Welcome back, baseball!
Well, not really. The season is still 27 days away, after all. But I always welcome the return of baseball. It doesn't matter what the calendar says, or what the weather looks like - baseball's opening day represents the true start of Spring. It's the day where everything is fresh and new, and the possibilities are endless.
Now that the owners are done with their public temper tantrum about actually paying players their worth, I decided to celebrate this year's return with a look at 25 of the most exciting postseason games ever played. I'm doing this because I haven't written in this blog for five years, and because I like the structure of lists. I've done similar things here, including ranking all the World Series and League Championship Series. This time, I'm decided to rank things at the individual game level.
First, a qualifier. When I say all "postseason" games, I mean that. Every World Series game since 1903, every League Championship Series game since 1969, and every Wild Card-related game since 1995 will be under consideration here. I've also included all season-ending tiebreaker playoff games. I know Major League Baseball considered those to be regular season games, but they always felt like postseason games when they happened, and since they were only scheduled if the regular season ended in a tie, I have decided that they count as "postseason" games for this purpose. (Note: I'm really bummed those games will no longer occur. They were a unique part of baseball, and they happened so rarely so they became kind of a special event.)
Unfortunately, even though the Negro Leagues are now (rightly) considered Major Leagues, I didn't include the Negro League championship series games, because available play-by-play for those games is incomplete at best or missing entirely at worst. It's pretty hard to rank a game if you only know the score
Now, when thinking about what makes a baseball game exciting, I thought of three things: Big comebacks, big plays, and big moments. Big comebacks are pretty self-explanatory - one team has the lead, and then later they don't. Big plays are something everybody can relate to, those moments where you're minding your own business enjoying a game before a lightning bolt hits and you leap from your seat in excitement. Big moments are something that are unique to baseball, the times where your team just needs one hit, and you're sitting at the edge of your seat, biting your nails, hoping your light-hitting shortstop can find some magic just one time.
So I had those subjectively chosen parameters, but I wanted to find a way to measure them objectively. Otherwise, I'd just be rehashing the lists I made years ago. Luckily for me Baseball Reference makes it super easy to look up anything you want for baseball stats, including ways to objectively define and measure things like big comebacks, big plays, or big moments.
Big comebacks was the easiest to measure. At any point in a game, you can calculate a team's win probability based on the score, inning, number of outs, and runners on base. Every game starts with both teams sitting at 50% (there's no built-in home-field advantage in this stat) and ends with one of the two teams at 100%. So for this one, I recorded at the highest win probability the losing team had at any point in the game. Obviously, the lowest win probability for any game measured was 50%, which was also the most common result at 315 games. At the top end, there were 8 times in postseason history where a team managed to turn a 99% win probability into a loss. However, only one of those games ended up making my final list. Apparently the small range of possibilities meant that category had the least effect on whether a game made it to "classic" status.
For big plays, I looked at the win probability added. That's a simple enough concept - if the Twins had a 50% chance of winning before an at bat and a 55% chance after it, that at bat added five points to their win probability. For every game, I decided to count the 10 plays that produced the biggest swing in win probability - regardless of whether that swing helped the winning team or the losing team - and added them together to get what I called Top 10 Swing. Picking the top 10 plays is admittedly arbitrary, but as I was going through the games, it seemed appropriate. In the vast majority of games, the WPA chart had started to flatten out by the time I got to the 10th best play, so I don't think extending this number to 15 or 20 plays would have made much difference.
Unlike the win probability stat, there is no theoretic lower or upper limit to my invented Top 10 Swing. The game with the lowest combined Top 10 Swing was Roy Halladay's no-hitter in game 1 of the 2010 NLDS. The Top 10 Swing score for that game was only 40, which makes sense when you consider the Reds didn't get a hit and so never had a chance to improve their chances of winning. The highest score in this category was a stunning 317, which (minor spoiler alert) happened in the game that ended up at the top of this list. (For all games I write about, I'll include the highest single-play win probability added in bold print to make it stand out).
The last thing I needed to measure was big moments, and luckily there is also a metric for that. The Leverage Index of a plate appearance measures its potential to change the game. In other words, leverage index measures the importance of a plate appearance and, indirectly, the tension of it. Baseball Reference created Leverage Index so that 1 is average (and in my list of postseason games, 1.01 ended up being average). The highest Leverage Index possible for an individual plate appearance comes when the home team is trailing by 1 in the bottom of the 9th (or any extra inning) with two outs and the bases loaded. The exact number varies, from anywhere between 10.1 and 11, depending on how many runs were scored per game in that stadium that year.
For this measure, I simply grabbed the average Leverage Index over all plate appearances throughout the game. The worst game in this regard was 0.12 in game 3 of the 2020 NLCS, when the Dodgers scored 11 runs in the top of the first to immediately take any possibility of excitement out of the game. The best game had an average Leverage Index of 2.07; that game was the 13-inning Game 2 of the 2009 ALCS, when the Yankees and Angels each had multiple innings after the ninth where they had two runners on base. But even that game wasn't quite good enough to make the final list.
So that was it. 1,730 games over 119 years, all sorted by win probability, win probability added, and leverage index. Then I let Excel determine the average and standard deviation of each data set, and added up those numbers to make my final list. Is that the best mathematical way to do that? I have no idea. Seems OK to me. Did it take me a long time? Yes, very much so. No, I'm not going to say how long. It's not important.
I will say I was surprised at some of the results. First of all, many of the games I wrote about were decidedly modern. Twenty-one of the 25 games happened in my lifetime, which didn't seem right until I remembered how many more postseason games there are now than there used to be. In fact, half of all postseason games have occurred since 1997. So of course a large number of these games will be from modern times.
The second surprise was some of the classic baseball games that didn't make the cut. Bobby Thomson's 1951 Shot Heard 'Round the World? Not on here. Kirk Gibson's home run off Dennis Eckersley in 1988? Nope. Game 7 of the 1962 World Series, the one immortalized by a couple of Peanuts strips? Sorry. I won't even get to write about any of the classic games of the 1991 World Series (which, really, is fine, because I've written plenty about that series).
But I will get to write about 25 of the best games ever played, 25 games that had the perfect combination of tension, drama, and heroics. Tomorrow, I'll summarize a few games that just missed the cut, and then I'll cover each game, one at a time, until the best game on my list gets its entry on Opening Day. Hopefully it'll be fun to relive the kinds of games that make baseball so great, while waiting for that day that represents the true start of spring.
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