It felt, immediately, like The World Series That Ended Too Soon.

When Julio Urias

Was the Dodgers’ six-game victory over the Tampa Bay Rays a good series? It was at least a good series. Was it a great one? In our ranking of all 116 World Series, it’s 30th. We’ll get to why below.

To rank every Fall Classic ever, we leaned on four primary factors:

1. Game leverage index, at Baseball-Reference, which measures how close the game is on each play and how likely the next play is to shift each team’s chances of winning. A game that’s close for nine innings and won by a walk-off in the 10th will rate much better than one in which a team jumps ahead early and runs away with it.

2. Championship leverage index, at The Baseball Gauge. It’s similar to game leverage, except it includes how close the series itself is. A seven-game series will rate much better than a sweep.

3. How memorable the series was. The 1988 World Series wasn’t particularly close, but it produces instant recall for one inning alone.

4. How historically significant it was, and how satisfying that history is.

We’ll list each World Series’ rank in the first two categories. The latter two are subjective, so we’ll just describe them as best we can.

struck out Willy Adames on Tuesday night, it concluded the 951st baseball game of 2020. The 951st game of the 2019 season, by comparison, had been played on June 8, with the Washington Nationals still in fourth place.

How could Adames not swing at that pitch, when even a foul ball would have helped set this season slightly righter, one pitch longer? We weren’t exhausted by baseball yet.

And then it emerged minutes later that Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner had tested positive for COVID-19 — the results coming midgame — and we were reminded that the season ended just soon enough. Not quite soon enough, actually.

Was the Dodgers’ six-game victory over the Tampa Bay Rays a good series? It was at least a good series. Was it a great one? In our ranking of all 116 World Series, it’s 30th. We’ll get to why below.

To rank every Fall Classic ever, we leaned on four primary factors:

1. Game leverage index, at Baseball-Reference, which measures how close the game is on each play and how likely the next play is to shift each team’s chances of winning. A game that’s close for nine innings and won by a walk-off in the 10th will rate much better than one in which a team jumps ahead early and runs away with it.

2. Championship leverage index, at The Baseball Gauge. It’s similar to game leverage, except it includes how close the series itself is. A seven-game series will rate much better than a sweep.

3. How memorable the series was. The 1988 World Series wasn’t particularly close, but it produces instant recall for one inning alone.

4. How historically significant it was, and how satisfying that history is.

We’ll list each World Series’ rank in the first two categories. The latter two are subjective, so we’ll just describe them as best we can.