A World Series championship is invariably built on moments that fans of the winning team will never forget. So it is for the 2020 Los Angeles Dodgers, who capped a season of dominance with the franchise's first title since the waning days of the Reagan administration.
I'm going to recount some of those moments and will try to do so with a little analytical rigor. If we look beyond the highlight-reel fodder that will dominate the obligatory Dodgers season documentary, what were the main steppingstones to this drought-snapping victory?
To narrow things down, I'll turn to a few different measures before making some subjective calls for the final list. In my toolbox will be win probability and championship probability from Baseball-Reference.com. I'm also going to use my own season projection and tracking model. Each morning, I run simulations of the remainder of the season to capture any changes from roster moves, injuries or the added data from on-the-field results. I keep a log of each of these simulations so that I can go back and see the shape of each team's season narrative. I do that to make lists like this.
Let's get to it. We'll do this not as a ranking, but as a chronological progression.