Stakes, Story & Spin
Updating the all-time World Series Greatness Rankings
Most things turn out to be ordinary, and most reactions turn out to be overreactions, so my initial instinct was to be cautious. Greatest World Series ever? they asked me. Probably somewhere between fourth and seventh, I ventured1, with the caveat that I might be overcorrecting for recency bias.
With 11 days for reflection and about as many spreadsheets for my nerd analysis, I’m convinced: I was overcorrecting for recency bias. Furthermore, I was doing this year’s World Series a disservice by not judging it while all my senses are still inflamed. The 2025 World Series can’t be ranked any lower than fourth all-time, and the next 3,800 words very well might lead me to conclude it’s no. 1.
STAKES
The basic skeleton for my complete World Series rankings, in 2020, came from three objective measures for suspense:
Game leverage index (i.e. how close the games were)
Championship leverage index2 (how close the series was)
Comeback distance (how low the eventual series victor’s win expectancy got)
(From there, I applied various subjective standards to rearrange the years as much as they merited.)
The desire to put 2025 at the top was not an overreaction or recency bias. The 2025 series is, in fact, arguably the most suspenseful ever.
By leverage index, it ranks 8th all-time
By championship leverage index, it ranks 2nd all-time
By comeback, it ranks 8th all-time
Together, that tops any other World Series’ cumulative closeness:
1975: 11th, 3rd, 12th
1924: 5th, 1st, 20th
2011: 20th, 6th, 3rd
Now I think it’d be fair to say “comeback” is the least telling, and potentially most distorting, of those three legs. Had the Blue Jays won on an Alejandro Kirk walk-off inside-the-parker, Toronto’s comeback3 would have ranked only around 30th all-time, and yet this Series obviously would not have been any less suspenseful for that. So if we toss out “comeback” for being a junk measure, and equally weight only how close the games were and how close the Series was, 2025 still ties for second:
1924: 5th at game level + 1st at a series level
2025: 8th + 2nd
1991: 6th + 4th
So now, permitted by our objective data to run wild with the premise, we get to go onto the subjective.
STORY
