Odds favour Dodgers, Rays but other numbers are in play
Baseball may be down to its final four but there are still plenty of game to be played.
The Tampa Bay Rays and the Houston Astros meet in the American League Championship Series starting Sunday, with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Atlanta Braves kicking off the National League Championship Series on Monday.
The offence, the pitching, the pedigree — all great reasons to watch these four teams in action. But here are a few other reasons to pay attention that may surprise you.
Odds are just odds. On the NL side, it’s the league’s top two teams going head to head, fulfilling many pre-season predictions. Both teams swept their wild-card and division series. Finally, audiences can see what these teams are like against more formidable opponents.
It’s possible you may have predicted a Rays-Astros ALCS early this year, but unlikely you would have done so as Houston bungled its way through the regular season, finishing as the sixth seed to Tampa Bay’s first. But the Astros now look like a team that knows how to win in the playoffs, one thing the Rays have historically struggled to do in the post-season.
ESPN gives the Dodgers a 73.3 per cent chance of winning the NL, and the Rays a 63.3 per cent chance of advancing out of the AL. But with these matchups, anything goes. á A team with a losing record could make the World Series. MLB’s pandemic-altered season and subsequent expanded playoffs helped the Astros and the Milwaukee Brewers became the first teams to make the playoffs with losing records, outside of the Kansas City Royals in a 1981 season split in two halves by a strike. Houston now has a shot to become the first sub .500 team — they had a winning percentage of .483 — to reach the World Series. A poor regular-season record hasn’t always predicted a short postseason stay. Of the six teams with the worst regular-season records to make the post-season in the wild-card era before 2020, the .519 Dodgers went to the NLCS in 2008 and the .516 St. Louis Cardinals won it all in 2006. á We may be in for a home run derby, of sorts. Teams are 22-1 this post-season when outhomering their opponents. Regular-season numbers suggest that stat favours the NL teams, with the Dodgers and Braves going 1-2 in home runs in the majors this season. But it’s the AL teams, middle of the pack when it came to long balls during the year, who are going deep in the post-season. The Rays have 14 home runs, the Astros have 13, Atlanta is at seven and the Dodgers have just two.
Individually, only three men have homered eight times in a single post-season, all in the wild-card era. Nelson Cruz was the last to do it, for the Texas Rangers in 2011. Now, with help of the expanded three-game wild card series, Houston’s Carlos Correa is already at four home runs and the Rays’ Randy Arozarena is at three. They’re the top candidates to join that exclusive group.
á It could be another step toward ending a big-league drought. It’s been a while since the Dodgers and Braves were World Series champions — 32 and 25 years, respectively. The Rays have never won it all in the franchise’s 23-year existence. Atlanta and Tampa Bay haven’t reached the Fall Classic since 1999 and 2008, respectively. á There’s no love lost between
(some of) these teams. The Rays celebrated their AL Division Series win over the New York Yankees by trolling the team they just beat, blasting New York-themed music as they smoked celebratory cigars, and the team they would face, banging trash cans a la Astros of 2017. And of course it’s the Dodgers who were the victims of Houston’s garbage can signstealing scandal in 2017, so a potential World Series rematch between those two could be something to look forward to, if you’re in the mood for fireworks.