WORLD SERIES TEAMS WITH SUB-.500 ROAD RECORDS...

THIS is most likely our last post for 2023, with the early part of '24 certain to bring us the chess/checkers machinations of present-day GMs and the ongoing loopiness of the Hall of Fame voting process.

And for a swan song we have something relevant from the '23 season itself--the seventh occurrence of a phenomenon that, in this instance at least, is overlain with irony (fear not, we'll explain that reference eventually)...

Just what are we talking about--seventh son of a seventh son, or something like that? No, it's not some antediluvian mumbo-jumbo: it's simply the seventh time that a team winning the World Series did so despite having a losing record in road games during the regular season.

A total of twenty-three teams have won league pennants while playing sub-.500 baseball on the road, as the chart at right will show you. Only 21 of those are relevant to the World Series, however, since the 1902 A's and the 1914 Indianapolis Hoosiers (Federal League) had no World Series in which to participate.

So that means that one of every three teams to win a pennant with a sub-.500 record in road games has gone on to win the World Series.

AND the most recent team to do so: the 2023 Texas Rangers--who, in the height of irony, achieved their post-season feat by winning all of their post-season road games.

As you can see, most of these teams were just barely "in the red" with respect to their road record--14 of the 21 teams who played in the WS had a road WPCT of .481-.494. The two WS champs who were truly sub-par road teams are shown right up at the top--the 1987 Minnesota Twins (29-52) and the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals (34-47). 

We've never had teams face off in the World Series who both had sub-.500 road WPCTs, but we came close this past year: the Arizona Diamondbacks had a 41-40 record in road games. That combined road record of 81-81 isn't the lowest of all time for World Series opponents, however: such would be found in 1987, thanks to the woeful road record of Twins. Combining their 29-52 with the 1987 Cardinals' 46-35 mark, we get a combined road won-loss record of 75-87 for that World Series--which was the first World Series where the teams won all of their home games.

One last graphic on this--one of our TimeGrid™ charts (at left) showing the evolution of this phenomenon. As you might expect, most of these occurrences have happened since divisional play began, with an added acceleration during the Wild Card Era.

The greatest preponderance for this (thus far, at least) occurred during the 2000s, when it happened six times, including four in a row from 2005-08; it's also the only decade where two sub-.500 road record teams won the Series.

OTHERNESS & THE OMINOUS IN OHTANI OMNIVOROUSNESS...

THANK God (or whatever "otherly" being you choose to employ...) that the Great Ohtani Sweepstakes farce is over...we call it "farce" because it seems abundantly clear that all of the other teams involved in the process were always on the outside looking in at a done deal with the Dodgers that, in truth, was mooted for many months. 

As a left-coast denizen, BBB is cheered by the notion that the East Coast media will continue to have to genuflect in a "pacific direction" for as long as Ohtani is the "Great Other" in all the dimensions that he's come to embody for baseball and for the roiling rodomontade that is American culture in the 2020s, the most repercussive decade in America since the 1960s and the 1850s. 

We are not particularly sanguine about the Dodger deal and its overall outcome, however. It's clear that the LA brain trust is looking to create the Greatest Team Money Can Buy (GTMCB), an endeavor as unwieldy as its acronym is unpronounceable. Ohtani's pent-up desire for "world domination" (aka a World Series win) has created a bowling alley worth of lanes for the Dodgers to "de-tax and spend" in pursuit of a lineup that should not only win 120 games but also manage not to slip on that bar of soap in the "October shower" that has mostly drowned their hopes since 2017.

Brilliant (and lucky) trading and painstaking farm system development used to be the way that teams became competitive over a long period; that model still is viable, but the Dodgers are attempting to turn the clock back to the late 90s and be a left-coast version of the "Evil Empire." Their actions may rouse the sleeping dotards in the Bronx to respond in kind, as they've already begun to do with their acquisition of Juan Soto.

The impossibly chipper and sadly doomed Sarah Langs gave us a great stat that reflects the danger involved in stockpiling seeming insurmountable concentrations of talent, however. She mentions that fact that the 2024 Dodgers will have players who finished 1-2-3 in MVP voting from the previous year (Ohtani #1 in AL, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman #2 and #3 in the NL). And, indefatigable researcher that she is, she also notes that four other teams had such a situation going for them previously. 

Those teams: 2004 Yankees, 1967 Orioles, 1960 White Sox, 1942 Dodgers.

What Langs fails to note, however, is that while all of these teams were in the World Series during the previous year (only the 1966 O's actually won the World Series), none of these teams made it to the World Series in the years shown above.

The 2024 Dodgers would be the first of such teams to do so--assuming that they can. 

But most of us know, however, what happens when you "assume."

What we have here is a variant of the "unstoppable force" (the Dodger brain trust's pursuit of glory via creative financing and hubris) and "immovable object" (the odd wrinkles in the fabric of the game as played on the field) that will collide head-on next year. There is an ominous undercurrent at work here, a fault line that is waiting to emerge--will it manifest itself and foil the aspirations of the would-be empire builders? Or will the game's variant of the teetering concept of "no one is above the law" fall in the dominoes threatening the degraded form of democracy that still hangs by a thread here in the "land of the free"...? And who of us will be "happy" with whichever outcome prevails?

Stay tuned...