From Teddy Ballgame to All Rise: The Myth of the Postseason Choker

Ted Williams pretty famously hit .200 in the World Series. It was one of the big weapons, probably the biggest weapon, wielded by his favorite newspaper critics. There’s not a whole lot you can use to knock Teddy Ballgame, who hit .344/.482/.634 over his career — that career on-base percentage is STILL the highest in baseball history, higher than Ruth, higher than Gehrig, almost 40 points higher than Barry Bonds, who was intentionally walked pretty much every time he came up in the 2000s.

But he hit .200 in the 1946 World Series, and, yes, he only played in the one World Series, and, yes, it was the year after he got back from World War II and he was exhausted, and, yes, it was only 25 at-bats, and, yes, he was twice robbed of hits by outstanding defensive plays in the decisive Game 7, yes, the Cardinals’ manager Eddie Dyer had a scout at every Red Sox game for three months studying and charting every Williams’ at-bat to create a special short term plan to stop him.

But the mind abhors complexity, especially when it comes to sports. Ted Williams was a choker. And, because the Red Sox failed to surround him with much talent — having decided that Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays, for example, were not their style — he never made it back to the World Series and retired a choker and, to some at least, was a choker until the day he died.

Aaron Judge is the greatest hitter of this generation. He might just be the greatest hitter who ever lived. That’s a discussion for another day, but in this bananas time when pitchers come at you like tanks, each of them throwing 100 mph with exploding sliders and shape-shifting sweepers, Judge is hitting .306/.426/.649 these last five years. Only Shohei is even in his stratosphere, and he’s only just there. 

Look at the OPS+ leaders over those five years:

The crazy part is Judge is only getting better. Over the last TWO years, he’s hitting .326/.457/.695 — that’s a 220 OPS+. It’s Aaron Judge’s world, and we’re just lucky to be living in it.

BUT … yeah, Aaron Judge has had some rough Octobers. From 2020-2024, he hit just .160 in the postseason. He was just four for 18 in the World Series. And so the narrative is written as a question: Why can’t Judge hit in the postseason? 

The most likely answers — exhaustion after a long season, the postseason barrage of bullpen terminators, teams more effectively pitching to his weak spots, the unreliability of small sample sizes — are thrown away for the more obvious answer.

AARON JUDGE CHOKES!

There must be something at least a little bit flattering about this because throughout sports history the choke label has been placed on, among others, Ted Williams, LeBron James, Peyton Manning, Andre Agassi, Patrick Mahomes (really!), Tom Watson, Novak Djokovic, Clayton Kershaw, Mark Spitz, Martina Navratilova and Barry Bonds. I mean, that’s pretty decent company.

But it probably doesn’t feel flattering, and I’m sure it adds extra weight. It can’t be fun to be Aaron Judge and have the John Smoltzes of the world talk around the clock about how he’s got to turn things around.

Tuesday night, Aaron Judge did what he does. I don’t know where it ranks among his all-time great games, but given the moment — the Yankees trailing an elimination game against the rampaging Toronto Blue Jays — it will be remembered as his best game. 

And now, maybe, everybody can shut up about Aaron Judge as a choker. He’s hitting .636 in this series, and yes, that’s a small sample size, too. He’s the same incredible player he ever was. It’s just the story that changes.

There was a stat making the rounds the other day — teams that win the first two games of a five-game series go on to win the series 89% of the time.

That sounds like something. It really does. It sounds like teams that take a 2–0 lead have momentum on their side, they’ve broken the spirit of their opponents, they are bursting with confidence, etc. You can do 10,000 pregame shows with this sort of stat.

OK, now do this: Imagine a coin. A fair coin. A 50–50 coin. You flip it five times. The first two times it comes up tails.

What’s the chance that the next three flips will come up heads?

There’s a 50% chance it comes up heads the first time.

There’s a 50% chance it comes up heads the second time — .50 x .50 = .25. So there’s a 25% chance you’ll get two heads in a row.

There’s a 50% chance it comes up heads the third time — .50 x .50 x .50 = .125. So there’s a 12.5% chance it comes up heads a third time in a row.

That means that after flip two, tails has an 87.5% chance of “winning the series.”

Baseball: 89% chance. Coin flip: 88% chance.

We love to assign magical reasoning to basic math.

Seattle can get back to the ALCS for the first time since 2001 with a victory today in Detroit … and it feels a little bit like a winner-take-all game even if it isn’t. For a reason that I know will make sense to a lot of you older baseball fans, it makes me think a lot about Game 6 of the 1986 NLCS between the Mets and Astros.

That game, the Mets had a chance to clinch the series while the Astros did not … BUT it felt like a winner-take-all game because everybody knew the Astros would start Mike Scott in Game 7, and the Mets could not hit Mike Scott. Nobody in 1986 could hit Mike Scott. The game went 16 wild innings, and the Mets did win and punched their ticket to the World Series.

To this day, everybody involved in that game — Mets and Astros alike — knows that if the Astros had won, they would have gone to the Series. That’s how good Mike Scott was that year.

Today’s pitching matchup is Seattle’s Bryce Miller vs. Detroit’s Casey Mize, but the most important pitcher on the day will be Tarik Skubal. He’s waiting for Game 5. It’s not quite a Mike Scott situation because Skubal has only completed one game in his entire career, while Scott threw five shutouts JUST IN 1986, but the theme is the same. The Mariners are trying to break free from their haunted history. They do NOT want to have to beat Skubal.

In a rush on Monday morning, I wrote this about the Yankees-Blue Jays series:

The Yankees, I’m sure, don’t feel entirely hopeless about being down 2-0 in this series. They come back home now, and the Blue Jays are basically out of pitchers and have to throw Shane Bieber in Game 3; he has made just nine starts in the last two years.

I unfortunately didn’t have time to expand on the Bieber thought, which was a shame because I got a flurry of fairly angry Brilliant Reader responses — you know, as angry as Canadians get — about what they viewed as a Bieber diss. Let me assure you, it was anything but a Bieber diss. I love the guy. But I think what happened on Tuesday (with Bieber not making it out of the third) was as predictable as San Diego sunshine. Bieber was a terrific pitcher before he started feeling elbow pain in 2023. He pitched great in his first two starts of 2024 before having to shut it all down for Tommy John surgery. 

He came back in late August, and while his run prevention was pretty good (a 3.57 ERA), he’d given up eight home runs in just 40 innings, and he struggles now to get that final strike. I still hope he can return to being the Shane Bieber who won the Cy Young Award in 2020. But he’s not that guy now. It was going to be a real tightrope for him to get through this Yankees lineup at Yankee Stadium, and he couldn’t quite do it.