The Rays Were Supposed to Win 79 Games.

What makes a team a surprise? Not being good. The Dodgers won 100 games and surprised nobody. A surprise is the gap between what you expected and what you got. So to measure one, you need to say out loud what you expected.

Here is ours, and you can do it on a napkin. Take last year’s wins, and give back half the distance from 81. A 97-win team should win about 89. A 65-win team should win about 73. We fit that rule on 750 team-seasons since 1999, and it misses by about 10 wins either way.

One honest note before we use it. We did not print this forecast in March; we built it this week. So we kept it simple enough that you can check it yourself, with no knobs for us to turn after the fact.

The Rays went 77–85 in 2025. The rule said about 79 wins. They won 98. That is 19 wins above the forecast. Only 14 teams in 750 did better. And the team they face, the Brewers, won 103 against a forecast of 90. Both of this year’s finalists came out of nowhere.

You would expect that to be rare among champions. It is the rule. By the end of this you will see why, and why it should make you a little suspicious of every “how they built it” story you read this week.

Champions Live on the Right Side

Look at where the red dots sit. Only three champions in 25 won fewer games than the forecast. Thirteen beat it by 10 or more. The 2013 Red Sox finished last in 2012, beat the rule by 23 wins, and won the whole thing.

Why? Because a title is picked on the outcome. To win one, you almost always need a great season. And a great season is mostly made of things the forecast could not see: a rookie who hits, a pitcher who stays healthy, a dozen one-run games that break your way. Teams that get those breaks show up in October. Teams that do not stay home. So when you look only at the winners, you are looking at the lucky end of the pile.

The Rays Have Done This Before

The biggest surprises of the last 27 years read like a list of October stories. The 2001 Mariners beat the rule by 30 wins and won 116. The 1999 Diamondbacks beat it by 28. Third on the list: the 2008 Rays, worst to first, who also reached the World Series. The Mets show up too, in 2022, 22 wins above the rule. That one ended in the first round, which is its own lesson.

The Rays do it on a small check. Their payroll is about $96 million, among the smallest in baseball. The Brewers spend about $145 million, which is near the middle, not the bottom. Neither club is buying wins the way the Dodgers do. Both are good at the part money cannot buy: finding the season the forecast missed.

What to take home

Before you call anything a surprise, write down what you expected. If you cannot, you were not surprised; you were just watching. Then notice what you are looking at. A list of winners is a list of teams that got the breaks, so it will always make the breaks look like a plan.

That does not mean the Rays got lucky and nothing more. Nobody wins 98 games on luck alone. It means this: of the many teams that were about as good as the Rays, the one in the World Series is the one whose year broke right. Watch the “blueprint” stories this week with that in mind.

The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at www.retrosheet.org.