The Best Teams Don't Always Reach the World Series

The best teams don't always reach the World Series, let alone win it. As the theoretical physicist, Leonard Mlodinow, notes in his book, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, even in a 7-game series, there's a good chance that the inferior team will win:

For instance, if one team is good enough to warrant beating another in 55 percent of its games, the weaker team will nevertheless win a 7-game series about 4 times out of 10. And if the superior team could be expected to beat its opponent, on average, 2 out of each 3 times they meet, the inferior team will still win a 7-game series about once every 5 matchups. There is really no way for sports leagues to change this. In the lopsided 2/3-probability case, for example, you’d have to play a series consisting of at minimum the best of 23 games to determine the winner with what is called statistical significance, meaning the weaker team would be crowned champion 5 percent or less of the time (see chapter 5). And in the case of one team’s having only a 55–45 edge, the shortest statistically significant “world series” would be the best of 269 games, a tedious endeavor indeed!

Heading into the playoffs, FiveThirtyEight's ratings of the 10 teams that had qualified for the playoffs looked something like this (along with the % chance of them winning the World series):

1. Astros - 1592 - 25% chance
2. Dodgers - 1590 - 21% chance
3. Yankees - 1584 - 21% chance
4. Athletics - 1560 - 4% chance
5. Nationals - 1557 - 6% chance
6. Cardinals - 1548 - 6% chance
7. Rays - 1547 - 3% chance
8. Braves - 1547 - 8% chance
9. Twins - 1543 - 5% chance
10. Brewers - 1532 - 2% chance

In short, the best three teams heading into the playoffs were the Astros, Dodgers, and Yankees, and the probability that one of them would win was 67%. But, that still meant that there was a 33% chance that another team would. A 33% chance may not sound like a lot, but I suspect that if there was a revolver lying around, loaded it with two (out of six) bullets, very few people would put it to their head and pull the trigger even though there's only a 33% chance that it would fire a bullet.

Last night, the Nationals upended the apple cart by upsetting the Dodgers 7-3. A lot of blame is being thrown around, especially at Dave Roberts, Clayton Kershaw, and Joe Kelly, but even if Roberts had managed the game differently, there was still 80% chance the Dodgers wouldn't have won the World Series this year, which are pretty low odds for a team that won 106 games during the regular season.

Is there anything major league baseball (MLB) can do to insure that the best teams reach the World Series? Not much, given what Mlodinow has demonstrated. It can, however, increase the odds that it will happen, by turning the Wild Card games into a best of 3 series and the Division Series to a best of 7. To do so, however, MLB would probably need to shorten the regular season, say from 162 games to 154, and that might be a bridge too far for most owners. Not for the Dodgers' owners, though, I bet. I'm pretty sure they wish there were two more games to play against the Nationals.