Over the past four years, I've become something of a connoisseur of World Series final-out celebrations. Beginning with the last play of the 2016 World Series -- the little grounder hit by Cleveland's Michael Martinez that the Cubs' Kris Bryant turned into a historic clinching out -- I've taken a smartphone video of those climatic moments from the press box.
In those ecstatic moments, there is no hierarchy. Every player in that pile of ballplayers rolling around on the field has accomplished the No. 1 goal of that campaign -- to be the last team left standing. And yet, we know that all champions are not created equal. Some are good-but-not-great teams who got hot at just the right time. Some are powerhouses that dominated their leagues. These days, the population of the former group is growing thanks to the ever-expanding format of baseball's postseason. Now more than ever if the best team in a season ends up in that Series-ending dogpile, it's kind of a coincidence.
On Monday, Sam Miller unveiled his ranking of all 115 World Series ever played. Now I'm going to place those 115 champions into a hierarchy based on my estimate of just how good each title team really was. To do this, I've employed a little art and a little science. The rankings are based entirely on statistical ratings (the science), but the choices made to build the system employed a good bit of subjective judgment (the art).
Before getting into the tiers and highlighting some of the teams within each one, let me walk through some of the choices I made in building the system. Some general criteria:
1. What did they do? That is, how many games did they win? How many runs did they score and allow? Teams are rated in this general category for both one-year and three-year performance. The three-year measurement works against flash-in-the-pan champions, such as the 1987 Twins or the 1914 Braves, and aids the teams who validated their dominance over a multiyear stretch.
2. How much talent did they have? To answer this, I combined two methods. Using the new version of AXE (awards index estimate), I created updated best-in-game ratings for every player back to 1901. Then by weighting the AXE scores for each player by playing time, I generated a team AXE score. This gives us an estimate of how much in-their-prime talent each team has had.
To some degree, this rating is redundant to the overall team metrics and, thus, receives relatively less weight in the final rating. However, my thinking is that there is something noteworthy about teams with high-level, in-their-prime stars. This is my attempt at quantifying that.
I also calculated a Hall of Fame score for each roster, which simply is the sum of the career AXE numbers for each player, weighted by playing time. This theoretically adds a "glitz" factor to the mix. However, it became apparent that doing this penalized recent teams too much, so it was left out of the final rating formula. But I will refer to these Hall ratings now and again when they are interesting.
3. How were they run? This is a small factor in the ranking formula -- more a nudge than anything -- but I wanted to incorporate my belief that the best teams over time have tended to have Hall of Fame-level managers. So I calculated a career Fibonacci win value for every manager. It's a simple formula: wins times winning percentage, divided by net wins (wins minus losses).
The manager's career Fibonacci score is the value each champion gets in this category. That's good for John McGraw-managed teams. It's less good for the 2018 Red Sox, who won the title with a rookie manager in Alex Cora. Cora has had just one additional season to tack on some more win points. Again, this is a small factor but in this way, recent champions can actually improve their scores in seasons to come as their managers build their career résumés.
4. How competitive was the league? Each team's power ratings are adjusted for league competitiveness, using the overall standard deviation of the run differential for each league over a three-year period. While it's not universally true, this works against pre-World War II teams and aids teams from the division era. That's less true of the past couple of years, when the unusual number of rebuilding teams has led to atypical league levels of imbalance.
All those measurements are standardized, weighted and converted to a rating for wins per 162 games. We'll call this the World Series Tier rating. Based on the standard deviations of each team's overall rating, clubs were then assigned to one of five tiers.
Tier I: Best of the best
Once the final formulas were set, this classification buoyed my spirits. This, I think, is a pretty good accounting of the teams mentioned in most best-ever discussions.
The Joe McCarthy-led Yankees teams from the second half of the 1930s are probably the best team in history over a multiyear stretch. They, along with the Bronx Bombers of the early 1950s, are the only clubs to win four straight World Series.
The 1939 version might have been even better had tragedy not struck Lou Gehrig early in that season. But New York's organization was teeming with talent. As the later Babe Ruth teams started to show signs of aging, the Yankees built up one of the great early farm systems under the direction of Ed Barrow and George Weiss. In fact, Yankees affiliates from that time in both Newark and Kansas City are considered among the best minor league teams of all time.
In this system, the '39 Yankees ranked first in both the one-year and three-year ratings. McCarthy ranks fourth on the Fibonacci leaderboard. The Yanks rank "just" 17th in the best-in-game rating, though Joe DiMaggio rated as baseball's best player that season. The 1936 to 1938 teams all rated higher in this category, so you can see how by 1939, the team was starting to show a tiny bit of aging. Indeed, New York failed to win the 1940 pennant. Still, the sheer power of one- and three-season factors allows New York to rate ahead of its '27 brethren, who rated better by best-in-game rating among its players. And that's saying something: Calling the 1927 Yankees the best team ever assembled has long been a cliché.
The division era received fair representation in the top tier, with the '98 Yankees, who won 114 games en route to the first of three straight championships, leading the way. Also, I'd guess that few would argue with the inclusion of the '70 Orioles, the '75 Reds and the '86 Mets on this tier.
Without much of a historical buffer to consider it, the inclusion of the 2016 Cubs might raise a few eyebrows. However, if you're surprised by that, you're probably letting your perception be colored by the lack of a second title for Chicago during its still-ongoing run of contention. That team had the run differential of a 108-win club during a season with less imbalance than we've seen in the subsequent campaigns. Their roster ranks 27th among the 115 champions by best-in-game rating, led by Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant. It was a great team in which everything intersected at once in an electric fashion, but it was no flash in the pan.
Here, I want to illustrate what's lost by the expanded playoff format. Here are the top 10 teams by World Series Tier ratings among all non-champions going back to 1901:
Best non-champions
1. 1998 Braves (105.4)
2. 1993 Braves (105.0)
3. 1942 Yankees (104.7)
4. 1997 Braves (104.4)
5. 1902 Pirates (104.2)
6. 1969 Orioles (103.4)
7. 1906 Cubs (102.4)
8. 2001 Mariners (102.2)
9. 1971 Orioles (103.4)
10. 2019 Astros (102.0)
If we went another 10, we'd add the 2018 Astros (and, yes, few are weeping over that), the 2017 Indians and the Dodgers from both 2017 and 2019.
Tier II: Bronx bonanza
Damn Yankees! Here, we see a tier with several versions of Casey Stengel/Mickey Mantle New York teams, as well as the memorable group from 1961 led by Ralph Houk. In fact, New York teams led by Stengel, Houk, Billy Martin and Joe Torre all show up in this group. So, too, do the Terry Francona-led Red Sox from 2004 and 2007.
Incidentally, in terms of average Fibonacci manager win points per season, the Yankees don't lead all franchises. They rank second. Even better are the Giants, largely due to McGraw's No. 1 all-time ranking, though the stints of Leo Durocher, Dusty Baker and Bruce Bochy don't hurt. Behind the Yankees are the Athletics, Dodgers and Braves.
Tier III: Blue-collar champs
With the distribution of ratings styled to represent a good, old-fashioned bell curve, this is our most populous tier: the middle-of-the-road champions.
There are two versions of Dodgers teams I want to highlight from this large group, while noting that the reigning champion Nationals land here. So, too, for that matter, do the only other World Series champ from Washington, D.C. -- the 1924 Senators.
The first Dodgers team to note is the 1955 version, who finally landed Brooklyn's only championship after a generation of fans crying, "Wait 'til next year!" This team won eternal glory, but you also can see the source of the angst quantified in this system: Both the non-champion versions of Dem Bums of 1951 and 1953 rate as better.
Next is the 1965 Dodgers, who won the World Series behind the dual dominance of aces Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. The best-in-game rating for that club (111.8) ranks fourth among World Series champions. Koufax was the game's top player that season, and he was joined in the top 100 by Drysdale, Maury Wills, Jim Lefebvre, Lou Johnson, Ron Fairly, Willie Davis, Jim Gilliam, Claude Osteen and Tommy Davis. The Hall rating for these Dodgers isn't unusually high, as a number of these players had sharp, short peaks in their careers.
Despite the bulge of talent in 1965, the Dodgers' one-year rating (92.4, 91st) and three-year rating (91.0, 89th) are pedestrian enough to land them on this tier. I haven't looked into whether a disparity between this kind of talent rating and team results might work as a proxy for managerial performance. But if it does, that doesn't speak well of longtime Dodgers skipper Walter Alston, who nonetheless had 1,566 career Fibonacci managerial points, giving the Dodgers a No. 19 rating in that category.
Tier IV: Better than fiction
A lot of Missouri teams ended up in Tier IV. On the east side, you've got the first Cardinals championship team (1926), the Great Depression Cardinals (1931, 1934) and two Albert Pujols-led champions (2006, 2011). On the west side, you've got both versions of the Kansas City Royals who have won championships. You've also got all three Giants teams who won the World Series during the 2010s.
Here is a theory: Powerhouse champions are memorable. The Yankees of 1927, 1939 and 1998 -- the top-ranked clubs in this system -- are among the most lauded teams of all time. So, too, are other Tier I champs such as the 1986 Mets, the Big Red Machine and even the 2016 Cubs. Those teams have obvious narrative appeal, even if the shape of their best seasons doesn't always lend itself to drama.
However, you see an unusual number of compelling teams in Tier IV from a narrative standpoint. That's likely because of their below-average standing in this system. For one thing, it's not like they are on the bottom tier. And, as we'll see, that last group has some good stories too. But the theme from the fifth tier is that, together, they are history's greatest fluke champions.
But here on Tier IV you've got a mix of good-not-great teams who typified the different eras in which they played and won with a great deal of dramatic flair. While they might not be remembered as history's best teams, they are in fact very much remembered. A sampling:
• 1934 Cardinals: Dizzy Dean and height of the Gashouse Gang years
• 1954 Giants: Willie Mays and "The Catch"
• 1979 Pirates: Willie Stargell and "We Are Family"
• 1982 Cardinals: Whiteyball
• 1988 Dodgers: Kirk Gibson and Orel Hershiser's destiny Dodgers
• 1990 Reds: The Nasty Boys
• 1997 Marlins: the champs who put up no defense
• 2005 White Sox: snapping Chicago's title drought
• 2010, 2012, 2014: MadBum and Bochy's poor-man's dynasty
• 2011 Cardinals: David Freese's heroics
I think I saw documentaries on just about all of these teams over the winter.
Tier V: Fluke flags still fly
Let's leave aside the mid-1910s Red Sox, who are docked by a pretty severe adjustment for winning imbalanced leagues in this system. Those teams were dynastic. The others, not so much. To wit: The moniker attached to the 1906 White Sox is the "Hitless Wonders." For the 1914 Braves, it's the "Miracle Braves." That kind of tells you about how this group of champions were viewed even while they were winning.
To state the obvious, none of these teams have any reason to be ashamed of the championships they won. They won, and that's all that really matters. And these middling champions were still all near or better than .500 the year after they won, so it's not as if these were bad teams that emerged from the ether to win pennants and championships.
Still, compared to the elite class of all teams -- the World Series champions -- these clubs do not rate as well and generally aren't historically compelling. Beyond the Braves, not many of these teams spurred historical interest at the level of the Tier IV teams, even though in theory the very flukiness of their titles should be the sharpest of narrative hooks. If you want to point to these teams as an argument against any further expansion of the playoffs (beyond this hoped-for season, when circumstances kind of demand it), then be my guest.