As baseball fans, we have been graced to have four teams in the League Championship round who are not perennial powerhouses. This is the first year since 2011 that we didn’t have at least two of the Giants, Cardinals, Red Sox, and Yankees and the first year since 1997 that none of those four made it this far. If nothing else, that should help even out what has been a very lopsided list of winners in baseball history.
To see just how lopsided that history has been, I thought it would be interesting to look into how many World Series each team should have won in it’s history, all things being equal. Since many years the National and American Leagues had different numbers of teams, this was done by finding the odds of each team winning the Pennant each year (you may divide this number by two if you would like the World Series total).
Rather than supply you with years and years worth of confusing numbers featuring many city changes and expansion, I’ll give you this pretty, zig-zaggy, color coded chart below:
This features the current 15 teams in the American League with the exception of the Yankees since about 1938 when they flew off the chart, never to return. As expected, the Yankees have won more than their fair share (since the founding of the Highlanders franchise in 1903, they should have won about 11.5 pennants, they have won 40) and are currently poking a hole through the top of the graph with a 28.5. That number on the y axis represents not how many pennants each team should have won, but how many different than the number they actually have. For example, the Red Sox shot out of the gate and by 1918 had already won 2.5 more than expected. After the long drought, however, it took three of the last 11 pennants to just barely push them above their franchise expectations.
The current probability of any one team winning either pennant is 0.067 or 1 in 15, but it was just one in eight for the majority of American League history. Because of this, franchises that began in 1901 (like the White Sox and Indians) or shortly after (like the Yankees) had a lot of years with limited competition increasing their odds of titles. I bring up Chicago and Cleveland in particular as they are increasing the range of the graph down, although not to the degree that the Yankees are pushing up the top. Two World Series appearances in the 1990’s by the Indians and one by the White Sox in 2005 have brought things nearer to “fairness,” but at almost seven less than expected, they are far separated from the rest of the AL and it would take a decade of domination to fix the gap.
As for the current two candidates, the Blue Jays and Royals, both are slightly below expectations at -0.8 and -0.4 respectively and either would move into the positive range with a return to the World Series in 2015. While the Jays made great strides in the early 1990’s, their lack of a return since has pushed them again towards the bottom of the pack. For the Royals, it was even longer between appearances as they missed out from 1986 through 2013 before returning last season. Legitimately in AL history, however, any team other than the Orioles, who dominated so much during the 1970’s and 1980’s that their lack of appearances since hasn’t really hurt them, the Athletics, whose story is similar and the Red Sox would be working to erase that deficit.
To keep things fair, I calculated franchises separately for each city, so the Kansas City Athletics have been separated from Oakland and Philadelphia. Including them in Kansas City’s woes would drop their actual pennants minus expected to -1.9.
In the National League, no team has been nearly as proficient as the Yankees and none as bad as the Indians and White Sox, at least not since the Phillies broke their their mark of -7.2 in 1979. While you may say, but what about the poor Cubbies, who haven’t won a World Series since 1908? You may take a look at the NL graph below:
While it has been awhile for the Cubs (1945 for an NL Pennant), they were at the top of the heap when they won that pennant at more than four more pennants than they should have won to that point. No team has a more perfect ski slope to the present, however and they currently are the fifth most drought stricken NL team (-1.8). At the bottom of this group are the recently (meaning the past 20 years) somewhat successful Phillies and the not quite as successful Pirates. While the two teams from Pennsylvania are currently on opposite trajectories, the recent World Series appearances in 2008 and 2009 have placed the two franchises on equal footing historically.
While Cubs fans may be jealous of the Pirates’ five rings, those have been spread out since the World Series began and they haven’t been to the Series since 1979 either, so it’s not like the younger generations have fans have ever seen either team win. In fact, the Cubs’ plea for a World Series win in any particular fans lifetime could be taken up by many teams, including the Mets, who pushed slightly above their pennant expectations in 2000, but have not won a World Series since 1986 (they have since dropped slightly below expectations again at -0.2).
At the top of the chart are the Cardinals, who started off very slow, but quickly made up for it in the 1930’s and never looked back, and the Dodgers, who aren’t even being given credit for the fact that they won 1.9 more than expected while in Brooklyn. In similar fashion, the San Francisco Giants recently jumped above expectations with their three NL pennants in five years, but their early deficit depends on how you view the franchise as the New York Giants finished 6.9 ahead of expectations before the move.
We already know that whoever wins both the American League and National League pennant will be making up ground, but the winner of the World Series will be ending a significant drought as well. Obviously the Cubs have the longest since 1907, but the Royals (1985), Mets (1986) and Blue Jays (1993) have all been waiting more than two decades as well.
Looking only at the World Series and sparing you any more spaghetti charts, here are the top and bottom five franchises in wins compared to expectations:
| Top 5 | WS Wins | Exp WS | Dif. | Bottom 5 | WS Wins | Exp WS | Dif. |
| New York Yankees | 27 | 5.7 | 21.3 | Chicago Cubs | 2 | 5.9 | -3.91 |
| St. Louis Cardinals | 11 | 5.9 | 5.1 | Philadelphia Phillies | 2 | 5.9 | -3.91 |
| Los Angeles Dodgers | 5 | 2.3 | 2.7 | Cleveland Indians | 2 | 5.9 | -3.87 |
| Oakland Athletics | 4 | 1.8 | 2.2 | Washington Senators | 1 | 4.3 | -3.28 |
| Boston Red Sox | 8 | 5.9 | 2.1 | St. Louis Browns | 0 | 3.3 | -3.25 |
No one with any sense of history should be surprised by either side of this ledger. The Yankees have far out won their share and the Cubs are tied with the Phillies at the bottom. The Indians aren’t too far behind and they are surpassed by only two defunct franchises (the Senators include both iterations). On the plus side, the Athletics and Dodgers have been very busy in their relatively short period in their new cities while the Red Sox have won theirs in streaks at the beginning of the franchise and in the last decade.
As can be seen by the Cubs, Red Sox, Phillies and Indians, teams that have been around should have won about six each by now, but the Yankees have made sure that wasn’t possible. Giving the Athletics, Giants and Dodgers credit for all theirs across multiple cities, only six of the 30 teams have reached that number and all but the Yankees (began in 1903) were a part of the original 16 1901 franchises (of course the World Series didn’t start until 1903, but modern day baseball essentially began with the advent of the AL in 1901).
Of the 39 total franchises considered (the Pilots count as Mariners, all others with same city and team name included together for simplification) 25 are currently or finished within two World Series wins of expectations. Only the five listed above finished over that and the only modern franchises below are the three listed above and the White Sox.
In general, things aren’t even that bad for teams like the Brewers, Padres, Mariners and Rangers who are without as they aren’t that far behind yet and there are some much worse off. World Series appearances tend to come in bunches (as the Rangers recently discovered) and things will probably even out at some point. For now, however, we can be thankful that none of those teams at the top can increase their lead while those at the bottom (KC -0.7, TOR 0.61, NYM -0.1, CHC -3.9 World Series wins over expectations) now have a chance to make up some ground.
