No matter how many times your team wins it all, it doesn't ever quite erase the memory of the one that got away.
As a Royals fan, to an embarrassing degree my happiness over their winning the 2015 World Series was hampered by the unshakable memory of Alex Gordon being stranded on third base as the tying run in Game 7 the year before. One of my very first painful sports memories was watching the Royals fall short against the wantonly evil New York Yankees in Game 5 of the 1977 ALCS, which ended with that saint of a man Freddie Patek, sitting in the dugout with his face buried in his hands after grounding into a series-ending double play. Oh, it still hurts.
I suspect every baseball fan has similar memories. Even Yankees fans. We all have moments that we replay in our mind over and over, thinking of just how close it was to coming out right. These little pangs of regret sometimes make us wonder why we bother to invest ourselves so thoroughly in the first place. The only thing that could cauterize these wounds would be a chance to do it all over again.
Well ... we can't do that. There's no app for that. But what we can do, in the void of the actual, real games we need so badly right now, is offer up a second chance for some of those teams. Not really, of course, but in a virtual sense.
Here is what we're going to do. There is a lot of simulating of the 2020 baseball season going around right now, and part of me is heartened to see it. Sims! My sun and stars! At the same time, we demurred from doing that very thing. (Publicly, anyway. I am in fact managing the Chicago teams in a day-by-day sim of the suspended season.)
For one thing, it seems a little macabre given the reason for the delayed start to the season. For another, we didn't want to lure anyone into an exercise we didn't really want them to follow to the end. I mean, we want real games. If we get them, we would want to drop our simmed 2020 season like a bad habit. What would be the point?
Instead, we decided to embark on some what-if scenarios that might be fun to explore. At the top of the list was a "Second-Chance World Series."
What if we could provide another shot -- albeit a virtual one -- at the crown for some of those near-miss teams through baseball history? Starting next week, that's what we're going to do.
Jump to ... Tourney setup | AL teams & bracket | NL teams & bracket
Second-Chance World Series setup
Quickly, here is how we arrived at our 32-team bracket. I created an all-time standings list with teams ordered by the harmonic mean between their wins-per-162 games total and their Pythagorean wins-per-162 games total to strike a balance between actual record and expected record. We flagged every team that won a World Series in the measured season, or at any point within five years before or after to weed out the talent cores that might have fallen short in one season but were rewarded as a group in another season.
We wanted every franchise represented but found there was one that simply did not have a candidate. The minimum harmonic mean win score was 90 wins to be considered, while not violating the five-year title buffer restriction. One franchise could not do that. We'll get to them. So 29 of the 30 current franchises are represented. The AL has one historical wild-card entrant, and the NL has two.
We ended up filtering out pre-World War II candidates. I'll include mentions below of pre-war candidates that might have been included if we went with a larger bracket. While in many cases we simply took the top-ranked eligible candidate for each franchise, we have made other selections based on the desire to have every decade represented, beginning with the 1940s, and for narrative purposes. The heartbreak of some teams is simply more famous than that of others.
Each matchup will be composed of a best-of-7 series, with the higher seed getting home-field advantage in a 2-2-1-1-1 format. The games will be simulated using the Action! PC baseball simulation software from Dave Koch Sports. The game uses cross-era historical normalization to put different teams from different league contexts on equal footing.
And now to our Second-Chance World Series entrants, listed by league and order of seed, with a little background on the teams we chose and the ones we didn't.
American League
1. 2001 Seattle Mariners (Harmonic mean win score of 112.3)
Other leading candidates: 2003, 2002, 2000, 1997, 1995
As mentioned, there was a five-year buffer before and after a title season required for a candidate. Well, the Mariners have never had a title team, so all of their best teams were eligible. For a lot of teams, the best candidates appeared in clusters -- a group of players who excelled for a period of years but never quite got over the top. You can kind of see that here with the Mariners, for whom all the leading candidates toiled within a nine-season period. But with Seattle, there is a difference.
To refresh your memory: The Lou Piniella-managed M's reeled off an unbelievable 116 wins in 2001, tying the big league mark set by the 1906 Cubs. With historical hindsight, what's still so amazing about those Mariners is who wasn't on the team. Ken Griffey Jr. Alex Rodriguez. Randy Johnson. All generational talents on Seattle teams from that era. None of them joined Edgar Martinez, Ichiro Suzuki and Freddy Garcia in putting up that record win total.
In the end, though, the '01 Mariners did not punctuate their regular-season success with a title. What they did get was the top overall seed in our Second-Chance bracket. Among eligible teams, only one had a higher harmonic mean win score than the 2001 Mariners. You'll read about them below, and the results will be unveiled round by round each day beginning Monday, with the World Series results unveiled Friday.
2. 1954 Cleveland Indians (112.0)
Other leading candidates: 1995 (wild card), 2017, 1996, 1906, 1904
The Indians have had a number of near-miss clubs through their history and, in fact, are the franchise that landed our AL wild-card slot. So Cleveland is the only AL city with two shots at historical revenge. The years for candidates listed above represent the strongest Cleveland candidates, but they don't even include the near-miss teams from 1997 and 2016 that lost in the World Series.
The '54 Indians were the one team to break the hegemony of the Casey Stengel/Mickey Mantle Yankees teams of the 1950s, racking up 111 wins. The Tribe outdistanced a New York club that won 103 games and might have been Stengel's best. The Indians rode the power of an amazing starting rotation that featured Hall of Famers Bob Lemon, Early Wynn and Bob Feller.
We should mention that selecting a five-year buffer between a measured season and a championship was an arbitrary decision. We played with buffers of three years, five years, eight years and even 10 years. Five years just seemed to work the best. In 1954, Indians fans could hardly have been called long-suffering, as Cleveland won its second (and still last) World Series in 1948, just six years before. But the heartbreak of the '54 team was real when it couldn't finish off the great season with a title, instead losing to the Willie Mays-led New York Giants. And, of course, the Indians haven't won a World Series since.
But six years is a pretty long time in the baseball world. The top five players in bWAR for the 1948 Indians were Lou Boudreau, Joe Gordon, Lemon, Ken Keltner and Gene Bearden. In 1954, they were Bobby Avila, Larry Doby, Wynn, Lemon and Mike Garcia. There were a few players on both rosters, but they were different teams. Five years before and after a measured season seemed to be long enough to turn over a good portion of most core talent groups.
3. 1995 Cleveland Indians (108.3)
Other leading candidates: see 1954 Indians entry
Many of you probably remember this potent offensive juggernaut. In a shortened 144-game season, Albert Belle had 50 homers and 52 doubles. Carlos Baerga, Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome, Kenny Lofton, Eddie Murray, Paul Sorrento and Sandy Alomar Jr. all posted OPS figures over .800. Shortstop Omar Vizquel was at the height of his wizardry. But the pitching was not at the same level and Cleveland was ultimately toppled in a great World Series matchup with the pitching-rich Atlanta Braves.
4. 1946 Boston Red Sox (104.8)
Other leading candidates: 1949, 1942, 1948, 1950, 1978
Before the Red Sox fell off in the 1950s, they had a number of teams more than good enough to win a World Series with Ted Williams as the franchise cornerstone. However, the only one of those teams to snare an American League pennant was the 1946 group, which ranks as the strongest eligible candidate in the long, frustrating history of the Red Sox. That was the only World Series Williams ever played in. He struggled to five singles in 25 at-bats in that year's Fall Classic, which Boston dropped to Stan Musial's St. Louis Cardinals in seven games. Boston dropped the decisive game 4-3.
You could put together a great tournament of heartbreaking Red Sox teams. We all know that. Books have been written on the subject. Movies have been made about it. The 1967, 1975 and 1986 teams all won pennants, lost in October and had great narratives. The 1978 team was one of Boston's best but fell in the Bucky Dent game. The 1977 team was really good as well. All of those teams were considered. But the best Boston teams that never won were those Williams-led teams from the late '40s. We decided to give Teddy Ballgame another shot at the gold.
5. 2001 Oakland Athletics (102.9)
Other leading candidates: 2002, 2019, 1902, 2013, 2018
Whether it has been in Philadelphia, Kansas City or Oakland, the star-crossed Athletics franchise has often vacillated between really good and really bad. Several of their eras were eliminated from consideration because they won titles. Others were eliminated because there have been large swathes of baseball history when the Athletics simply sucked. In 1902, Connie Mack's second Athletics club won the AL pennant, but it was the year before the World Series began.
That leaves us with a selection of Billy Beane teams from which to choose. Remember the Moneyball A's? The one Brad Pitt put together with the help of Jonah Hill and the guy from Lodge 49? That whole narrative was set up because the powerhouse A's from the year before had been broken up. Kind of. They lost Johnny Damon and Jason Giambi. In 2002, Oakland won 103 games -- one more than in 2001. However, the 2001 team was nearly eight games better in Pythagorean record. And it was undone by Derek Jeter. Let's give them another shot.
6. 1965 Minnesota Twins (100.8)
Other leading candidates: 1933, 1930, 2019, 1969, 1970
Filtering out pre-World War II teams saved us from the tough choice of dropping one of the outstanding Washington Senators clubs from the first half of the 1930s that never got a World Series win. Instead, we've got a lot of slugging Twins teams, including last year's club that set the big league mark for team home runs. The 2019 Twins won 101 games, second in franchise history and just the second Senators/Twins team to break the century mark. The team that won more was the 1965 Twins.
Those Twins were led by a potent offense that featured Tony Oliva, Harmon Killebrew, Bob Allison and Don Mincher, as well as the unlikely 1965 AL MVP in shortstop Zoilo Versalles. The pitching staff was led by Mudcat Grant and Jim Kaat who, between them, started half of the Twins' games. Minnesota made it all the way to Game 7 of the 1965 World Series, but Sandy Koufax was just too much at that point, and the Twins dropped the decisive game at Metropolitan Stadium to the Dodgers.
7. 1977 Kansas City Royals (100.0)
Other leading candidates: 1978, 1976, 1975, 1994, 1971
I kind of already advanced this Royals team, the best in franchise history. That club battled in a tightly packed AL West race for much of that season. After losing at Fenway Park on Aug. 16, Kansas City was 64-51, in fourth place, but just two games out of first. After that game, the Royals reeled off a 10-game winning streak, lost three of four, won 16 straight, lost one, then won eight straight.
Led by George Brett, Hal McRae, John Mayberry and a career season from Al Cowens, it's still the only Kansas City club to crack the 100-win barrier. Whitey Herzog was the manager of a team that ran opponents off the field. The Royals eventually got a World Series win in 1985, with Brett and Frank White still in the fold. But it was a very different club by then. The 1977 team should have been the first Royals team to bring home the flag.
8. 1985 Toronto Blue Jays (99.6)
Other leading candidates: 2015, 2016, 2008, 1983, 1984
The Blue Jays' two leading candidates were ultimately thwarted by the Royals, which, you know, I feel really bad about. Toronto's 1985 loss to Kansas City in the ALCS is the biggest heartbreaker in franchise history to date, as the Blue Jays squandered a 3-1 series lead. Making that outcome even more painful at the time was the fact that it was the first season in which the league championship series were best-of-7 affairs. In any LCS prior to 1985, when the Blue Jays won Game 4 to grab that commanding lead, that would have been it.
The Jays methodically built up their talent pipeline after entering the majors as an expansion club in 1977. By 1983, they were winners, putting up back-to-back 89-win teams. In 1985, they peaked, racking up 99 wins, still a franchise record. Toronto was still early in the salad days of the franchise, an 11-year period from 1983 to 1993 when only the Yankees won more games. They also won back-to-back titles in 1992 and 1993. The title Toronto teams got over the top with acquired talent like Jack Morris, Roberto Alomar, Rickey Henderson and Joe Carter. The '85 Jays were almost entirely homegrown.
9. 1961 Detroit Tigers (98.9)
Other leading candidates: 1915, 1909, 1907, 2013, 2006
Four Tigers candidates had harmonic mean win scores of 98 or better. Three of them were Ty Cobb teams, all filtered out when we decided to stick with post-World War II teams. The other was the '61 Tigers, so they get the nod. Detroit has had a few long postseason droughts during their existence. In 1961, they were in the midst of a pennant drought that started after the Tigers won the 1945 World Series and ended when they won again in 1968.
In between, the '61 club was easily the best, winning 101 games and still finishing eight games back of a Yankees team enjoying an uneventful season. New York pretty much established its dominance by Labor Day, so it's not really a heartbreak kind of season for Detroit fans. It's just a really good team that competed in a win-or-go-home era.
10. 1985 New York Yankees (98.1)
Other leading candidates: 2019, 2018, 2017, 1906, 1904
The list of Yankees candidates is an odd one. That'll happen when you're working with a franchise that has won 27 World Series. Remember two of our criteria: A five-year buffer before and after a title season with no championships, and a harmonic mean win score of at least 90. The Yankees had only eight eligible candidates altogether -- the last three clubs of Aaron Judge vintage, and two versions of the Deadball Era New York Highlanders. And the '85 team, which was a pretty easy pick even though the last couple of Bombers squads are stronger.
First, the current Bombers might still get over the top. They are certainly high up on the list of favorites if we get to enjoy a 2020 season. Second, the 1985 Yankees featured Don Mattingly at his peak. Mattingly of course was one of the few Yankees greats who didn't get much of a chance to embroider his career exploits with October highlights. In 1985, he hit .324 with 211 hits, 35 homers and 145 RBIs, but the Yankees finished two games back of the aforementioned Blue Jays.
The Yankees had some Hall of Famers in 1985 in addition to Donnie Baseball, whose greatness was fairly brief. Rickey Henderson stole 80 bases and scored 146 runs. Dave Winfield drove in 114 runs. And 46-year-old Phil Niekro won 16 games. Still, this is mostly about Mattingly. Let's give Donnie Baseball another shot at a crown.
11. 1983 Chicago White Sox (98.6)
Other leading candidates: 1954, 1964, 1955, 1994, 1963
The White Sox were probably better in 1954 and 1964. In addition to the years listed, the overachieving 1959 team won an AL pennant. But there is just something special about Tony La Russa's 1983 club that made a shambles of the AL West with a style of play that became known as "winning ugly." Carlton Fisk and Harold Baines were the Hall of Famers. Greg "the Bull" Luzinski and Rookie of the Year Ron Kittle both hit over 30 homers. LaMarr Hoyt won 24 games and took AL Cy Young honors. Pretty or not, it worked, and Chicago won its division by 20 games before falling to the Orioles in the ALCS.
12. 2011 Texas Rangers (97.0)
Other leading candidates: 1977, 2012, 1999, 2013, 1996
The Rangers have never won a World Series and have had relatively few powerhouses over the decades, from their early days as the second version of the Washington Senators through their time in Texas, which began in 1972. But Texas fans have known heartbreak, with back-to-back World Series losses in 2010 and 2011.
In the latter defeat, the Rangers came one measly out from a championship, only to succumb to the October heroics of the Cardinals' David Freese. Freese is to Rangers fans what Bucky Dent is to Red Sox fans. The good news is we're giving the Rangers a chance to get that final out. The bad news is that Freese is on one of the other teams in the AL bracket.
13. 2014 Los Angeles Angels (97.0)
Other leading candidates: 2009, 1982, 2008, 1986, 1989
And this is the team for which Freese will appear, though that had nothing to do with why we went with this Mike Trout-led version of the Halos. The Angels have mostly been a middling team during their 59-year existence. Here's a tally of how many seasons they have landed in various ranges of harmonic mean win scores during their existence:
100: 1
90-99: 9
80-89: 19
70-79: 24
60-69: 6
Rarely great. Rarely terrible. Usually somewhere between. The 10 teams that reached 90 comprised our initial pool of candidates. The one that reached 100 was the 2002 Angels club that landed the lone World Series title in team history. That club and its proximity to the 2004, 2005 and 2007 teams filters out four of our 10 candidates. Of the six left over, the 2014 team was the strongest. And it's a good thing. That was a vintage year for Trout, and let's face it, many of us are thirsting to see Trout get another crack at the crown.
14. 2010 Tampa Bay Rays (96.3)
Other leading candidates: 2019, 2008, 2012, 2011
As you can see, whereas we list the five leading candidates for each team beyond our actual selection, we can't do that for the Rays, who have only five candidates altogether. The 2008 club was Tampa Bay's only pennant winner, one that holds the franchise record with 97 wins. The 2010 team won 96 but was five games better in Pythagorean record, which suggests it was actually Joe Maddon's strongest group in St. Petersburg. The Rays won the AL East but lost in five games in a tough ALDS matchup with Texas, dropping Game 5 at the Trop in a game started by David Price.
15. 1997 Baltimore Orioles (95.9)
Other leading candidates: 1922, 2014, 1944, 1977, 1994
The most interesting Earl Weaver-led Orioles teams mostly operated within five years of a championship, with only the 1977 club emerging as a possibility. The 1979 team that lost to the "We Are Family" Pirates operated within five years of the 1983 team that won it all. The 1977 team, good as it was, actually finished tied for second in a stacked AL East. So for teams in Baltimore, we were faced with that '77 club, a worthy choice, one of the good Orioles teams from the mid-1990s, the 2014 team that dropped the ALCS to the Royals or the two best versions of the St. Louis Browns.
If you read me on a regular basis, you know whom I favored. I wanted those '22 Browns, led by George Sisler, Ken Williams, Baby Doll Jacobson and ace starter Urban Shocker. The '44 Browns won the franchise's only AL pennant before the move to Baltimore, but the '22 version was the best in team history, a year that happened just before St. Louis flipped over to becoming a Cardinals town. Alas, we opted to filter out pre-World War II teams, saving my editors from forcing me away from picking a 98-year-old team for a version of a franchise that no longer exists.
In the end, we went with the '97 Orioles, which featured a plethora of Hall of Famers in Mike Mussina, Roberto Alomar, Cal Ripken and Harold Baines. It was a strong team whose season ended in a six-game defeat against Cleveland in the ALCS. All four of the Indians' wins were by a single run.
16. 1982 Milwaukee Brewers (95.6)
Other leading candidates: 1978, 1992, 2018, 2011, 1979
You're seeing the complete list of Brewers candidates above, and you can make a decent case for any of them. All rated between a harmonic mean win score between 92.3 (1979) and the 95.6 figure of our choice, the '82 Brewers. The Harvey's Wallbangers Brew Crew of the late 1970s -- epitomized by the immortal Gorman Thomas -- were an awful lot of fun. The 1992 team, led by manager Phil Garner, stole 256 bases, with 11 different players cracking double digits. The more recent 2011 and 2018 teams advanced to tough NLCS series before falling just shy of the World Series.
Nevertheless, I'd argue that the 1982 Brewers are the most memorable outfit in club history and by our metric du jour also rate as the best. Harvey Kuenn managed a roster that featured future Hall of Famers in 1982 MVP Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, Rollie Fingers, Don Sutton and Ted Simmons, who is going in this summer. The Brewers won their first pennant that year and took the Whiteyball St. Louis Cardinals to seven games in a fantastic World Series.
The Cardinals won the finale 6-3 after Milwaukee led 3-1 entering the bottom of the sixth. The Brewers navigated the 1982 postseason without relief ace Fingers, who sat out with a muscle tear. The question of whether the Brewers would have won what would still be the franchise's only title had Fingers not been injured is one of the great what-ifs in Milwaukee sports history. We are deeming him healthy for Milwaukee's run in our Second-Chance tourney.
National League
1. 1998 Houston Astros (103.8)
Other candidates: 1998, 1999, 1994, 1986, 1981
Hey, it's a version of the Astros for which it's OK to root. The Craig Biggio/Jeff Bagwell Astros never did land a World Series title, topping out with a four-game World Series loss to the White Sox in 2005. The 1998 Astros were the best club in team history before the current (controversial) group came together a few years ago. Houston won 102 games that season and featured the run differential of a 105-win powerhouse.
Biggio, Bagwell and Moises Alou led the offense, though all were past their peaks by that point. Billy Wagner led a shutdown bullpen. And Houston was bolstered by a midseason acquisition who will be on the roster for this tournament: Randy Johnson. That was the year Big Unit went 10-1 with a 1.28 ERA to help get Houston into the playoffs. Unfortunately, once the Astros got there, they fizzled out quickly in a four-game loss to the San Diego Padres.
2. 2017 Los Angeles Dodgers (102.8)
Other candidates: 1942, 2019, 1974, 1941, 1949 (wild card)
The Dodgers have had a lot of strong also-rans over the decades. This is, after all, the franchise that gave birth to the mantra "Wait 'til next year." Our parameters filter out the 1941-42 clubs, which really returned Brooklyn to the baseball map. The 1974 Dodgers were a memorable club, with Steve Garvey leading the way, along with an epic season from reliever Mike Marshall. And last year's Dodgers rank neck-and-neck with the 1942 Brooklyn club as the strongest non-champs in franchise history.
Still, though we leaned away from teams that are still mostly intact and, thus, might still quench that championship thirst, we opted to give the 2017 Dodgers another run at it. They rate as one of eight Dodgers clubs with a harmonic mean win score over 100, so they were certainly a formidable bunch. Beyond that, given the developments over the winter involving the shenanigans of the Astros during the season in question, the seven-game World Series loss the Dodgers suffered at their hands takes on added poignance. We couldn't resist.
3. 1994 Montreal Expos (102.2)
Other candidates: 2012, 1979
As you can see from the paucity of eligible candidates, there hasn't been a lot of high-level baseball in the history of the Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals franchise. Most of it has come over the past five or six years, culminating with last year's franchise-first World Series title. For our purposes here, that title knocked out three good Nationals teams from the Bryce Harper era. That left us with just three possibilities. On one hand, that's not a lot to choose from. On the other, if there is one team in all of baseball history that ought to be included in an exercise like this, it's the 1994 Expos.
After years of successful scouting and development, 1994 is when it all came together for the Expos. The lineup was stacked with homegrown stars in their respective primes, such as Hall of Famer Larry Walker, Marquis Grissom and Moises Alou. The pitching staff featured another future Cooperstown enshrinee in Pedro Martinez, who at 22 was just getting started. Montreal featured a mighty bullpen featuring dual closers in John Wetteland and Mel Rojas. When the strike stopped the 1994 season in its tracks, the Expos led the NL East by six games and owned the best record in baseball. The entire franchise went south after that ... figuratively and literally.
4. 1949 Brooklyn Dodgers (101.7)
Other leading candidates: see 2017 Dodgers above
One of our two NL wild-card teams was going to be an edition of the Dodgers, and it came down to this group or the '74 club. It was a tough choice. The '49 team was one of the string of Brooklyn pennant winners that lost to the Yankees in the Fall Classic. The Dodgers finally got over the top in 1955, but that's far enough down the line to make the '49 club eligible.
Most all of the Boys of Summer are accounted for here -- Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Don Newcombe and so on. You can say the same for much of the '74 team, which featured many of the same players as the 1981 championship Dodgers team. However, the latter group had more turnover. In the end, we went with the '49 club because even if that group eventually did get a title, the heartbreak of Brooklyn fans existed on a much grander scale. They, more than any fan base, put my 99-to-1 theory of sports fandom to the test. Was that one title worth it?
5. 1993 San Francisco Giants (100.7)
Other leading candidates: 1912, 1911, 1913, 1962 (wild card), 2003
I pretty badly wanted to have a team that played in my favorite historic park -- the Polo Grounds. And the 1912 Giants deserve another shot. It was a dynastic group that never finished the job, much to the chagrin of John McGraw, who hated to lose to the league founded by his archrival, Ban Johnson. And the '12 Giants lost the World Series in eight games -- there was a tie -- to the Red Sox. In the clincher, the Giants took a 2-1 lead in the 10th inning but gave up two in the bottom of the 10th. The title-clinching rally was set up on a dropped fly ball by poor New York center fielder Fred Snodgrass. When Snodgrass died in 1974, the headline on his New York Times obit read, "Fred Snodgrass, 86, Dead; Ball Player Muffed 1912 Fly." That's a guy who deserves a second chance.
But because we aren't using pre-World War II teams, Snodgrass will continue his eternal rest fitfully. We do have a pair of Giants squads in the tourney, but both played after the franchise relocated to San Francisco. The 1993 team was a juggernaut, led by NL MVP Barry Bonds in his first season with the Giants. Frisco reeled off 103 wins and led the NL West by as many as 10 games. But the Braves ran them down and took the division by one game when the Giants lost on the last day of the season.
Baseball went to its current six-division format the next year, which brought wild cards into our baseball universe. The '93 Giants would have been the strongest wild-card entrant on record. Instead, they end up as the also-ran in baseball's last great pennant race.
6. 1962 San Francisco Giants (99.8)
Other leading candidates: see 1993 Giants above
The antecedents to the '93 Giants were the 1962 Jints. As in 1993, their predecessors won 103 games but fell a hairsbreadth short of postseason glory. It was a typically great season for Willie Mays, who posted at least 7.5 bWAR in every season from 1954 to 1966. In 1962, he hit .304 with 49 homers, 141 RBIs and 130 runs scored and won a Gold Glove for his play in center field. As happened too often to Mays, he came up just short in the MVP voting, finishing an inexplicable second to Maury Wills of the Dodgers. Wills had a good season, single-handedly reviving the stolen base by piling up 104 thefts, but we now know the value Wills produced that year paled in comparison to that of Mays.
Anyway, Mays' Giants did take the NL flag after beating the Dodgers in a best-of-three tiebreaker. But San Francisco came up just short in a seven-game loss to Mickey Mantle and the Yankees. They lost a soul-crushing Game 7 1-0 at Candlestick Park. In that game, with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, the Giants had Matty Alou on third base and Mays on second after the latter stroked a two-out double. Willie McCovey hammered -- and I mean hammered -- a line drive that Yankees second baseman Bobby Richardson speared to end the series. Ouch.
7. 2002 Atlanta Braves
Other leading candidates: 2003, 1948, 2013, 2004, 2019
The 2002 Braves were picked as the representative of a cluster of excellent Braves clubs from their epic reign of 14 straight first-place finishes. (Omitting the never-completed 1994 campaign.) Atlanta's run went on so long that even though they won the World Series in 1995, the five-year buffer around that title still left us with several eligible candidates. The epic pitching trio of Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz were all still there in 2002. However, it was a little different: That was the season in which Smoltz worked as a closer and saved 55 games, while Kevin Millwood filled out the big three in Bobby Cox's rotation. The Braves won 101 games in 2002 but dropped an LDS series against the Giants in five games.
8. 1991 Pittsburgh Pirates (96.6)
Other leading candidates: 1902, 1901, 1903, 2015, 1990
Those Pirates teams from the early 20th century were true powerhouses. Part of that was because of contraction -- Pittsburgh absorbed several regulars from the defunct Louisville Colonels after Louisville owner Barney Dreyfuss bought into the Pirates. One of those players was Honus Wagner. Alas, the best of the early-1900s Pirates -- the 1902 club that went 103-36 -- played the year before the World Series began. That team had a monstrous harmonic mean win score of 118.6 -- the only figure better than that of the 2001 Mariners among our eligible non-champs. Pittsburgh then played in, and lost, the first World Series in 1903.
That bit of history is all the role the early Pirates can play in this tourney, so we fast-forward to the excellent Jim Leyland-led Pirates teams of the early 1990s. Those teams featured Bonds, of course, but lost three straight times in the NLCS before Barry bolted for the bay. The '91 team was the best of the bunch, featuring Bonds, Bobby Bonilla and Andy Van Slyke.
9. 1998 San Diego Padres (95.5)
Other leading candidates: 1995, 2010
The downtrodden history of the Padres doesn't leave us much to work with. Even the 1984 pennant winners don't make the cut, as their harmonic mean win score fell just under the 90-victory cut-off. I'm sure Goose Gossage will understand. The upshot is that in turning to the '98 pennant winners, who were dominated by a historically great Yankees team in the World Series, we get Tony Gwynn involved.
10. 1999 New York Mets
Other leading candidates: 2006, 2000
Yeah, the Mets don't give us much either, though it's a different set of circumstances for them than San Diego. For the Mets, it's that they happened to space their two World Series wins (1969, 1986) out just well enough to knock out their other most alluring possibilities. The 1988 club that lost to Orel Hershiser and the Dodgers in the NLCS would have been especially interesting.
That said, don't sneeze at the '99 Mets, who were markedly better than the 2000 team that lost the Subway Series to the Yankees. Mike Piazza and Rickey Henderson were the Hall of Famers on the roster. But the '99 Mets are best remembered for their infield defense that featured John Olerud and Egardo Alfonzo on the right side and Gold Glovers Rey Ordonez and Robin Ventura on the left. That team set a record for fielding percentage (.989) that has since been surpassed. New York lost to Atlanta in six games in the NLCS, dropping the clincher in 11 innings when Kenny Rogers issued a bases-loaded walk to Andruw Jones. That's no way to go out.
11. 1962 Cincinnati Reds (95.2)
Other leading candidates: 1999, 1904, 1956, 2012, 1961
Picking a Reds team was a bit more difficult than anticipated. The '62 club was about dead even with the '99 team by harmonic mean win score. The 1999 Reds were kind of a unicorn in that they sandwiched a lot of mediocrity around that one really good year, one that didn't even get them to the postseason. The 1961 team made the World Series but outperformed its Pythagorean wins-per-162-games score by a staggering 10 games. The 1962 team was better and it was one version of a cluster of good Cincinnati teams. So that team gets the nod, and that gets Frank Robinson into the tourney during his prime and gets us some simmed games at Crosley Field.
12. 1993 Philadelphia Phillies (95.2)
Other leading candidates: 1915, 1901, 1916, 1950, 1952
Ah, the '93 Phillies. Lenny Dykstra. Wild Thing Williams. John Kruk. Darren Daulton. Curt Schilling. It was a team with an edge, a fun team, a team with a lot of mullets and a very good team. Those Phillies advanced to the World Series and battled the Blue Jays to six games, only to have their hopes snuffed out by Joe Carter's series-clinching homer off Williams. I love this line from the team's Wikipedia entry: The team was often described as "shaggy," "unkempt," and "dirty."
We could have gone with the 1950 Whiz Kid Phils, or the 1915 edition led by Pete Alexander. Both of those teams lost in the World Series and played in classic ballparks. But neither of them had the joie de vivre of the '93 Phillies, and neither of them lost on a game-ending home run in the World Series.
13. 1984 Chicago Cubs (94.1)
Other leading candidates: 1935, 1918, 1945, 1929, 2008
Here's one where we let narrative carry the selection, and even then it wasn't easy. By harmonic mean win score, there were seven Cubs candidates better than the '84 club. Both the 1929 and 1935 teams were part of an 11-year run in which the Cubs easily won more games than any other National League team and took four pennants, all that resulted in World Series defeats. If we had been willing to dip even further down the list of eligible Cubs teams, the 1969 team had a pretty nice narrative as well, and some demons to exorcise. And even further down the list, we could have plucked the 2003 Cubs in an effort to ease the pain of Steve Bartman.
Still, anyone who remembers baseball in the 1980s remembers the 1984 Cubs as one of the most celebrated teams of modern times. It was Harry Caray at the height of his popularity and baseball still played exclusively in the daytime at Wrigley Field. Ryne Sandberg won the MVP award, and Rick Sutcliffe took NL Cy Young honors even though he pitched 15 of his 35 games in the AL. Sutcliffe went 16-1 after being traded to Chicago. Alas, it ended in tragic fashion. The Cubs blew a 2-0 series lead against the Padres in the NLCS and an early 3-0 lead in the decisive fifth game. It was when the billy goat still haunted the Friendly Confines.
14. 2011 Diamondbacks (91.1)
Other leading candidates: 2017
Most of the interesting Arizona possibilities were filtered out by the team's 2001 championship. We went with the 2011 Snakes because they won the NL West and dropped a tough five-game LDS against Milwaukee. The clincher slipped away in the 10th inning on a Nyjer Morgan single. The 2017 D-backs were probably a better team but were a mere wild-card club in October. At least Arizona had a couple of eligible candidates.
This seems like a good place to drop in ...
AN APOLOGY TO MARLINS FANS
And, yes, we know there are actually a few of you out there. The Marlins were the one franchise without a single candidate who met our parameters. Miami has had only one club break the 90-win mark by harmonic mean win score, and that club barely did so, hitting 90.2 in 1997. The second-best Marlins club was the 2003 team that posted a score of 89.0. Then it drops all the way down to the 84.2 mark of the 2009 Marlins. But you know what? Those two OK-ish candidates both won the World Series. So we don't feel too bad about leaving the Marlins out of the bracket.
15. 2009 Rockies (90.8)
Other leading candidates: none
Some Rox fans get really nostalgic about the Rocktober team from 2007, but we're sorry to report the 2009 team is the only one to clear the 90-win standard for harmonic mean win score to get into this tournament. Take heart, Denver fans. For one thing, at least you're not left outside like your 1993 expansion brethren in Miami. And most of the same faces from 2007 were still around in 2009 -- Todd Helton, Troy Tulowitzki, Ubaldo Jimenez, Huston Street. There's no Matt Holliday, but you do get a young Carlos Gonzalez and an old Jason Giambi.
16. 1957 St. Louis Cardinals (90.0)
Other leading candidates: 2000
As arguably the second-most successful franchise after the Yankees, it might seem stunning to have our Cardinals entrant be a No. 16 seed that finished a distant second place during the year in which it existed. It might seem even more stunning that the selection is one of but two possibilities for the storied franchise. The problem is that the Cardinals are victims of their own frequent success, having several times entered into mini-dynasties that were capped with one or more titles. Neither the 2000 nor the 1957 Redbirds rate as one of the 25 best teams in Cardinals history. All the others were filtered out by a championship, or their proximity to one. We went with the 1957 version because how can you say no to Stan Musial?
That's our tournament. We will now get back to the hard work of playing fake games. Tune in Monday to find out how the bracket begins to unfold.