Winning World Series Harder Than Ever

The early-playoff demise of the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Yankees has convinced me that it is tougher than ever to win a World Series.

Every playoff series offers peril. You can win a world-record number of regular-season games and not reach the World Series and while baseball observers might call that an upset, they are generally not going to be terribly surprised because we have seen this so many times now. We live in the era of anything-can-happen baseball.

Up until 1969 there was only one winner in the American League and only one winner in the National League. The team in each league that won the most games during the regular season won the pennant and advanced to the World Series where it knocked heads with the winner from the other league and a champion was crowned. Period.

Things got more complicated starting in 1969 when baseball joined the rest of the pro sports world by creating playoffs. As if to prove just how wacky a door baseball had opened, that very year the Boston Celtics finished fourth in the NBA’s Eastern Division, yet won the world title. Later, after splitting the leagues into three divisions, baseball added wild-card entries–the team with the best record in each league that didn’t finish in first place.

No one can say that the addition of more teams to the playoffs hasn’t been suspenseful. There have been many, many dramatic moments and many upset winners over the last 42 years (Can you believe it’s been that long?) since the creation of the ALCS and the NLCS. What we have seen, however, is a team that has proven itself over the long haul of five months often not able to dominate for three weeks. And a team that was short on depth and front-line pitching could pull it together and prevail in a shorter, five-game series, or even a seven-game series, though it had possessed a thinner roster.

Results in those shorter series also come under the heading of “These things happen.” Any time you are involved in a pitcher’s duel that turns out 1-0 it’s like sudden-death overtime in football. First team to score wins and one mistake will cost you. The Phillies won 102 games this year, the most in baseball, and they couldn’t make it out of the division series. The Yankees won 97 games games this year, the most in the American League, and they couldn’t make it out of the division series, either.

Hitting slumps, tired arms, injuries, unsung heroes on a hot streak, all of those things can play a magnified role in a short series and the margin for error shrinks in the playoffs because every team is a winning team and most teams are championship teams of a sort (division winners, except for the wild cards).

Going back in time to the pre-LCS era, you’ve got to wonder how many of the teams that won the World Series would actually have done so if a playoff format was in place. Teams won 100 games and were shut out of the post-season by a team that won 101. Any team that finished second in the standings by a game would likely have been a wild-card team generations later and who is to say the results in a playoff series wouldn’t have been flip-flopped?

In 1948, the Cleveland Indians and Boston Red Sox were tied at the end of the 154-game regular-season. Many in the sport were rooting for the Red Sox so there could be an all-Boston World Series with the National League winner Braves. The Indians won a one-game playoff. What if that had been a best-of-five series. Would history have been altered? Would the Red Sox have won a World Series after only a 30-year drought instead of the 86-year drought it became?

Remember that the Seattle Mariners won 116 games in 2001, tying the Major League record of 116 victories set by the Chicago Cubs in 1906, beat Cleveland in the Division Series, but lost in five games to the Yankees in the ALCS.

If you think it was hard to win a World Series then, try wading through three rounds of playoffs now.