The Commissioner’s Trophy. The gold-and-silver symbol representing the holy grail of baseball in the western hemisphere. First awarded in 1967 (although the World Series has been around since 1903), this marks the installment the 121st edition of championship baseball. It’s incredibly hard to win it. To have 162 games in the regular season come down to a maximum of 22 playoff games allows for so much randomness that the best team from March to September rarely stands at the top come the end of October. There obviously isn’t a standard procedure for winning it all, but we know more now about organizational philosophy, priorities, and strategy than we ever have. In that respect, are there any trends or patterns that we can publicly identify from recent World Series winners, or at least finalists/teams that make it to the championship series, in the regular season that can point hopeful contenders in the right direction?
Let’s take a look at the final four teams in the playoffs for each year that we have been able to use Statcast to analyze them (since 2015). This excludes 2020, because everything about the postseason that year was fundamentally different – schedules and format were modified, games were managed differently, and the regular season was obviously much shorter. World Series champions are denoted in blue.
I don’t want the following to be mistaken as a true scientific study, but rather a high-level snapshot of what each of these teams’ strengths and weaknesses were. Even the clubs that got here despite unspectacular regular seasons don’t owe it all to simple good fortune. With this decade-long sample, here’s what we can conclude about how teams have won in the postseason, based on what they did well in the months leading up to it.
How to Hit Like a Championship Team
It’s interesting to see how, especially when looking at just the eventual World Series winners, the offensive makeup of what we understand as an esteemed organization has changed throughout this sample. In 2024, the championship series consisted of three teams that hit the ball very hard and didn’t chase much, but struck out at a non-negligible clip. Then there’s the Guardians, who were about as powerless a team as we’ve seen reach a Championship Series lately, but put it in play enough to secure the #2 seed in a wide-open AL. Meanwhile, in 2023, the common theme among the league finalists was an overwhelming prowess for both not chasing and making contact. The only team that was seriously intimidating on the power front was Texas, and they rode it to a convincing championship. Those Rangers had thump from top to bottom and had a near-historic approach at the plate, going down as arguably the most potent offense to win a ring in recent history.
In 2019, at the height of the juiced-ball era, making hard contact was no longer a competitive advantage; bat-to-ball and discipline were the most impressive parts of those groups of hitters (excluding the Yankees), and for the Nationals and Astros, they had enough of a surplus in the power department to get by. This was a stark contrast to 2018, when every team in the final four had a dynamic power-discipline combo. Go back a few more years, though, and the old-school Royals still linger on the borders of our short-term memory: bottom-10 in MLB in isolated slugging, and a 99 wRC+ (although the latter was top-10), but a strikeout rate head-and-shoulders below everybody else.
Within these ebbs and flows, here’s one thing that stands out: It is near-impossible to win the World Series if you strike out too much. The 2021 Braves are the only exception to this rule, as you’ll see below:
