27 Things That Will Decide the 2026 World Series: 1st Inning

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Twenty-seven is baseball's holy number. It takes 27 outs to win a game, unless it rains—and this year, during the World Series, we don't have to worry about rain. If the atom of the game is the at-bat (made up of three subatomic strikes), then its molecular lattice is the inning (three outs on each side, balanced like the sides of a strand of DNA). Cobble together nine innings, and you have a game. There's something divine about it, the way the whole thing spirals out: 3 x 3 x 9 (which is really just another 3 x 3, right?), all played out on what we call a diamond but what really looks like a flattened cone—a triangle, with a beer gut.

I expect this World Series, played between two of the most delightfully deep and versatile teams in recent memory, to be like a weeklong vigil in the church of ball, so let's begin it by performing a ritual that entwines us with the sport's holy arithmetic. Here are three little wrinkles and big ideas that will (you know, probably; even God is not as unpredictable as baseball) influence the action as the Brewers try to capture their first-ever championship. We'll do three more, and three more after that, and keep the threes coming right up until Game 1 on Friday night.

1. The Fastest Ever vs. The Fastest Ever
By now, it should be news to no one whatsoever that Jacob Misiorowski is the hardest-throwing pitcher in baseball history. He might even have the best fastball ever, though that's a slightly different question and an impossible one to answer. On April 26, I wrote that Misiorowski's start the previous day against the Yankees might never be duplicated by anyone, in terms of the number of pitches thrown at an unbelievable speed for a non-contact strike. It's one of my funniest bad takes ever. Misiorowski equaled or exceeded that outing nine times over the ensuing 100 days or so. He's an outlier. He's a monster. He hasn't been quite as good since the All-Star break, but he's had ample rest over the last few weeks. We'll see some fireworks from him during this series.

What might be news to you, though, is that Misiorowski isn't the only historical outlier who'll appear in the top of the first inning of Game 1. I'm not quite as confident that no hitter has ever swung faster than Junior Caminero as I am that no pitcher has ever thrown harder than Misiorowski, but it's a fact that in the (very limited, dating only to the All-Star break in 2023) bat-tracking era, Caminero's 79.5-MPH average swing speed this season is the fastest Statcast has tracked. Caminero did a better job cutting the plate in half this season, and a better job of swinging with conviction as a result.

The Guardians got Caminero out by throwing him a slew of high fastballs that induced him to expand at the top of the zone. In theory, no pitcher has ever been better-suited to that strategy than Misiorowski, but this feels a little like that moment in Ocean's Eleven (2001) where the demolition crew accidentally blows the Bellagio's backup grid, foiling the gang's initial plan for knocking out the power. The easiest way to confound Caminero has been used up. Now, Misiorowski and the Brewers might have to come up with their equivalent of "The Pinch".

2. The Slumbering Superhero
The numbers haven't been pretty lately. Jackson Chourio is batting .148/.172/.259 since his walkoff single in Game 2 of the NLDS. There's something real in need of redress there, too. He's only walked once in 29 plate appearances over that (tiny) six-game sample, which isn't tenable. But he's also hit into some rotten luck. More importantly, he's now had a moment to gather a deep breath and reset himself for one final burst of genius at the plate. Bet on seeing it.

Because the postseason doesn't look like the regular season in terms of the pitching population, evaluating hitters based on their whole body of work from March through September is a poor way to predict what will happen in October. Therefore, I took the 110 best pitchers who threw at least 50 innings this season (according to Baseball Prospectus's DRA-) and searched up hitters' performances against them. All of the hurlers in question were at least 10% better than an average pitcher, based on the Deserved Run Average model. The leaderboard in expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) against those pitchers among hitters on these two teams looks like this:

Chourio: .362
Jake Bauers: .352
Caminero: .333
Jonathan Aranda: .318
Yandy Díaz: .318
William Contreras: .314
Gary Sánchez: .300
Andrew Vaughn: .299
Brice Turang: .296
Richie Palacios: .295

I don't pretend that this data is destiny. The samples are inherently small. It's worth taking careful note, though, of how far clear of even the Rays' formidable trio Chourio is. As I documented in late August, Chourio has made some vital adjustments of late, and he's tracing a Hall of Fame arc over the first three seasons of his career. That's already included plenty of postseason heroics, which shouldn't surprise us. He hit good pitching well all year; he's never been one to get fat on punishing chumps.

3. The Two Kinds of Defensive Genius
No team in the league turned batted balls into outs more efficiently than the Rays, with a Defensive Efficiency rating of .723, meaning they recorded almost three outs for every four balls in play. The Brewers were a sturdy sixth, though, at .712. They both play great defense, but they couldn't do it much more differently.

No team in baseball used shaded infield alignments more often than the Rays did this year, according to Baseball Savant. No team in baseball used those alignments less often than did the Brewers, going by the same numbers. More so than in the past (before rules changes outlawed the true infield shift), this is subjective, but when you watch the teams play, it's apparent how real the difference in strategy is.

The Rays crowd their weak-side middle infielder much closer to the second-base bag than the Brewers do, on average. In fact, keep an eye out for a possible challenge by the Brewers at some point in the series. The Rays are one of just two teams to be penalized at all for violating the shift ban this season, and they're almost always flirting with doing so. With the stakes as high as they are now, the Brewers will be vigilant.

They have to be, because no team gets more value from the way it positions its defense than Tampa Bay does. According to Sports Info Solutions, they realized a massive 44 runs of value based purely on shifting their infielders this year. We'll talk about one special case within that pool of value in a future installment, but for now, consider some examples of just how well they get their guys in front of balls that would otherwise go through or prove very, very difficult to convert into outs.

The Brewers have a huge source of value on the infield, too. It's just that theirs has a name and a pulse. Brice Turang saved more runs than any other infielder this year, according to SIS and their flagship defensive metric, Defensive Runs Saved. The Brewers' plan for getting outs on grounders and line drives is pretty simple: put Turang somewhere near the ball. Funnel everything to him. It sounds implausible, but it works marvelously.

There's the first inning. Three up, three down. Come back later today for more; this Series will offer us plenty.