Big Bad Baseball looks at the World Series in the context of win differential, the Astros and Phillies separated by nineteen wins. That’s not the highest of all time, but it does rank second to the 1906 championship, won by the underdog.

The most fascinating thing to me is that pre-expansion, World Series where the teams were separated by ten wins or more were dominated by the team with the better record, 12-2. Since expansion, that record is 7-7. We worry about tanking and so forth, but in general baseball is much more balanced in the last 60+ years than before that. An 87 win team might intrinsically be 97 win team that had bad luck, or a 77 win team that had good luck. It’s why I tend to keep my probabilities of a favorite winning a series below 60%. Teams are just to close to each other to say for sure which is really better.