The 25 most decisive plays in World Series history
By Bill Felber
The greatest moments in World Series history live in our memories.
Our judgments about those moments, however, can be biased. They can be biased by the memorability of the television description of them, by our level of fan interest, by subsequent media coverage, or by a plethora of other things..
The numbers, however, do not lie. What follows is a look at the 25 most decisive moments in the 120 years of World Series history as viewed through the objective prism of Championship Probability Added.
The metric is fairly easy to understand. It asks one simple question: How much did the likelihood of the World Series outcome swing on the play in question?
Championship Probability, an easy riff on the more familiar Win Probability Added, flows from the understanding that every event in a game moves the odds of either team winning by some, usually small percentage.
In World Series history, more than 70 plays have moved that Championship needle by as much as 17 percent, which is a really big swing. During the 2021 World Series, for example, no plays moved the decision needle to that extent. In fact, since 2017, there have been only three such plays.
But decisive plays occur in spurts, largely hinging on the closeness of the game, and the point in the Series at which that game is played. For instance, there were three such plays during the memorable 2016 Series between the Cleveland Indians and Chicago Cubs alone.
There is a randomness to these big plays, and especially with regard to who’s involved in them. So while greats of the game such as Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, and Joe Morgan play a role, so also do comparative unknowns. Who was Elmer Miller, anyway, and how did fate deal him such a pivotal role in one of the decisive moments in World Series history?
Here are the 25 most statistically decisive moments in the history of the World Series.
The heading information includes the batter and pitcher involved, the teams, the date, and the change in Championship Probability brought about by the outcome.