![]() ![]() 2 As we noted before the game, Boston ranks ninth all-time in final Elo, and its blended Elo comes in 12th among historical champs. Just as my former colleague Reuben Fischer-Baum did when rating MLB teams a few years ago, here I’m blending a team’s final end-of-playoffs Elo with its peak and average daily Elo from throughout the season. In a nutshell, it tracks a team’s estimated skill level over time, updating after every game and accounting for things like home-field advantage and starting pitching in each contest. Here at FiveThirtyEight, we also have our own pet metric for judging a team’s performance - the Elo rating. Their 53.3 total WAR during the regular season was almost exactly the same as Houston’s last season. For Boston, WAR per game splits the difference somewhat between winning percentage and Pythagorean record, ranking the 2018 Sox 27th among champions. Digging deeper into a team’s performance, we can also look at WAR (averaging together the versions found at and FanGraphs) to get a sense of how well its roster played at a player-by-player level. According to Pythagoras, Boston really “only” played like a 103-win team that saw somewhat good fortune in close games. ![]() And by this standard, the 2018 Red Sox do drop down a bit - falling to 30th among all-time champs. Perhaps a better judge of a team’s performance than raw W-L record is its underlying run differential, as measured by the Pythagorean expectation. In other words, on wins alone, seasons like that of the 2018 Sox are exceedingly rare in baseball history. MLB hadn’t seen a 108-game winner since the 2001 Mariners, and no team that had won so much had captured the World Series since the 1998 Yankees. 667, Boston ranks 17th all-time among eventual World Series winners. There, we looked at teams according to a handful of criteria: So, we must ask: How does this Boston squad stack up against history’s greatest champions? Let’s put the Sox to the test using the same metrics we employed to judge another recent all-time champ, the 2016 Chicago Cubs. After all, the Red Sox won 108 regular-season games and went a scorching 11-3 during the playoffs. That’s a topic we covered as well going into the series, but this team was also an all-time great squad, period. If next year is anything like this one, that will be a fun three-game set.In the celebration Sunday after Boston pitcher Chris Sale struck out Manny Machado to end Game 5 of the World Series, clinching a title for the Red Sox, much was made about this being the best Boston team ever.
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