How to Crown — or Deny — a Champion
On back-to-back days, MLB and NASCAR delivered championships with high drama — and confusion over whether the best (or most deserving) truly won.
What makes a championship team “deserving”? What makes a championship contest satisfying? How much season-ending drama is too much drama?
Major League Baseball and NASCAR both provided their own confounding answers to those questions over this past weekend, as Game 7 of the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays was an instant classic — with L.A. winning in 11 innings — and the 2025 Cup Series title race — won by Kyle Larson in overtime over a heartbroken Denny Hamlin — was something no racing fan will ever forget.
But in each case, the end was abrupt when compared with the tension that had led up to it, and it left us with more questions than answers about what it means to compete at the highest level but fall short.
In baseball, what had once looked like a mismatch on paper proved to be an epic for the ages between the big-budget, defending-champion Dodgers and a Blue Jays team usually defined as good but not good enough. After winning Game 5 in L.A., Toronto headed back home up 3-2 with a chance to clinch… but there’s no way this series would go that easy, and the Dodgers forced Game 7, which itself contained many twists and turns. Counting the 18-inning marathon in Game 3, Los Angeles and Toronto had already fought for eight full games’ worth of innings before extras even started in Game 7, additional frames that were only forced by backup L.A. infielder Miguel Rojas hitting a crowd-silencing home run with 2 outs left in his team’s season.
The teams continued to go back and forth with multiple narrow escapes until Dodger catcher Will Smith’s HR put L.A. up in the top of the 11th. By the bottom of the inning, Mookie Betts’ championship-clinching 6-3 double play felt oddly anticlimactic — wasn’t this unbelievable series1 supposed to end on some photo-finish at home plate, or a walk-off homer? — despite being what
called “the most momentous out-recording play in baseball history” by Championship Win Probability. In a flash, the longest World Series in history was simply… over.Out on the track in Phoenix the next day, Denny Hamlin was looking to win his first career championship, shedding the title of NASCAR’s best driver to never win one, and he seemed to be on an unstoppable mission — particularly to win for his dying father, who was watching back home in North Carolina. He won pole on Saturday, led the first 50 laps and held an average position of 2nd place for the race as a whole.
While the entire field seemed to suffer tire problems, Denny’s came at the best possible time after a midrace caution, allowing him to avoid losing too much track position by ducking into the pits to fix the problem under yellow. Later passing championship rivals William Byron and Chase Briscoe, Hamlin led the last 28 laps of regulation and had a 3.1-second lead with just 3 laps left… until Byron blew a tire and forced the race into OT. Gambling to take 2 fresh tires while Hamlin took 4, Kyle Larson started ahead on the restart and Hamlin was unable to overtake him before the race ended with Larson in championship position. What had seemed like Denny’s year all season long was simply… over.
More than perhaps most sports, MLB and NASCAR face constant criticism about their playoff formats, and whether they’ve achieved the proper balance of rewards versus randomness.
Baseball now allows nearly half of the league to make its rapidly-expanding postseason, doubling down on what has long been considered the most chaotic playoff system in major North American men’s sports. This has had the side effects of incentivizing load-management and disincentivizing greatness during the regular season, and producing scrambled postseason fields that sometimes yield the favorites as champs, but just as often gives us weird one-off winners.
And NASCAR has been fighting battles over its playoff system for more than 20 years, dating back to Matt Kenseth winning the season-long points race in 2003 — despite ranking T-9th in wins — and the subsequent introduction of the Chase For The Cup elimination format the following season. Ever since, the fan base has been split over the entertainment value of the playoffs and the fairness of a return to the old-style points system.
The complicated part of the 2025 World Series and Cup Series championships is that each played into their sport’s reputation for unfair postseason chaos — but also not.
In the NASCAR title race, Hamlin was obviously the most deserving winner on Sunday — “I think it was evident who was the best today,” in Hamlin’s words — with a field-high 208 laps led and 140.2 Driver Rating. Along similar lines, the Blue Jays lost the World Series despite outscoring Los Angeles 34-26 in the series itself — tied2 for the second-best series margin by a WS loser ever, trailing only the 1960 Yankees’ absurd +28 mark — and posting a run differential three times as large as L.A.’s (+30 versus +10) in the playoffs overall.
Now, whenever that type of disparity happens, there are many little situational factors that can add up to the defeat. Toronto lost two 1-run games in extra innings because of mistakes they made to relinquish the lead — cue Jeff Hoffman’s hanging slider to Rojas that tied Game 7 — and they also gave up an incredible number of outs on the bases all series long. They simply didn’t do enough to bury the Dodgers.
And while Hamlin’s loss was vastly more unfair — his lead was stolen by a caution for an incident he had nothing to do with, taking place 500 feet behind him — his team did choose the wrong tire strategy going into the restart, and after pulling even with Larson at first, he was unable to match Larson’s outside burst to pass his way ahead, despite the inside line being the preferable path earlier in the race.
I’ve written about NASCAR’s overtime system before, and I think it deserves more blame for what happened on Sunday than the playoffs at large. By adopting the “green-white-checker” OT format — which doesn’t allow a regulation race to end under caution, but instead forces the field to bunch back up again for (at least) one more chaotic restart — it’s guaranteed that multiple races per year will sacrifice a deserving winner with a big late lead at the altar of a manufactured, made-for-TV restart finish. When that happens in the biggest race of the year, amplified by the winner-take-all format for the championship round, you end up with Hamlin being denied what should have been his first title.3
(What should they do instead? I still think finishing under caution, while anticlimactic, is probably fairest. Or another intriguing idea could be to borrow F1’s concept of the Virtual Safety Car, which checks car speeds under caution but maintains the spacing between cars as it was before the yellow flag — which certainly would have helped Denny on Sunday!)
At the same time, it’s hard to say that Larson and the Dodgers weren’t deserving champions in the scope of the entire season.
Los Angeles went into the season as heavy title favorites, was among the best pack of teams in a regular season with no standout counter-candidates, and was the best on paper in terms of talent — even if they didn’t always show it over the 6 months from April through September. Meanwhile, for all of the howls from NASCAR fans to return to the pre-playoff, full-season points system… Larson — also the preseason title favorite — would have won the 2025 title under the old format anyway. (And Hamlin wouldn’t have even been within striking distance on Sunday.)
So did we get the “right” winners this past weekend, or not? Maybe that depends on whether you value justice or drama more — and whether, in modern sports, it’s still possible to have both. Or maybe it doesn’t even matter either way, and the winners proved themselves deserving precisely because they, well, won. The Dodgers and Larson got the trophies, affirming what we thought of them all along, while Hamlin and the Blue Jays finished their seasons in the bitter disappointment of coming as close as possible to glory without actually tasting it.
Quite possibly the greatest World Series ever played, pound-for-pound, when you consider the sheer volume of crazy “stuff” that happened in it.
With the 1996 Atlanta Braves.
Or Carl Edwards being in roughly the same situation back in 2016, which directly led to him quitting the sport.
Denny was robbed. I know NASCAR wants to keep the drama going all the way to the end, but having a dominant season ending with a performance like that mean nothing is just wrong.
There seems to be a tension between wanting the best team to win, and wanting some sort of last-minute, slow-building drama - for ratings and money, of course, but also simply for the sheer spectacle that is one of the things we watch sports for in the first place. Sometimes the result is that the best team, or guy, isn't the winner, but people generally seem ok with that. I don't know that "best or most deserving" is really the issue. The story now in most sports is that the winner was the one that did what was necessary to win, and that guy or team may not be "best" but he is "most deserving," and everyone seems to understand that.
However, what can seem unsatisfying is often not that the wrong guy won but that the resulting story of the victory falls flat because of the artificiality of the choosing-a-winner setup. NASCAR had one of those this last weekend. Fortunately, Larson is a top driver. But the fact that Hamlin was leading and actually dominating the race is the problem here. If the top four had been, say, 12th, 16th, 20th, and 25th when Byron blew a tire, and then Larson overtook Hamlin, it wouldn't have been as big a deal. Still a toughie for Denny and all, but that's just racing. Drivers shuffle position all day long out there. The way it happened, though, was almost perfect for throwing a lot of light on the artificiality and seeming randomness of the system for choosing a winner. And that makes "most deserving" kind of an empty definition.
Look at penalty kicks in soccer. The World Cup, the biggest sporting event in the world, often comes down to these. Artificial? Yes. Only peripherally related to the actual playing of soccer? Yup. Partly because the players are exhausted, but at bottom, it's simply a way to pick a damn winner and be done already. And nobody really minds. Because it's very clear-cut and simple, and so the level of drama is virtually the same every time. Personally, I don't care for it - I'd prefer a system where each team took off a player every 10 minutes until someone scored, but nobody asked me. But it does work.
NASCAR heaps artificiality (points system) on artificiality (baroque playoff system) on artificiality (one final race), and instead of a lot of drama and a winner people felt was most deserving, this time they got some drama and a big reminder of how contrived the system is. At some point, you might as well draw lots, right?