The Upstarts Won 103 Games.

How did a club of small-market upstarts sweep the stars? It didn’t. Milwaukee won 103 games, more than anyone in baseball. Los Angeles won 100. The better team won the series.

You probably heard it the other way: the two-time champions against the plucky Brewers. That framing comes from rings and payroll, not from the season. A reputation is not a priori you should be using.

So here is what you will get from this: the one extra column of arithmetic that tells you whether a team collapsed, or whether October simply did to them what it does to everyone. Then you can watch the World Series the same way.

The Shape Was the Surprise. The Winner Was Not.

Here is how we got the odds. Treat each game as a coin weighted by the two records. Milwaukee wins a single game about 52 times in 100 — barely better than a flip. That makes the Brewers about a 54% pick to win a seven-game series.

A four-game sweep is the rare part. Four straight wins at 52% happens about 1 time in 14. Notice the difference: the result was a near coin flip, and the margin was the long shot. When someone calls this a shock, ask which of the two they mean.

Measure a Team Against Itself

Now the Dodgers. They scored 4.9 runs a game all summer and 3.1 in October — almost two runs a game gone. That looks like a collapse. Then you check the other three clubs that reached the final four.

Milwaukee is down too, by about a run. Tampa Bay is down one and a half. Cleveland is flat. Nobody in the final four is hitting better than they did all summer. October takes runs from everybody; the Dodgers just lost the most.

Where the Series Was Won

So if both clubs lost offense, what separated them? We had to look at the other side of the ball to find our answer. Milwaukee allowed 3.8 runs a game in the regular season. In October it has allowed 2.6. That is more than a run a game saved, and it came against a lineup that scored the fourth-most runs in baseball.

The Dodgers scored 1, 4, 2 and 4. You cannot win a series that way against anyone, let alone the best record in the sport. The story is not that the stars choked; it is that the Brewers’ pitchers were better than their own very good summer, at the moment it counted most.

If you want the Shohei Ohtani part of this, we did the arithmetic on his October in Issue #201.

What to take home

When a number looks alarming, ask what it should be compared with, and prefer the team’s own season over anybody’s reputation. “The Dodgers scored 3.1 a game” sounds like a collapse. “The Dodgers lost two runs a game in a month where everyone lost runs, to the team with the best record in baseball” is a different story, and it is the true one.

We will run the same check on the World Series. And when someone calls a result an upset, check the records first. Half the time the “upstart” won more games.