A TALE OF TWO WORLD SERIES

Baseball is now over and done with again as we wobble our way through 2022; and, despite gnawing concerns about the game/business that remain disturbingly visible, many of us will miss it intensely until it returns in February to quell what will likely be a winter of discontent.

We set it aside this year with a final result that restores some orthodoxy to our sense of relative team quality: the Houston Astros had lost two World Series (in 2019 and 2021) to opponents whose W-L were distinctly inferior to them.  It also rewards the honorable career of Dusty Baker, whose long-term excellence as a manager (after an accomplished career as a player) was finally capped by a World Championship at the advanced age of 73 (the oldest manager to pilot a World Series winner). 

There are actually two tales of "two World Series" that are pertinent here, and we'll lede with the one we weren't referring to when we devised the subject line for this post. In 2021, the Astros were in the same position they found themselves in this year: down 2 games to 1, with Game 4 in the opponents' park. Houston took a 2-1 lead into the seventh, but the Atlanta Braves scored twice off Cristian Javier (home runs by Dansby Swanson and Jorge Soler) to pull out a 3-2 win (you remember those, don't you?). The Astros overcame a poor performance from Framber Valdez in Game 5 to take the series back to Houston, but they were shut out by a trio of Braves' pitchers (headed by Max Fried) in Game 6.

This year, Valdez and Javier won three games between them, with Game 4 producing only the second no-hitter in World Series history. And it's that Game 4 that sets up our lede, where we can see that the 2022 World Series was actually two World Series in one...

...and that can be demonstrated simply by looking at the Philadelphia Phillies' batting lines for Games 1-3 and Games 4-6. As the data shows you, Philly used its "long-ball" offense to fashion a 2-games-to-1 lead, stoking the fires of the game's overheated media presence by hitting five homers in Game 3. (The theory in these pages is that while some of the media folk decry certain details in the game's transmogrification when it suits them, they are really still in thrall of the "launch angle/TTO" Frankenstein monster version of baseball that has been brutalizing the game since late 2015. Thus the Phillies' power display, combined with their underdog status--and the Astros' still-tainted reputation--made them media darlings.)

But then the second 2022 World Series kicked in, where the Astros virtually shut down the Phillies in their home park for two games and continued it last night. In the "first" WS, the Phils rode HRs to 15 runs despite not hitting much otherwise; in the "second" WS, their power supply was limited to baseball's current TTO king, Kyle Schwarber, while the rest of the hitters resembled creatures from Val Lewton's I Walked With A Zombie. (Schwarber himself had a strange, zombie-like moment in his final at-bat, betraying his TTO bonafides by attempting a bunt with two strikes, managing to paradoxically strike out while making contact with the ball.)

The Phillies did manage to do better than their 1905 counterparts, the Philadelphia A's, who scored three runs over five games and were shut out four times by the New York Giants (including three shutouts by Christy Mathewson). But their OPS in the final three games of the '22 Series (a woeful .380) was pretty much on part with what the A's managed for the entirety of what was the second World Series in baseball history.

While the Astros hit over 200 HRs in '22, the results of the World Series proved that it was their pitching that brought them back into dominance (winning eleven more games in '22 than in the previous year). With the triumphant return of Justin Verlander to Cy Young form, along with the rise of Valdez and Javier, and bolstered by an uncommonly deep bullpen, the Astros overcame a spotty offense to push themselves out of the "flawed dynasty" category they were in danger of occupying along with the 50s Brooklyn Dodgers, the '70s Baltimore Orioles, and the '90s Atlanta Braves. 

Buttoning things up from our most recent posts, the "talismanic 3-2 win" connection we reported on continued in play, with the Astros' 3-2 win in Game 5 clicking into their World Championship, making them the 20th team to do so out of 21 such occurrences. (And yes, we did the research for the games prior to 1972...we'll present that later on during the off-season.)

And, as regards the "NANA" pattern we discussed previously, the Astros put the AL back into the lead by closing things out as they did. Of the eleven WS with the "NANA" pattern over the first four games, the AL has now won six to the NL's five. 

The Astros matched the victory pattern (NANAAA) achieved previously by two New York Yankees teams, the 1951 squad that beat the "miracle" New York Giants, and the 1923 edition that also beat the Giants (though that "subway series" was handled with alternating games at each home park instead of the now standard 2-3-2 format.)