This World Series, more than any in recent memory, has been dominated by two storylines: The ascendancy of small markets (I hope you enjoyed watching it in your mansions, Dodgers and Yankees!) and the triumph of small ball. Never mind that Rays batters struck out more frequently than did the Guardians in the ALCS, or that the Brewers struck out more, hit more homers, and committed more errors than the Dodgers in the NLCS. We’ve got a narrative here, facts be damned! The teams that avoided strikeouts (um, the Brewers had the 14^th-highest K% in the majors) and were aggressive on the basepaths (um, the Rays were league-average at taking an extra base on hits, the Brewers below-average), with old-school pitching (um, Rays and Brewers starters ranked 20^th and 21^st, respectively, in innings per start) were the ones left standing in the competition for the hunk of metal. They left the three-true-outcomes teams (um, the Brewers had a higher percentage of plate appearances ending in a strikeout, walk, or homer in the Championship Season than the two teams they vanquished in the playoffs, the Dodgers and Padres; point taken re the Rays) in their dust.

Rather than snarkily refute the contention exclusively in parenthetical phrases, I decided to create a model for small ball and calculate a Small Ball Index for each team. Here are the components I used (and, for those of you keeping score at home, their sources):

• High contact percentage: Percentage of swings on which batters make contact with the ball. This is revered in small-ball circles. (Baseball Prospectus leaderboards, Batted Ball tab)
• Low chase percentage: Percentage by which batters swing at pitches outside the strike zone. A low percentage indicates a disciplined, less-swing-happy approach. (Ibid.)
• Low reliance on home runs: The Guillen Number is the percentage of a team’s runs generated by homers. The smaller the Guillen Number, the less reliant the team on a slugger knocking the ball out of the park to score runs. (Baseball Prospectus leaderboards, Standard tab)
• Stolen bases: Self-explanatory. (Ibid.)
• Bunts: I spent a lot of time thinking about this. Should I look at just sacrifices, or all bunts? I decided on the latter, since bunting for a hit is a small-ball tactic as much as actual sacrifices, which have become rare in a universal DH world. (Stathead team batting split finder, Hit Trajectory = Bunts)
• Extra bases taken: Going from first to third or second to home on singles, or first to home on doubles, is aggressive baseball. It’s affected by the batted ball and the runner on base, but in aggregate, taking the extra base is a small-ball tactic. (Baseball Reference, Batting, Baserunning/Misc tab)
• Turning batted balls into outs: The Defensive Efficiency Ratio is the percentage of balls in play resulting in outs. (Baseball Reference, Fielding, Standard Fielding tab)
• Productive outs: This stat, created by Elias and ESPN, measures the percentage of time a team advances a baserunner with no outs or drives in a batter with the second out of the inning. (Baseball Reference, Batting, PR/HR/Situ Hitting tab)

For each statistic, I calculated a z-score, which is the number of standard deviations from the mean. For example, this year the average Defensive Efficiency Ratio was .699, with a standard deviation of .013. The Rays’ .723, best in the majors, was 1.82 standard deviations higher than the mean. Their ALCS opponent Cleveland’s was .691, a z-score of -0.62.

To calculate the Small Ball Index, I simply summed all the z-scores. Here’s the result: