Which World Series Archetype Fits Your Favorite Playoff Team?
Which World Series Archetype Fits Your Favorite Playoff Team?
I grouped every modern World Series champ into clusters — and found which category each 2024 contender would need to resemble to win.
The notion that MLB’s postseason is largely driven by randomness is fairly well-accepted these days, especially among more statistically inclined fans. During the triple-wild card era in particular, it’s been common to see top-seeded teams in at least one league (if not both) get picked off by underdogs who were better prepared and rose to the moment — regular season be damned.
But that doesn’t mean the playoffs are a complete crapshoot. There’s a reason why the Yankees, Dodgers, Phillies and Astros have a higher probability of winning the title than, say, the Mets, Royals and Tigers do. (No offense.) And one of the cool things about baseball stats is that we can go back and find teams that resemble each of this year’s contenders, to see which clubs most look like the strongest champions of the past — and which ones would need a Cinderella run to join the list of World Series winners.
To classify each current team (with at least a 0.5 percent chance of winning the World Series on Tuesday afternoon) by what kind of champion they might be, we first need to go back and sort historical winners into groups. For this exercise, I ran a K-means cluster analysis on every World Series winner since the divisional era began in 1969, feeding the model data on every aspect of each team — from its record, run differential and WAR to the quality of its offense, defense and pitching, particulars like isolated power and K:BB ratio, its average age and even the composition of its roster. (Was it top-heavy? Did they build up the middle?)
After doing all that, the algorithm found that there are four different types of historical World Series winners, to whom I assigned fun nicknames:
Complete Champs - These teams were good at pretty much everything, with high winning percentages/run differentials, very good offenses, sure-handed defenses and excellent pitching staffs. (Archetypal example: 1999 New York Yankees)1
Heavy Hitters - This type of champ relied on an extremely strong offense to carry its title hopes. The pitching wasn’t necessarily bad, but it was generally only OK — often with a mediocre starting rotation — and not nearly as good as the hitting. (Archetypal example: 1993 Toronto Blue Jays)
Mound Masters - These teams are the opposite of the Heavy Hitters. They had incredible pitching staffs, but offenses that were at or even below the league average in scoring. But in tight postseason games, the ability to shut down opposing offenses — particularly with great starters — put runs at a premium. (Archetypal example: 1990 Cincinnati Reds)
Scrappy Winners - Finally, we find the teams that provide fuel for the theory that the playoffs are a total crapshoot and nothing really matters. These teams were good but not great during the regular season, and in many cases had subpar pitching… but they still got the job done when it mattered. (Archetypal example: 2014 San Francisco Giants)2
As part of the clustering process, the algorithm has the ability to flatten all of the different attributes of each team into a few principal components, which makes it possible to show them all in a 2-dimensional plot that still carries most of the information that drove the groupings. Here is every champ since 1969, mapped according to its cluster and principal components (mouse over each dot to see which team is which):
Some teams blur the lines between categories as they drift closer to a different grouping of teams, but the classifications are based on which group’s central point the team is positioned closest to.
What does all of that tell us about this year, though? Let’s re-make the same chart, but now add 2024 teams (with at least a nonzero chance of winning it all) according to the clusters they would be sorted into if they end up winning the World Series:
In the Complete Champs club, we would have the Phillies, Yankees and Padres. I’ve written a lot already about Philly’s mostly charmed season, but the Yankees also rank among the Top 10 in WAR from position players (No. 3) and pitchers (No. 9) — as do the Padres (Nos. 10 and 4, respectively), who actually went into Wednesday ranked No. 1 in the league in Elo rating.
The Heavy Hitters are a little sparse this year: Only the Dodgers, Brewers and Diamondbacks fit into that category — and Milwaukee is a bit of an odd fit, because their pitching (No. 8 in WAR) has been much better than either Los Angeles (No. 20) or Arizona (No. 26). Where have you gone, 1973 Oakland A’s, 1977 Yankees… or even the 2023 Rangers, who won from this category last year?
We do have more teams among the Mound Masters this season, with the Mariners, Guardians, Braves, Tigers and Royals getting grouped into the same fine tradition as more than a quarter of all champs since 1969.3 By definition, all of these teams have had their troubles scoring runs at times, but their presence in this category proves that each has a viable path to winning (if they get into the playoffs).
And then we arrive at the Scrappy Winners, with four entries in our chart — the Twins, Mets, Orioles and Astros. Each has a different arc that brought them here: Houston and New York started weak and surged as the season progressed, though they have some real differences in recent postseason success. Baltimore is a borderline Heavy Hitter with the talent to be among the Complete Champs, but they also are 29-32 since the All-Star break and are down to No. 14 in the Elo ratings right now. And the Twins have been collapsing for a while now, with 20 losses in their past 30 games; with 29.3 percent playoff odds, they may not even get the chance to put their Scrappy Winner status to the test in the postseason.
Each of these archetypes has won a title in the past five seasons. And Complete Champs have won 5 of the past 10 World Series, with Scrappy Winners taking 3 and Mound Masters/Heavy Hitters splitting the other 2. So there are recent precedents for all of the teams in our 2024 chart to ride their formula all the way to the championship — and perhaps this framework can help provide some order to the seeming chaos that we sometimes think rules the world of October baseball.
Filed under: Baseball
These archetypal teams are, statistically, the teams closest to the centroid of the teams in their cluster, as mapped out on a 2-D projection (which we’ll show in a second).
When we think of that Giants team, we remember Madison Bumgarner’s dominating postseason performance — but S.F. ranked just 22nd in pitching WAR (and 24th specifically among starters) during the regular season.
Of the 54 winners in that span, 37.0 percent were Complete Champs; 27.8 percent were Mound Masters; 18.5 percent were Heavy Hitters; and 16.7 percent were Scrappy Winners.
Broken Record Alert...curious (if you know) how the Bill James World Series Prediction System has fared over the years, and how it compares? In looking at that years back I came away with the impression that what appeared to be random, was far less so when the proper elements were weighed - as you point out here.
Many thanks.