - WAS 6 HOU 2 - 3:42
4:03 to play a 4-1 game is fucking stupid. It’s just stupid. That’s almost as long as Game 4 in the 1993 World Series and that was the highest scoring World Series game ever played.
By way of comparison, the 2019 NBA Finals between Toronto and Golden State, which went six games, contained precisely zero games that went longer than 2:37. The 2019 Stanley Cup Finals between St. Louis and Boston, had no three hour games. Even the Super Bowl, which is an interminable slog, was 3:32, shorter than all but one World Series game and not by much. I randomly chose the 1982 World Series for the sake of comparison (St. Louis 4, Milwaukee 3) and five games were under 3 hours, and the other two just barely over.
I love baseball but 4-hour nine-inning games that only have five runs in them suck. They just suck. MLB is an entertainment product and they are now fitting the same amount of entertainment that once filled 2:40 and asking it to fill in 3.5-4 hours. That is inescapably less exciting; there is no way around it. A 4-hour 4-1 game isn’t more baseball; it’s exactly the same amount of baseball interspersed with 60-90 additional minutes of nothing. I want this fucking fixed. It’s ridiculous.
After game 6, it was announced that neither the NBA nor the NHL had seen the visitor win the first 6. So I’m pretty confident that it hasn’t happened in any major US sport before.
Right off the bat, Ryan & Seaver from the 1969 Mets.
ETA: 2000 Diamondbacks Schilling & Randy Johnson, though Schilling might not make it.
The Braves had three: Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz.
1970 A’s had Catfish Hunter & Rollie Fingers
The 2019 Washington Nationals — one great postseason journey: entering as the 4th-seeded NL postseason team, they beat the 5th-seeded Brewers in the Wild Card game, 4-3. They then knocked off the top-seeded Dodgers in the NLDS (#1 in the NL), 3 games to 2 which of course I loved*. They then swept the #3-seeded STL Cardinals in the NLCS, 4 games to 0. And then they beat the #1-seeded AL team in the World Series.
An awesome run.
Of all postseason teams this year, the Nationals (93-69) had a worse regular season record than all except two, the Brewers (89-73) and the Cardinals (91-71). All other NL and AL postseason teams had better records.
107–55: Houston Astros
106-56: Los Angeles Dodgers
103-59: New York Yankees
101-61: Minnesota Twins
97-65: Oakland Athletics
97-65: Atlanta Braves
96-66: Tampa Bay Rays
93-69: Washington Nationals
91-71: St. Louis Cardinals
89-73: Milwaukee Brewers
- — And two long-lasting images for me from this postseason are of yet another Kershaw meltdown, Yet another Kershaw meltdown in the postseason, 2019 vs eventual World Series Champions, the Washington Nationals. My heart bleeds — NOT! - Album on Imgur
Smoltz barely counts, it was one season as a washed up 42 year old. But Maddux & Glavine surely count, so all good.
Damn straight! Not to mention, their future fan base is going to be smaller if a game that should normally take 2.5 hours is routinely taking nearly 4 hours in the postseason. Between that and the late-ish start times, I had to send the Firebug to bed after 4 innings each night, and even that was well past his usual bed time.
Two questions:
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Unfortunately, this year’s Series doesn’t strike me as particularly out of line timewise, compared to recent years’ Series. Is that the case?
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Compared to regular season games, how much of the differential seems to be due to the game itself taking longer to play, and how much seems to be longer commercial breaks between half-innings?
No argument there.
And was there any difference between the WS and other games broadcast on Fox, and those that were shown on TBS?
As long as the games are broadcast on TV, they will never appreciably shorten them. We all know the way to get sub-3 hours games is to kill all the commercial breaks.
Yeah, it’s pretty annoying.
I lived on the west coast for the last decade or so, and the long games didn’t affect me too much. I would sometimes get pissed at the long ad breaks and the generally slow progress, but even the longest games finished by about 9.00, and I could just mute the TV or the computer during the ad breaks and do something else.
But now that I’m back on the east coast, it’s really annoying to have to stay up until midnight just to watch a game that should be done by 11.00. It wasn’t so bad when I was in grad school, because I was a bit of a night owl and generally didn’t go to bed until 1 or 2 in the morning anyway, but now I like to be in bed reading by 10.30 or 11.