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.
But there is of course one big exception there: their top acquisition for the year, Shohei Ohtani. The likely-MVP was fourteenth on our list entering the postseason, and he made the most of his first playoff appearance (at least, prior to that shoulder injury in Game 2 of the Series). The other big removal from the list was former Platinum Glove outfielder Kevin Kiermaier, who they acquired from the Blue Jays at the deadline. The 12-year veteran announced this would be his final season and was removed from the Dodgers’ postseason roster to make room for Miguel Rojas, but it does send him out on a highlight.
Actually, speaking of Rojas, while the Dodgers only had two players on the official Best Player quiz, they did also have an unusual number of close misses for the list. Tommy Edman, another deadline acquisition, was the closest, missing my cutoff (18.5 career WAR, per Baseball-Reference) by about half of a Win. Eleven-year vet Rojas was about a win short himself.
Yet another deadline pickup, Jack Flaherty, needed one or two good seasons, but he was the Tigers’ active WAR leader back when I did my write-up at the start of the postseason, since I include anyone who touched that team’s roster during the season. And Teoscar Hernandez was about 1.5 Wins shy, but he played on the 2017 Astros, so he already didn’t qualify for my list for that same reason (he was traded back at the 2017 deadline for Fransisco Liriano).
As I also mentioned back in that last article, there was no player with a chance to join the 18-player Three-Team club (that is, players who have won a title with three different franchises). World Series MVP Freddie Freeman did pick up his second, though (after the 2021 Braves), as did reliever Daniel Hudson (2019 Nationals); they join teammate Mookie Betts (who joined the club back with the 2020 win). And if you go by the “played for them at all during the season” rule, you can add Jason Heyward (2016 Cubs), too, although they cut him back in late August due to roster crunch.
And in the weirdest bit of trivia, 2024 marks the fifth consecutive World Series won by a player named Will Smith; the Dodgers catcher accounts for 2020 and 2024, while left-handed reliever Will Smith set a record by winning consecutively with the 2021 Braves, 2022 Astros, and 2023 Rangers. That certainly doesn’t seem like the kind of streak that’s going to happen again, so I guess we should appreciate it.
With that, we can close the book on the 2024 season and move on to offseason concerns, like Award votings, free agent signings, and of course Hall of Fame voting. As always, I should have a lot to say on all of that, so feel free to subscribe below for updates whenever I publish something new!
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