A Baseball Blog - Scientific and Speculative Thoughts from Third Base
Showing posts with label Playoff Trivia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Playoff Trivia. Show all posts
Sunday, November 2, 2025
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.
Tuesday, September 30, 2025
The Big 2025 MLB Postseason Trivia Roundup!
I don’t know that I have much specific to say about this year’s entry in my annual Playoff Trivia Series. Especially not after last year’s version, where I had to fit writing the entire thing in after that last-day double header. This is so much nicer of an experience (especially coming right on the heels of the huge Playlist article that I just published over at Out of Left Field).
Anyway, as a refresher, for those of you looking for a team to bandwagon for this postseason, perhaps this column will be of some use! That’s how it started, as a way for me to compile a whole bunch of interesting factoids about each year’s set of playoff teams and maybe give neutral observers some direction on fun storylines like long droughts or deserving players searching for a win, and it’s been a fun routine for me to preview October every year. So after a brief interruption for the Hot Corner Harbor email list sign-up form, let’s get right into it!
DROUGHTS
You may not have realized it if you haven’t sat and thought about it yet, but this is actually a fairly cursed set of playoff teams. Our dozen teams includes all four of the longest active World Series droughts. There’s of course Cleveland at the top (last win in 1948), they’re well into that upper-echelon of dry spells. You know, that point where almost every span above them got a fancy title “The Curse of”? I’m not sure if Cleveland fans have settled on a cause of their misfortunes yet, but this might be the point where they should start looking for one.
After them, it’s a bunch of expansion teams who have never won a title. Those usually don’t seem to get “Curse of” titles, for whatever reason; I guess because expansion teams are just expected to be bad? Now that the first wave of new teams from 1961 and ‘62 are all taken care of, the Padres and Brewers (established in 1969) share the runner up title, while 1977 additions the Mariners are our fourth-place team.
It’s not often you get the entire top four in October like this. By my count, the only other time it happened was 2015, which was thanks to the Cubs, Guardians, Rangers, and Astros all showing up. That kind of gets to an interesting point, which is that in the first quarter of the 21st century, we’ve actually lost a lot of our Mega-Droughts. Obviously you have the big three of the Cubs, Red Sox, and White Sox. But the Giants, Astros, Nationals, and Rangers were all also at the fifty-year mark as well, and even the Angels took over four decades to make it to the top when they made it back in 2002. That’s a lot of heavy hitters that just aren’t around any more, making it more shocking that we still see years like this one.
Anyway, as a refresher, for those of you looking for a team to bandwagon for this postseason, perhaps this column will be of some use! That’s how it started, as a way for me to compile a whole bunch of interesting factoids about each year’s set of playoff teams and maybe give neutral observers some direction on fun storylines like long droughts or deserving players searching for a win, and it’s been a fun routine for me to preview October every year. So after a brief interruption for the Hot Corner Harbor email list sign-up form, let’s get right into it!
DROUGHTS
You may not have realized it if you haven’t sat and thought about it yet, but this is actually a fairly cursed set of playoff teams. Our dozen teams includes all four of the longest active World Series droughts. There’s of course Cleveland at the top (last win in 1948), they’re well into that upper-echelon of dry spells. You know, that point where almost every span above them got a fancy title “The Curse of”? I’m not sure if Cleveland fans have settled on a cause of their misfortunes yet, but this might be the point where they should start looking for one.
After them, it’s a bunch of expansion teams who have never won a title. Those usually don’t seem to get “Curse of” titles, for whatever reason; I guess because expansion teams are just expected to be bad? Now that the first wave of new teams from 1961 and ‘62 are all taken care of, the Padres and Brewers (established in 1969) share the runner up title, while 1977 additions the Mariners are our fourth-place team.
It’s not often you get the entire top four in October like this. By my count, the only other time it happened was 2015, which was thanks to the Cubs, Guardians, Rangers, and Astros all showing up. That kind of gets to an interesting point, which is that in the first quarter of the 21st century, we’ve actually lost a lot of our Mega-Droughts. Obviously you have the big three of the Cubs, Red Sox, and White Sox. But the Giants, Astros, Nationals, and Rangers were all also at the fifty-year mark as well, and even the Angels took over four decades to make it to the top when they made it back in 2002. That’s a lot of heavy hitters that just aren’t around any more, making it more shocking that we still see years like this one.
Thursday, October 31, 2024
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.
(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.
(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.
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