more stoopid stats: world series drought edition

Table 1: The 30 longest droughts

I was thinking about the Cubs' victory in the World Series, and how it brings to a close the longest championship drought in Major League Baseball history. And what I was thinking the most is that this is an area ripe for the StoopidStats treatment.

First of all, I should note that I take issue with the fact that people are saying that the cubs ended a 108-year drought. They last won the World Series in 1908. By that logic, when a team wins the WS for the second time in a row, they are ending a one-year drought. That being the case, I think it's more appropriate to say that the Cubs ended a 107-year drought. But who am I to fight the world? Since I can't find the world, I am accepting that a drought's length is X-Y where X and Y are years that the team in question won the World Series, and they didn't win in any intervening year. Where X is the team's first win, I take Y to be 1902 (the last year before the inception of the modern World Series. Where Y is the team's most recent win, I take X to be 2016 (the current year). Although baseball's championship was called the World Series during some years in the 1800's, I am only considering the modern World Series, which began in 1903.

Now that the Cubs' drought is over, the longest active drought belongs to the Indians who are stuck in a 68-year jag. There have been a total of 141 droughts, which is equal to F+P-1 where F is the number of franchises (30) and P is the number of World Series played (111). That includes 23 one-year droughts which, per above, represent a team winning the series a second, third, fourth or fifth time in a row. Table 1 shows the 30 longest droughts, and table 2 shows each franchise's longest drought. A note about the second table -- there are 31 entries because the Cardinals have had two 24-year droughts, which are tied for the franchise's longest.




Table 2: Each franchise's longest drought

Droughts these days are necessarily longer than droughts from years past, simply because there are more franchises. With 30 teams, each one wins, on average, once every 30 years. When there were only 16 teams, each one won, on average, once every 16 years. I should put something together that normalizes adjusts drought length for the number of teams. The task is made more difficult by the fact that many of these droughts span years that included expansions. So it's not as if I can multiply each drought's length by a simple factor. More troubling is how to handle the two years (1904 and 1994) that didn't have a World Series. I am open to suggestions.