Rangers' World Series pushes Dallas in to Top-10 of Titles over Expected
Dallas teams have won nearly two more championships than anticipated in the past three-plus decades
Rangers reliever Josh Sborz spiked his glove in celebration after a perfectly placed curveball crossed up Ketel Marte for a called strike three catalyzing a celebration across the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The final out on Wednesday night meant the Texas Rangers had defeated the Arizona Diamondbacks 5-0 to win the 2023 World Series. It was Texas’ first ever pro baseball title, and the Dallas area’s first championship since the NBA’s Mavericks hoisted the crown in 2011.
It improved the city of Dallas’s stature from 14th to ninth on my list of Titles over Expected (ToE1). Big D now has 1.78 more championships than we would expect given how many teams it has in the big four men’s North American sports leagues.
Dallas-based teams have now won five percent of the championships available to the metro area’s teams2. Like The Athletic pointed out earlier in the week, 13 metropolitan areas in the U.S. have at least one team in all four major men's sports leagues (MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL), Dallas being one of them. The Rangers helped end one of the longer droughts among those cities.
I’m sure if you ask Dallas area fans which of their teams they’d most want to see win a championship next it would be the Cowboys, a team that despite being self-designated America’s Team, has represented mediocrity since its last Super Bowl victory in 1995.
The torch of futility has now been passed to the Minnesota Vikings who are the oldest active MLB/NBA/NFL/NHL franchise to have never won a championship. The city of Minneapolis resides at the bottom of the ToE table, as well, with the Twin’s World Series ring in 1991 being the last title the city saw.
As I documented in a previous post about the topic the methodology and assumptions I employed to arrive at this metric is as follows:
I looked at the metropolitan areas where championships were won in the four North American men's professional sports leagues -- the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL.
I arbitrarily used 1991 as the starting point because that was the year I was born.
I'm defining teams' markets as the metropolitan areas in which their fans are typically found. For example, I'm lumping all of Wisconsin's major professional sports teams into the greater Milwaukee area because the Green Bay Packers, who play their home games two hours north at Lambeau Field, called Milwaukee home for a portion of their games through the 1990s and are effectively the entire state of Wisconsin's team. Similarly, the Golden State Warriors, who won multiple NBA titles while based in Oakland, Calif., would be considered part of the San Francisco Bay Area.
The New York Giants and New York Jets are included as New York City teams, despite the fact both teams play in New Jersey. The NHL's New Jersey Devils are the lone Jersey team in this analysis.
An important call out is we are assuming every team in a league has an equal chance of winning a championship each season, a fact we know isn't true in practice. Those chances vary across different sports as well. The NBA, for example, is much more deterministic than a sport like hockey -- hockey is inherently random given the units of success (goals) don't happen very often, unlike in basketball where 100+ points scored is the norm in an NBA game.