IN SEARCH OF/3: THE MOST HOMERS HIT by A HITTER vs. AN OPPOSING TEAM

BACK at it after another hiatus...we will eventually shift the focus of this series to cover the HR/PA percentage sweepstakes, which currently has Babe Ruth out in front of all competitors.

In this installment, however, we continue to look for hitters who might eclipse Ruth's record for homers against a single opposing team: that total, in case it's slipped your mind, is 123 (a very nice number indeed, one that should remain readily rememberable; the Babe amassed that total against the Detroit Tigers).

So we turn our attention to hitters who played against a more limited number of opponents, figuring that this type of investigation will be the quickest way to determine if anyone can wrest this particular feat awav from the Bambino

First, Jimmie Foxx, whose total of 534 HRs was second only to Ruth for more than three decades, and who had very limited playing time in the National League, as the chart at right will reveal.

As you can see, it's those Tigers again (93 homers allowed to Foxx...) who are the favored victims--their ballpark was conducive to the long ball (particularly by opposing sluggers!). The lowly St. Louis Browns gave the Tigers a run for their money, but came up just short with 87 HRs.

Interestingly, Foxx had his lowest HR/PA against the Red Sox; we'd have expected it to be the Washington Senators due to the home run suppressive characteristics of Griffith Stadium, their home park for the timespan of Foxx's career. 

Note also that Foxx bucks the general trend of homer hitters feasting on weekend competition: his HR/PA against good teams (those with a WPCT of .500+) is actually six-tenths of a percent higher than against the major also-rans (<.500 WPCT).

We will eventually sum up those percentages for all of the notable homer hitters and present our findings.

Now let's move on to Willie Mays, who was thought to be the most robust of challengers for Ruth's overall HR record but who began to fade in the late sixties and wound up around fifty homers shy of 714.

Willie never played a single regular-season game against an AL opponent, which would seem to make him into an ideal candidate to challenge the Babe's "single opponent" record.

But, as you can see in the chart at left, Mays is also unable to get especially close to Ruth's 123 vs. the Tigers. The best he can do in chasing this record is to hit 98 homers against the Dodgers.

That pushed him one homer ahead of Hank Aaron, who hit 97 HRs vs. the Cincinnati Reds during his career.

The introduction of expansion teams did not particularly favor Mays--his only really robust HR/PA value against the NL's new teams came against the Mets. 

Willie was extremely consistent in his HR/PA versus good/bad teams, coming in with a 5.3% against both types. 

With these two hitters now accounted for, it's becoming hard to imagine that any of the other sluggers are going to eclipse the Babe in this subcategory of longball legerdemain. And neither man came particularly close to Ruth's HR/PA...which brings us back to what is possibly the most relevant question to be answered via the data in this series: who really is the greatest home run hitter of all time? Hold that thought: we'll get back to it...

IN SEARCH OF/2: THE MOST HOMERS HIT BY A HITTER vs. AN OPPOSING TEAM

ONWARD we go in search of "the ultimate long ball victim, opposing team division." In this installment we continue examining homers vs. opponent breakouts for our other two 700+ HR hitters--Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. Let's get right to the Bambino...

Last time we saw that the HR/PA (which, in fact, is "homers per 100 plate appearances," expressed as a percentage) was in the five to six percentage range) for Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols (with Bonds right at six percent). 

As we'll see, that's going to be higher for Babe Ruth, who's closer to seven percent. Might that be the highest such ratio for a hitter over baseball's 150+ seasons? (Wait for it...)

Given the gaps on the chart, it's clear that Ruth's career occurred in pre-expansion times. The Babe had plate appearances against fifteen teams, missing against his final team, the Boston Braves (who would appear in the row marked ATL if the Bambino had faced them). 

The range for Ruth's prodigious long-ball theatrics is rather narrow: from 123 vs. the Detroit Tigers, down to 89 vs. the Washington Senators, whose home park in those days (Griffith Stadium) suppressed homers. (Note that we've placed the Senators in the row marked "MIN", since the original Washington team moved to Minneapolis during the first round of expansion.)

What's revealed in this table is a fact that is well-established: the Bambino was, plain and simple, a home run machine. with HR/PA figures residing above six percent for all seven of his major AL opponents. He even had a HR/PA of above six percent against the Yankees, a team he faced for just a little more than five seasons (1914-19) while he was with the Red Sox. 

Ruth's HR/G average against good and bad teams has less separation than what we saw for Bonds and Pujols--as we said, a home run machine.

Note those numbers against the Pirates--three HRs in three games. That reflects Ruth's final moment of glory in 1935, when he hit three homers in the same game at Forbes Field. It makes for a eye-popping HR/PA, doesn't it?

Now let's move on to Hank Aaron. 

The Hammer spent 21 seasons with the Braves and two with the Brewers at the tail end of his career, so he faced twenty-two of the possible franchises that were in existence during his career. 

(Note that Aaron's totals against the Dodgers, Giants, and Reds are higher than the other NL teams: that's because when divisions were introduced, those three teams were part of the Braves' division, along with the Houston Astros from the first expansion, and the San Diego Padres from the second. That also explains how Aaron appeared in more games against the Padres than the other second-wave expansion team, the Montreal Expos--the uneven schedule meant fewer games against the "other division. As we can see, it adds up fast: that 80-to-57 difference occurred in just six seasons.)

The Padres were Aaron's favorite victims percentage-wise--a HR/PA of just over eight percent. But it's the Reds who were  team he hit up for the highest total of HRs--97. It's a bit surprising that his next highest total (95) is against the Dodgers, whose home park for thirteen seasons in Aaron's career was known for its suppressive tendencies. Aaron hit 22 HRs in Dodger Stadium over 95 games (a respectable pace of 37 HRs for a full season), but he also hit nine HRs at the Coliseum (in 45 games) and eleven HRs in Ebbets Field (in just 40 games). 

Given the Dodgers' rep, it's odd to note that Aaron's lowest HR/PA value is, in fact, against the Giants (4.9%). 

SO Aaron, too, was a homer machine--as we've seen, the numbers when expressed in HR/G and HR/PA don't move around all that much--but note two things: 1) he hit for a higher HR/PA against good teams than bad teams and 2) he broke Ruth's record in part due to his undeniable talent, but also because he amassed 3,000+ more plate appearances in his career. In a way, he didn't break Ruth's record so much as he outlasted it.

We'll be back with more folks in our next installment, in search for higher raw HR totals against an opponent (right now, Ruth's 123 against the Tigers is our top value) and for someone with a higher HR/PA. Stay tuned...

IN SEARCH OF/1: THE MOST HOMERS HIT BY A HITTER vs. AN OPPOSING TEAM

SOUNDS simple, doesn't it? But who knows the answer? 

The data is hidden away in the recesses of baseball archives...and we have to dig into the splits data of hitters in order to bring it to the surface.

So we will start showing the results of that "dig"--two hitters at a time. We'll begin with those folk who, if one thinks about it for a bit, can't be the answer to our question...

...because the nature of baseball's schedule has changed dramatically in the past six decades. Hitters face more teams than they ever did in the past, as will become obvious when we post "part two" of this series. 

And the more teams that hitters face in their careers, the less likely they are to cluster their homer hitting against any particular team.

So, as you can see in our first breakout (we'll start with the four hitters who've hit 700+ lifetime homers), Albert Pujols' highest total of HRs against any opponent is just sixty-two (the Houston Astros).

What these breakouts also provide, as you'll see, are homer rates against opponents--expressed in two separate ways: first, in HR/G, in a value that kinda sorta looks like a batting average (but, of course, isn't); and second, in a "percentage of plate appearances" value similar to what you'd find if you still had a copy of the original Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia. For Albert, you can see that he did manage to play games against all thirty teams (including the Cardinals and the Angels, the two that he primarily played for). 

And we've highlighted the teams where he had the highest HR/PA percentages--which, oddly, doesn't include the Astros, who due to a fluke in baseball history, became the team that Pujols played against far more than any other. (Remember that the Astros changed leagues in 2013, which coincides almost exactly with Albert's move to the AL with the Angels.

All of Albert's highest HR/PA are against NL teams, which shouldn't surprise us when we look at his OPS+ values for playing there (170) as opposed to the AL (108). Note also that Albert took good advantage of lesser teams, as his raw HR totals (400 vs. 303 against teams with .500+ WPCT) and his HR/PA rates demonstrate.

NOW let's move on to Barry Bonds, the man that many still would prefer to ignore as the all-time home run champ. 

Bonds' distribution is much more heavily stacked toward NL opponents, and his career occurred partially during the time before interleague play, so he has about half as many such games as is the case with Albert.

As you can see, the Padres are the team that Bonds took long--with 87 HRs, easily beating the Dodgers and Pirates, who finish a distant second. In terms of HR/PA, however, Barry did more damage in his games versus the Brewers and the A's (though both of these opponents faced Bonds in far fewer than 100 games--a situation that they're both probably still grateful for).

Note that despite playing in close to 3000 games, Bonds managed to miss Cleveland entirely. (We'll see a whole lot more blank spaces on these breakouts when we move on to players like Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, Willie Mays, Lou Gehrig, and Mickey Mantle.)

Bonds also took advantage of lesser teams according to HR/PA, but his plate appearances actually shaded slightly toward .500+ teams over his career, as opposed to what we saw with Albert.

SO that gets us started--we'll be back with the other two 700+ HR hitters in the next installment. And we'll see which teams those two guys (you just might know who they are without us having to mention their names, n'est-ce pas?) victimized the most with the long ball. And we'll likely see the highest lifetime HR/PA value as well...or will we? Stay tuned...

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...

2024 HALL OF FAME BALLOT: TEN (MINUS TWO)

IT was a very hectic non-baseball month here once the "final fizzle" came and went like a leaky balloon: we've spent much time on our non-baseball book and the now-ongoing French noir festival (capped by the anguish of Bernard Blier as he stares into a slowly-evolving abyss in THE SEVENTH JUROR, which plays on December 4 as the last salvo in this year's lucky thirteen shots in the dark: should you be interesting in learning more, go here).

We did notice, however, that there are rumblings underway about the upcoming Hall of Fame election: ballots are out to all of those "eligible voters" (may several of them rest in peace...) and the results, such as they will prove to be, will be announced on January 23rd. Two high-profile candidates (Adrian Beltre and Joe Mauer) will make their first appearance on the ballot: we'll discuss their respective chances for induction shortly.

At the social media swamp formerly known as Twitter, the HOF Tracker crew posted a ballot sure to provoke widespread derision, as it contains only two selections from the (mercifully anonymous) voter--who is nothing if not "up to date," since he/she has voted only for the two "hot-shot" new candidates. 

Since we know that folks these days want their information compressed (folded, spindled, etc.), we seized upon this opportunity to use the image to convey our picks--if the BBWAA was reckless enough to grant us a vote, that is.  

Note that we are indeed voting for Beltre and Mauer, who represent high-quality players at positions which remain under-represented in Cooperstown. 

We are also not voting again this year for either Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones. The former is, in our estimation, a worthy candidate, but we're voting tactically here, preferring to send votes to Bobby Abreu, whose case is (in our minds at least) at least as deserving and who is not drawing the type of support he warrants. We can only hope for a stall in the "quant quackery" driving the voting surge for Jones, who is to the "silly saberist" cabal what Jack Morris was to the dying curmudgeons of the old BBWAA. Morris was subsequently shoved into the Hall via the side door, and that should also be the case for Jones as well. 

Meanwhile, three far more deserving candidates--Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield and Manny Ramirez--will continue to struggle on the thorny vine of non-objective voter behavior, with Sheffield needing a serious boost in his final year on the ballot to make it in via the front door. 

We continue to cast votes for Todd Helton and Billy Wagner, hoping that both of them will get over the line in January, after which we suspect they'll accompany Beltre to the dais during 2024's induction ceremony. We expect Mauer to come up a bit short in his first time on the ballot, but we figure he'll likely make it in either 2025 or 2026. 

Folks might raise eyebrows over a pick for Andy Pettitte, but this is a solid choice when we consider that this is someone who pitched much of his career in an era of heightened offense. 

And finally, our tenth pick is another first-timer on the ballot, Chase Utley, who needs votes to stay in contention over the ten-year ballot period. Utley stands in for fellows like Lou Whitaker, Bobby Grich, Larry Doyle and Jeff Kent, all of whom should be in the Hall of Fame but aren't. We figure he'll get 20-25% of the vote this time, and then the question will be if some interest group decides to turn their neon crowdsourcing shenanigans loose for him--in this case, such tactics would be fully warranted.

SO there you have it. We have fifty-six days to wait for the official results, but we'll do what we can in that time frame to distract you...stay tuned.

SNAKES RATTLED, FALL INTO 5-GAME WORLD SERIES GHETTO

AN unorthodox World Series featuring two Wild Card teams began with great promise in Texas last week, with the Rangers and the Diamondbacks splitting two games with intriguingly different tonalities and setting up what appeared to be a compelling "punch-counterpunch" rhythm. 

But then the teams moved to Arizona, and that scenario swiftly fell apart, with the Diamondbacks' pesky offense suddenly sputtering in Game Three, followed by a catastrophic "bullpen game" whose 11-7 score was lucky only for the Rangers, and then...

AND then a Game Five where the Snakes were clearly rattled by their inability to score anyone despite five consecutive innings in which they had runners in scoring position. Their ace starter Zac Gallen was pitching a no-hitter, but Arizona's inability to take control of the game cast a pall over the proceedings that swiftly took on inevitable dimensions. The Rangers, working on a remarkable road winning streak, finally broke through against Gallen in the seventh, and the hissing sound that had become progressively more audible was not from the D-backs (no "snaking" back into the game forthcoming) but instead the sound of air leaking out of any and all receptacles--tires, balloons, and several orifices (not) to be named later.

Snakes' closer Paul Sewald, acquired in mid-season to reinvent the top end of the Arizona bullpen, delivered the coup de grace when he allowed four runs in the ninth, dooming the D-backs to a place in the lower depths of World Series history: the ghetto of the five-game series. 

IT is now an architectural archipelago with twenty-seven separate buildings, housing 135 games in all--108 of which were won by the World Champions, and only 27 by the D-back's luckless brethren--exactly one win apiece for 27 teams who simply fell on their swords. 

Very few five-game series are memorable, unless they are upsets: the ones that qualify include those played in 1969 (Mets over Orioles), 1988 (Dodgers over A's), and arguably 1942 (up and coming Cardinal dynasty shocks the Yankee dynasty). 

The sense of deflation that occurs in a five-game series can be seen in the results when we quantify wins/losses on a game-by-game basis. Simply put, an event horizon just clicks into place in Game Four which pushes things inexorably in the direction of the winning team. The aggregate record in Games Four & Five of a five-game series is as starkly dominating as you can get without an outright sweep: 54 wins for the eventual champ, vs. just three for the eventual chump.

THERE are some mildly interesting sub-patterns that emerge in the constricted world of the five-game series, which we'll briefly examine. The Snakes' pattern (splitting on the road, swept at home) has happened only three times previously, all of them involving the Yankees as the winning team (1941, downing the Dodgers; 1949, rinsing and repeating with Brooklyn; and 1961, ripping the Reds a new one in their home park). 

Another dramatic pattern--drop the first game and win four straight--has also happened only four times: in 1915 (Red Sox over Phillies), 1942 (Cards over the Yankees), 1969 (Mets shock the O's and the world), and 1983 (O's take to the Phillies). 

Rarer still is the "win first three, drop Game Four, win Game Five" scenario--shared only by the 1910 Philadelphia A's, the 1937 Yankees, and the 1970 Orioles. 

Nine teams have won the first two games, lost the third, and won the last two--we'll let you pick those out for yourself from the table above. 

BUT these sub-patterns don't really deflect us from the fact that the five-game World Series is just a collection point for an escalating (and simultaneously deflating) sense of lost opportunity. The teams that win and their fan base are, of course, extremely happy, but years later they're likely to have a much fuzzier sense of how and why their teams won. That's because the win came a bit too easily: the sense of competition has been stunted, leaving a mental wasteland that is inextricably intertwined with the desiccated landscape of the "five-game ghetto."

It's been five years since the most recent five-game series; the longest span of time between such series is thirteen years (1916 to 1929). That sounds about right: let's cross fingers that we don't see another one until at least 2036...

DISTRIBUTION OF POST-SEASON RESULTS: ISOLATING THE "CRAPSHOOT"...

SO you've heard the complaints this year about the playoff system going off the rails because many of the teams with more wins than their post-season competitors wound up losing (raise your hands as we call your names: Braves, Orioles, Dodgers, Rays). 

And you've heard the countervailing comments that have been in force for many years before the further "wilding" of the Wild Card team had produced a general feeling of chaos matching what many feel about the world at large. Namely: "the playoffs are a crapshoot." (Joe Sheehan, crusty Baseball Prospectus renegade, is especially vehement--and numbingly repetitive--with respect to this mantra.)

WHAT's missing in all of this, of course, is some kind of empirical data with which to actually assess the situation. (A condition that is shocking but not surprising in the still-blinkered and more-than-occasionally embedded world of baseball media.)

So--as is usually the case--here we are, in Atlas mode, carrying the worldly weight of such tasks squarely on our shoulders...and providing some answers never seen before. Let's get to it...

FIRST, note the summary total (for all post-season games of all types, since the invention of the World Series in 1903). It shows that teams with better records than their opponents (column marked "B") only hold a slightly better than 50% success rate. That percentage was higher in the "pennant era" (1903-68) and the first era of division play, which we call "the championship series era" (1969-93), but has dropped since.

Note that since 2000 this percentage is less than 50% (all such occurrences on this distribution table are shaded in blue).

WE then go on to break down the World Series by length of games. Note that as the number of games in the World Series increases, the likelihood of the team with the better record being the winner declines (from 65.5% in sweeps to just 43.3% in seven-gamers). But note also that this trend is reversing itself  for seven-game series since 1995, which kicked off what we call "the wild card era."

SWEEPS are where the better teams do best at holding their own (with one exception, that we'll look at it later). The World Series sweeps (4/0), now somewhat mixed in with ALCS/NLCS  data, and the old CS format and Division series sweeps (3/0) yield an aggregate success rate for 71% for teams with the better won-loss record. 

When we get into the Division Series' 3/1 and 3/2 subgroups, we see a stark decline: the 3/1 series are only 50/50 for the better team, and the 3/2 series, fueled dramatically by the changed dynamics in the "wild card" era, have been on an excoriating run against the better teams, who've won barely one-fourth of those series since 1995. This is the hidden story of how "the playoffs [became] a crapshoot."

And similarly, in the best-of-3 series (the variants of the more recent "wild card era" approach), the "sweeps" (the 2/0 series results) have thus far pushed against the team with the better record. In the old "one and done" variant of this approach, you can see that the results when broken out in the three categories--better (B), the same (E), and worse (W)--are virtually random.

All of these shorter series are currently running against better teams, who've won only forty percent of the "one and done" and "best of three" series. 

SO this is the structural anatomy of the post-season, and how it's changed as the post-season itself has changed. How this might look in twenty years absent any better system (and readers here know by now that we have several of those, including a new one that we'll discuss here after the World Series) is really anyone's guess, but there's no reason not to think that it will remain reasonably similar to what we see here.

It can be argued that we should break these categories (B/W) into smaller units that show the range of difference; while the sample would be smaller, it might provide some additional nuance. It can also be argued that we should use Pythagorean Winning Percentage for this breakout--and if that data were readily available, we'd do so...but none of the reference sites has seen fit to compile this in an easily accessible framework, and until they do so, we are constrained by time issues from doing so. (If someone provides it to us, however...)

21ST CENTURY POST-SEASON STANDINGS...

YOU may not have seen the data posted below...we'd not thought to retrieve it from the trusty folks at Forman et soeur, but the light bulb finally flickered a bit and managed to stay on. 

It's a summary display form that's probably new to most of you, but don't let it throw you off.

Note that this covers the 21st century only (just in case you're not ready the titles of the posts!) all the way up to this year's Championship series.

Interestingly, the Phillies are still the team with the best overall WPCT amongst teams with a sizable number of post-season games. They're slightly ahead of the Giants and Red Sox, the two franchises with the most World Series wins since 2000. The media has noted the long post-season losing streak of the Minnesota Twins, but we're not aware of anyone posting their overall record, which might actually be more astonishing....

The Yankees have still played in the most post-season games (161), but haven't had much to show for it since 2009. Behind them are the Cardinals (142), Astros (130), and Dodgers (126). 

The Royals remain the great outlier, destroying literally everything in their path whenever they manage to make the post-season, but mostly operating as baseball's resident iceberg. Still, they're not the franchise with the fewest post-season games since 2000: that would be the Pirates (8), followed by the Reds (11), Orioles (17), Rockies (20), Mariners (24),  Padres (25), and White Sox (26). 

We added a few basic rate stats to add a little more spice to things. Note that the Rays are the homer-ingest team by the HR/G measure, but also note that it's not done them much good (no World Series win, and a very middling .438 post-season WPCT). 

HR/G for post-season games since 2000 (1.12) remind us that "launch angle" was with us even before it was a "thing"... but note that the Giants did manage to buck the trend, winning three titles with significantly lower-than-average HR/G rates. (Much of the reason for that would be more evident if we were to run these standings again, but with pitching data--something we may just do after the World Series.)

Both of this year's participants in the World Series have burnished their post-season records sufficiently with their respective run-ups to the Fall Classic to currently be .500+ for their relatively limited number of playoff games (54 for the Rangers, 48 for the Diamondbacks). Odds are high that they'll both still be over .500 after the series, unless someone gets hot and sweeps the other one. 

But let's kibosh that thought and root for a seven-game series, shall we? While the game still has many problems to overcome, it's still far worse when there are no games at all. Let's savor what remains...