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October 21, 2006

World Series Prospectus

Detroit Tigers versus St. Louis Cardinals

by Nate Silver

Metro versus Retro? The Battle of Orange (and Blue)? Scratch that. Like just about everyone else on the planet, I was assuming that the Mets would dispatch the Cardinals in the NLCS, depleted rotation and all. Instead, thanks to a couple of very nasty curveballs by Adam Wainwright, we’re left with what Will Carroll has begun to refer to as Murdoch’s Nightmare.

Not that this World Series is without its own compelling angles. For two teams that neither play in the same league nor share any obvious geographic connection, the Cardinals and Tigers have a fair amount of shared history. Detroit and St. Louis have tended to rise and fall together, both as cities and as baseball clubs, and this becomes one of a bare handful of World Series matchups that have occurred at least three times and haven’t involved the Yankees:

Giants-Athletics, 4 Meetings
Cubs-Tigers, 4 Meetings
Cardinals-Red Sox, 3 Meetings
Cardinals-Tigers, 3 Meetings

You can also position this series as the meeting of two great baseball towns, although as I and the rest of the press corps will discover, a great baseball town is not the same thing as a great baseball city.

The bigger problem, frankly, is that this year’s iteration of the Cardinals just isn’t very good. The team finished the regular season with an Elo Rating of 1484, which is below the average of 1500. Although that rating has since risen to 1507 as a result of the Cardinals’ postseason success, this nevertheless represents the lowest Elo Rating for a team entering the World Series in my database, which goes back to 1960. In fact, you can make a good case that the 2006 Cardinals are the worst team to ever play in a World Series, since the two-league, one-winner structure of elder days would have prevented an 83-78 entity from ever playing in October.

Nevertheless, Cardinals fans can find some hope in the fact that the second-worst team ever to play in the World Series, the 1987 Twins (1514 Elo Rating after the LCS), went on to win the damned thing, beating none other than the Cardinals. And for a team that played so flatly for much of the year, the Cardinals have genuinely sparkled in the postseason, as four of their seven October victories have been by at least three runs.