Being a champion is hard. That's a basic tenet of sports, and that's why there's only one trophy handed out at the end of the season. Sure, the sports landscape is filled with dynasties like the UConn women's basketball team, the Golden State Warriors and the New England Patriots.
But the reality is that winning it all and then having the guts and skill to go back out and do it again is next to impossible. Especially in Major League Baseball.
The last team to win back-to-back titles was the Yankees, back when the Bronx Bombers capped off a three-peat in 2000. There are several reasons baseball teams haven't been able to get to the top of the mountain twice in a row since then.
Jay Jaffe, a senior writer at FanGraphs and a member of the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR), points to how the playoff format is structured.
"I think the main thing comes down to just the playoff format," he said. "In a short series, anything can happen."
Under the current MLB playoff format, the three division winners in each league are automatically in the playoffs. But before they play, the two teams with the best records that didn't win their divisions face off in a one-game, win-or-go home match up in the Wild Card round. And really, just about any team can win a single game.
"At best, you've got a 55 percent chance of winning that game," said Rob Neyer, another SABR member and the author of "Powerball: Anatomy of a Modern Baseball Game." "If you run the math, you realize that just knocked your chances of winning the World Series down by a lot."
And there are other factors that make it difficult for good teams to repeat. In baseball, a single player's impact just doesn't go as far as in other sports.
In a sport like football, the success of a team can sometimes be decided by the play of a single quarterback.
And Neyer says that talent in baseball is much more diluted than in the NBA — which has an active roster of just 13 players — where just a few individual star players can have a disproportionate impact on the outcome of a game.
"Barring injuries, you pretty much know what you're going to get from those guys [in the NBA]," he said. "But a baseball team ... over the course of the season, they're going to use 50 players, and 20, 25, 30 of those players might be asked to play key roles."
With rosters that large, Neyer says there's a great deal of variability in performance.
"That's why the range is so big for the projection of a team. And then the luck factor within games is also massive, which makes it very difficult to predict what a team is going to do season to season. There are really good teams that don't make the playoffs, let alone win the World Series."
Still, Neyer thinks there isn't a clear pattern to why champions repeat — or don't — in baseball.
"Since the Yankees run ended in the early '60s, I think the teams that have repeated were flukes more than anything," he said.
Right now, it's hard to predict if the Red Sox can top the AL East again this year. A lot can change over the course of 162 games, but if there isn't a turnaround, Boston may find itself in the unenviable position of playing in a Wild Card round — where a team's record doesn't matter — and anything can happen.
