How One Stat Explains The Last Three World Series Champions
By Jarrad Daniel Saffren
Over the past three seasons, a funny thing has happened in Major League Baseball. Regular season juggernauts started winning the World Series.
The Boston Red Sox became the latest example on Sunday night, when they closed out the 2018 World Series with a 5–1 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers. Boston’s championship came after a 108–54 regular season, the best record in baseball by five games.
In 2017, the Houston Astros won the World Series after a 101–61 regular season. In 2016, the Chicago Cubs won the title after a 103–58 campaign, the best record in baseball by eight games.
The past three World Series champions all won 100 plus regular season games. Two of them ran away with the best record in the league.
These teams were built to win in the regular season and in the postseason.
On the surface, this does not seem weird at all. It appears to make perfect sense. Great teams win championships.
But when you consider the first six years of this decade, 2010–2015, and the first 21 years of the wild card era, this trend is extremely abnormal. Regular season juggernauts almost never won the World Series.
From 2010–2015, only two MLB teams even won 100 or more regular season games. The 2011 Philadelphia Phillies went 102–60 and the 2015 St. Louis Cardinals finished 100–62. Both teams lost in the National League Division Series!
In those six years, only one team won the World Series after finishing with the best regular season record. The 2013 Boston Red Sox went 97–65 and won it all.
Regular season juggernauts barely even existed from 2010–2015, and they almost never won the championship.
It was the era of the underwhelming champion.
It was also not much different from the first 15 years of the Wild Card era, 1995–2009.
When you compare 2016–2018 with 1995–2015, the contrast is stark.
The team with the best record in baseball has won the World Series twice in the past three years. That happened four times in the first 21 years of the Wild Card era.
One-hundred plus win teams have won the World Series for three straight years. That happened twice in the previous 21 seasons.
Somehow, even with a wild card game in each league now, the playoffs have become less of a crapshoot than ever. How? Why? What?
The answer lies in one statistic.
OPS
Bill James is the godfather of modern, advanced baseball statistics.
Now he is a legendary baseball writer and longtime advisor to the Boston Red Sox. But in the late 1970s, James was just a baseball obsessed guy with writing talent and a lot to say. (He also definitely had a thick, dark beard.) Beginning in 1977, James wrote 11 annual Baseball Abstract books, six MLB season previews for Esquire magazine and countless other articles and newsletters.
His mission was two-fold: explain why MLB teams were stupid and outline a new way to look at the game. Basically, James argued that baseball was poker. The best way to win was to play the percentages.
James’ greatest contribution, one used by more MLB teams each year, was on the offensive side of the sport. The Lawrence, Kansas native argued that scoring runs was the most important part of the game. Scoring runs was more important than preventing runs, because teams couldn’t win unless they scored.
With just three outs in every inning, teams had limited opportunities to score. Outs were, as James called them, a “scarce resource,” that teams needed to attempt to preserve in every plate appearance. Giving up outs, on sacrifice bunts, base stealing attempts and other small ball plays, was pointless.
The point, instead, was to get on base and accumulate bases. This was the best way, according to the percentages, to score as many runs as possible. By this logic, on-base percentage and power were a player’s most valuable assets.
The Jamesian theory of baseball wrested control away from pitchers and gave it to hitters. Hitters still could not control outcomes. But they could control the process.
If a walk was as good as a single, they could be more selective, make pitchers work harder and focus on just getting on, not necessarily on getting a hit. If home runs, triples and doubles were better than just making contact, they could swing low and elevate their bat as it traveled through the zone. This would put more balls in the air, and balls in the air more often led to extra base hits.
James built a large following in the 1970s and 80s. But for years and even decades, his theory remained buried in the nerd subculture of fantasy baseball players and amateur baseball theorists. Fans were talking about it, but organizations were not.
That changed in the late 1990s and early 2000s with various clubs, but especially with the Oakland Athletics under General Manager Billy Beane. This was well-documented in Michael Lewis’ groundbreaking 2003 book, Moneyball.
The Moneyball A’s were the first team to implement James’ theory in a holistic way. After the A’s made the playoffs four straight times from 2000–2003, including two 100 plus win seasons, other teams started following their lead.
Beginning in the late 2000s and early 2010s, hitters, by organizational edict, started controlling the process. They began working counts and swinging upward. And it worked.
The Red Sox hired James in 2002 after they saw what the Athletics were doing with his theory. In the next 11 years, Boston won three World Series titles and reached the ALCS five times.
In all five ALCS seasons, the Red Sox finished in the top four in the league in runs scored. They led the league in runs in their championship years of 2004 and 2013.
Now, in 2018, if you aren’t using the Jamesian approach to offense, you are behind. You are antiquated. You are a relic from an age of mysticism and managerial gut feeling.
James was right. So right, in fact, that a statistic based on his theory, on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS), has gained mainstream attention and usage.
The first half of that equation, on-base percentage, is self-explanatory. The second half, slugging percentage, measures a player’s productivity once he hits the ball in play. In dividing total bases by at-bats, it gives more weight to home runs, then triples, then doubles and then singles on a sliding scale.
In short, the stat measures how often a player gets on base and how many bases he gains on his hits. Add the two together, on-base percentage and slugging percentage, and you can measure a player’s productivity as a batter and as a hitter.
You can determine a player’s value with one number.
Most importantly, since working counts and swinging upward are processes that players can control, not outcomes, on-base percentage and slugging percentage are more consistent than other stats.
In today’s game, the best teams have the highest on-base plus slugging percentage. Pitching and defense matter, too, of course. But the most reliable indicator of MLB success, over 162 regular season games and three or four playoff rounds, is a high on-base plus slugging percentage.
And that brings us to the last three World Series champions.
2016-PRESENT: THE ERA OF THE JUGGERNAUT CHAMPION
The last two World Series champions were OPS juggernauts.
This year’s Red Sox had the highest team marks in on-base percentage (.339), slugging percentage (.453) and OPS (.792).
Last year’s Astros also led baseball in all three categories, posting a .346 on-base percentage, a .478 slugging percentage and an .823 OPS.
Two years ago, the Cubs were not as dominant in the OPS category, but they were still elite. Chicago finished the regular season with the second highest on-base percentage, .343, and the third highest OPS, .772, in Major League Baseball.
It’s not that crazy that an elite or league best OPS led to great regular seasons for these clubs. In a long season, if you give up fewer outs and gain more bases than other teams, you will score more runs and win more games.
The crazy part is that, for each team, the approach and the results translated to the postseason. For most of the Wild Card era, the team that won the World Series was the team with the hottest pitching and the most timely hitting. The playoffs were basically about luck.
But the Cubs, Astros and Red Sox decreased the impact of luck on the MLB playoffs. They did so with the exact same formula they used to win in the regular season: by relentlessly working counts, getting on base and blasting big flies.
For all three teams, regular season dominance carried over into the postseason, where luck once reigned supreme.
But it would be a mistake to assert that all three clubs turned the postseason into the regular season, and made it more about skill than luck. The playoffs are still very much about fortune, too.
These teams did not eliminate luck from the equation. They just marginalized it. Marginalizing luck works better over a 162-game season. But it can work in best-of-five and best-of-seven playoff rounds as well.
This is not a secret anymore. A lot of general managers are building rosters with OPS in mind. A lot of players and teams are working counts and swinging upward. The hard part is doing these things better than everyone else.
The last two World Series champions did them better than the other 29 teams. The ’16 Cubs, for the most part, did too.
All three teams debunked the oldest adage in baseball: good pitching beats good hitting. Instead, they ushered in a new adage, one that contradicts everything we thought we knew about our national pastime.
Good hitting beats good pitching.