We've made it to November, and less than a week ago MLB crowned a World Series champion for the 2020 season. There have been times this year when that combination of declarative statements didn't seem plausible. But when the Los Angeles Dodgers claimed the title to end the strangest of all baseball seasons, it put another campaign in the books and thus maintained the continuity of our oldest professional sport.
The Dodgers are a fitting champion, too, which helps to validate the entirely weird circumstances of it all. The preseason favorite won the most games, and the team that won the most games won the World Series. The Dodgers are champions, for the first time since 1988, and no asterisk is needed.
The title caps a remarkable eight-year run in which the Dodgers have won eight straight division titles and three pennants. You might say L.A.'s current run is dynastic.
It probably was already that even before the championship, but now there should be no doubt.
That's kind of a spoiler, I guess. The question we've posed is whether the Dodgers are a dynasty, and here I am already declaring that they are. I don't see any reason to drag it out. There might be some who demur, those whose criteria for a title includes multiple championships, for example. If that's the way you want to define it, that's fine. I disagree. Because of the ever-expanding playoff landscape in baseball, defining a team strictly by championships is to tell an incomplete story.
More complete, I would argue, is to define a dynasty as a team enjoying high-level success over a multiyear period. High-level success does mean championships, but pennants are a championship (of a league) and division titles are a kind of championship. A team that wins a lot of games is often thought of championship caliber. All of these things are worth considering when evaluating the era of a franchise.
Now that this era's version of the Dodgers has validated its year-in, year-out success with a title, the question for me is not whether the Dodgers are a dynasty. It's where this Dodgers dynasty fits in with other dynasties through baseball history.
Well, of course, Bill James has a system for that. That system is the method by which I looked at the dynasty question, with a couple of tweaks. You can read up on the full system via the link, but there are basically two segments:
1. Each team's season is awarded points according to what they accomplished. A 100-win team that wins it all is given six points. If you win it all but win fewer than 100, that's five. If you have a losing record and miss the playoffs, that's minus-3. And so on. The full accounting is in James' essay.
The one tweak I made: James seems to use actual win totals in his system, but I decided to use adjusted win totals based on my yearly power ratings. I also wanted to account for the fact that season lengths have varied over time. That's especially pertinent with this year's Dodgers, given the 60-game season. I used these adjusted records, projected over a theoretical 162-game season, for the process of awarding points to each team for each season. Teams that reach thresholds of 90 equivalent wins or 100 equivalent wins get extra credit in some steps.
This choice means my version of James' invention generates slightly different results -- including one big case, which we'll get to.
2. Once a team starts a "run," it builds up dynasty points with each season. You can have an off season and remain in dynasty mode, but if your running total ever hits zero, that run is over. Also, if you have three straight "non-qualifying" seasons, your run stops. That means a team's dynasty range might actually extend a year or two beyond what you might think was the actual end, but we'll have to live with that.
James defines a dynasty as any instance in which a team hits the 10-point threshold. The "value" of a team's dynasty is equal to the highest running score the team gets during its dynasty window.
After this season, the Dodgers' dynasty point total reached 25, well above the 10-point threshold and the peak for their current window of success. The seasonal breakdown is as follows:
2013: 89.0 equivalent wins, division title, no pennant (2 points)
2014: 92.2 equivalent wins, division title, no pennant (2 points)
2015: 89.4 equivalent wins, division title, no pennant (2 points)
2016: 90.4 equivalent wins, division title, no pennant (2 points)
2017: 101.5 equivalent wins, division title, pennant (4 points)
2018: 101.0 equivalent wins, division title, pennant (4 points)
2019: 107.3 equivalent wins, division title, no pennant (3 points)
2020: 106.8 equivalent wins, division title, World Series win (6 points)
Total: 25 points
When I ranked all the teams that have met the dynasty threshold, I broke ties by championships, pennants and the duration of the dynastic period.
The current Dodgers rank 12th among 42 different dynasties in the majors since 1901.
That's pretty good, but exactly no one thinks that the Dodgers have peaked and are about to head into a decline. The roster is still pretty young. L.A.'s minor league system is brimming. The Dodgers have money, more than most any other team, and that's a particular advantage given the current economic landscape in baseball. I wouldn't hazard a guess for how long this dynastic window might remain open for the Dodgers, but mostly because it's hard right now to envision it closing.
Here are the all-time rankings, which I've broken into some arbitrary groupings just to write a little additional commentary.
Here's where my decision to use 162-game power rankings rather than actual win totals is most glaring. In James' version, the New York Yankees' Ruth-Gehrig-DiMaggio-Mantle dynasty was interrupted by a relatively fallow stretch from 1944 to 1946, when the Yankees won 83, 81 and 87 games respectively and finished no higher than fourth. Even without the aid of a power ranking, those 87 games over the old 154-games schedule translates to 91.5 wins over 162 games.
My system gives the 1946 Yankees a power rating of 97.3 (or a true talent level of 97.3 wins per 162 games). Thus with this tweak, the Yankee dynasty was never interrupted. That's not the reason why I went with this method, but the result does conform with my own sense of those Yankees as one interminable, uninterrupted powerhouse. Whether you agree with that or not, you do have to agree that there simply has never been anything else like it in baseball.
You of course also see the current Yankees are in this group with a peak score of 48 and an active score of 46 through the end of the 2020 season. Thus, this version of the Bombers can still climb the ladder toward their legendary predecessors.
New York's climb over the past decade-plus has been a crawl since the Yankees haven't won a pennant, much less a World Series, since 2009. The Yankees are tied with the Dodgers for the most regular-season wins during that span (1,057), but the Yankees almost saw their dynasty status lapse toward the end of the Joe Girardi era.
New York's power rankings from 2013 to 2016 were as follows: 78.6, 87.7, 77.5 and 78.6. In the midst of that stretch, the Yankees earned a wild-card berth in 2015. Their playoff run lasted exactly one game -- the Houston Astros went to Yankee Stadium and knocked off New York in that year's American League wild-card game. But any kind of postseason berth is worth one dynasty point. Thus, the Yankees' window remained cracked open.
Here's the group in which our current champions landed. You saw in the first group that the Dodgers' original dynasty stretched from 1946 to 1971, from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, from Pee Wee Reese to Maury Wills. That amazing run ended during a seven-year playoff drought that ran from 1967 (the year after Sandy Koufax retired) through 1973. A lot of those teams were actually pretty good, but three of those clubs finished with power ratings in the high 80s, from 1970 to 1972. The 1971 team had a power rating of 89.8.
Three straight sub-90 seasons without a playoff appearances closes your dynasty window. So it goes. One more win might have kept that Dodgers dynasty going. I'm kind of glad it didn't, however, as the team that emerged in the latter days of the Walter Alston era and flowered during Tommy Lasorda's long run as L.A.'s manager was a very different group of players.
The current Dodgers are within eight dynasty points of the old Dodgers. A couple of more years of the kind of winning L.A. has been doing lately will spark some interesting debates about whether this is the best-ever version of the Dodgers.
The current Boston Red Sox remain an active dynasty, even after their last-place finish in 2020. However, after two straight disappointing seasons on the heels of Boston's 2018 championship, one more lackluster season will end the latest Red Sox dynasty.
Some famous teams here. The Big Red Machine. The Gas House Gang. The George Steinbrenner Yankees. You also have two non-title-winning dynasties, great teams who could just never quite get over the hump. Many of you will recall the slugging Cleveland Indians teams of the late 1990s and early 2000s, offensive juggernauts featuring Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez, Kenny Lofton and the rest.
But the other non-champion -- the Chicago Cubs from 1926 to 1940 were one of baseball's best teams during an overlooked era of the franchise. When the Cubs won it all in 2016 for their first championship in 108 years, you read recollections of the 1969 near-miss Cubs, the 1984 Cubs, the 2003 Cubs, etc. You didn't hear as much about the Cubs of the Great Depression era. Those teams couldn't quite finish the task of winning it all, but they do serve as a reminder that for as long as the Cubs' championship drought lasted, it was far from an extended dark age for the franchise.
The franchises with no dynasties: Brewers, Diamondbacks, Mariners, Marlins, Padres, Rangers, Rays, Rockies and Twins.
You see the other four active dynasties in the last group. The Cubs, Astros, Nationals and Indians have all been strong for half a decade or longer. There are reasons to wonder how much longer that will be true for all four of those clubs, all of which face the possibility of some keys losses over the next couple of years.
If that happens, the Cubs, Astros and Nationals at least will have the solace of a championship. The Indians, on the other hand, are in danger of joining their slugging predecessors as a pitching version of a team that won at a high level for a number of years without ever topping it off with a World Series win.
That's where the Dodgers were at until last week. With their Series win over the Tampa Bay Rays, now the Dodgers can tear off that label as one of the best teams that never won. Now they can focus on becoming one of the best teams ever, period.