2025 World Series Trivia Wrap-Up + Best Players Without a World Series

With the final game of the 2025 Season in the books, I can follow up on my initial column with another trivia tradition here at Hot Corner Harbor: the Annual Best Active Players Without a World Series Sporcle Quiz! I’ll include a little more writing here before we get to the break (to give the spoilers within some breathing room), but I’ll also add that if you’d like more World Series fun facts, you can take a walk down memory lane through a full Sporcle playlist collecting past years’ editions of this quiz (I think it’s actually kind of neat to watch the list of names change slowly over time), as well as an entire second playlist of various other playoff quizzes that I’ve made.

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2024 Triva Wrap-Up: Best Players Without a World Series Quiz, and Other Tidbits

The 2024 season has come to a close; congratulations to the 2024 Dodgers on their World Series win! As usual, I’m here with my trivia wrap-up, including the new entry in my yearly Sporcle Quiz series, Best Active Players Without a World Series, 2024 Edition. If you’d like to go in completely unspoiled, maybe give it a try now; I’ll touch on some of the specifics later in the column. I’ve also updated my other playlist of World Series quizzes to account for 2024, if you haven’t tried those before.

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(I was not expecting to have to do this write-up tonight after the first four innings; good thing I’m flexible!)

The Dodgers’ win doesn’t provide us with as many remarkable stats to rattle off as the Rangers’ win last year did. Their title drought comes to an end at just 3 years (nearly six decades shy of the Rangers’ drought last year), and there wasn’t any historic turnaround involved in this one. This was the twelfth time the Dodgers had met the Yankees in the World Series (a distant record compared to any other match-up), and fully half of the team’s eight titles have now come at New York’s expense. A lot of their team this year was around for their 2020 championship.

2023 World Series Trivia: Best Players Without a World Series, and More!

The 2023 World Series has ended, with the Texas Rangers defeating the Arizona Diamondbacks and winning their first championship, in what is just the third-ever all-expansion team World Series. And as is tradition here, I have published a new Sporcle quiz: Best Active Players Without a World Series, 2023 Edition. I’ll write a little more after the break, but I’ll give the spoiler-averse among us a chance to try it before hitting all of that.

Additionally, I’ve updated my other new quiz, Stars with World Series wins on surprising teams, so if you missed that, maybe give it a look as well! I also updated my other postseason quizzes as well to reflect their win (although the WPA ones might need to wait a day or two, since pulling the data for those is a little more work). 

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Anyway, the Rangers’ win brings an end to what was the second-longest World Series drought, at 62 seasons (behind only the Guardians, who are at 75 years). The Brewers and Padres take over second place, as the two 1969 expansion teams have not won a championship in their 55 years (the other half of that expansion, the Royals and Expos/Nationals, are both covered). That also leaves those two teams with the Mariners, Rockies, and Rays as the only five teams left in MLB without a title.

That really is a remarkable thing, too; 62 years was tied for the seventh-longest drought in history with the Senators/Twins (1924-1987). That also means that six of the fourteen longest World Series droughts in MLB history (all 50+ years) have ended since the turn of the millennium (the Cubs, White Sox, Red Sox, Rangers, Giants, Astros, and Expos/Nationals).

Additionally, the Rangers’ turnaround from 2022 (when they went 68-94) represents the biggest single-season improvement for a World Series winner in history. And I think their win will hopefully give pause to the idea that signing free agents is a bad team-building strategy, given how many people seemed to want to point to the collapse of the Mets and historical bad luck of the Padres in the final days of the regular season (I was never sure why the Phillies were again being ignore here). Yeah, things didn’t work out in 2022, but you are actually signing the best of these players for the long-haul!