Ranking MLB's 10 Greatest Postseason Runs Since 2000

A Major League Baseball season unfolds over many months, but one in particular is where memories are made. If you're in the game and you want to become a legend, do it in October.

For a reminder of how it's done, let's look back at the 10 greatest playoff runs of the last 25 years.

This could have been a purely objective exercise based on wins, losses and run differential, but that would have risked missing the point. It's better to get subjective for the sake of really getting down to World Series winners that still have "Remember that team?" energy.

To keep things nice and fair, we limited selections to one team per franchise. The teams that made the cut are ranked according to how memorable they are and are likely to remain for years to come.

Was the 2005 White Sox's World Series really that memorable? Truth be told, the best answer is "Eh..." and one of those rocking hand gestures.

However, we simply refuse to participate in the long-running erasure of the 2005 White Sox from our collective cultural memory. They also get style points for A) winning the franchise's first title in 88 years and B) being one of the most dominant teams in history.

The White Sox were never not in first place in the AL Central as they won 99 games in the 2005 regular season. And in MLB's wild card era, only the 2005 White Sox and the 1999 Yankees have pulled off a .900 winning percentage in the postseason.

Pitching guided the White Sox's way that October, wherein 11 of the 12 starts they got resulted in at least 7.0 innings pitched. Altogether, the staff allowed just nine earned runs over 113.0 innings for a 2.55 ERA.

Even if it was a sweep, the White Sox's win over Houston in the World Series was still a white-knuckle experience. Each game was decided by two or fewer runs, and Game 3 lasted 14 innings. We'd also be remiss if we didn't mention Scott Podsednik, he of the zero regular-season homers, walking off Game 2 with a solo shot.

World Series: 4-3 vs. San Francisco Giants

The Angels had existed for 40 years before 2002, and had never once even made the World Series. If you want to know what that kind of agony feels like, only Seattle Mariners fans can tell you about it these days.

If you weren't there for it, trust us when we tell you that the 2002 Angels were one of the great vibes teams anyone had ever seen. The Thunderstix and the Rally Monkey eventually got played out, but it was revolutionary stuff 24 years ago.

The Troy Glaus-Garrett Anderson duo in the lineup was fun. The Troy Percival-Francisco Rodriguez duo in the bullpen might have been even more fun. Mike Scioscia also really liked his small ball , which gave the Angels a different flavor than every other team that October.

Further, the Angels got in everyone's good graces when they knocked the Yankees off in the ALDS. Obviously not Yankees fans' good graces, mind you, but everyone else was sick of the Yankees after they had represented the AL in 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001.

The actual World Series was a banger, with four of the seven games between the Angels and Giants decided by just one run. To make that happen in Game 6, the Angels needed a six-run rally punctuated by Scott Spiezio's huge three-run homer .

Every year, there's a team that gets into October and gives off a sort of "Just lucky to be there" energy. More often than not, teams like those go nowhere.

Every now and then, though, you get a 2003 Marlins squad.

Though they managed to sneak into the playoffs via a wild card berth, they were widely expected to get bounced by a Giants squad that had won 100 games and which still featured Barry Bonds at the height of his power. That's not what happened, in large part because the Marlins held Bonds to just two hits in the NLDS.

Then came the Cubs series, which is certainly more famous for the fact that the Cubs lost . But just so everyone's clear, they didn't blow Game 6 because of that one fan . They lost that one because the Marlins put on a relentless eight-run rally that continued into Game 7, which they won 9-6.

Along the way, we got to know a young Miguel Cabrera as he hit three home runs in the playoffs. And we really got to know Josh Beckett, whose series-clinching shoutout in Game 6 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium should be the textbook definition of "stunned silence."

World Series: 4-3 vs. Kansas City Royals

The Giants won three World Series in the first half of the 2010s, and we won't argue with any Giants fans who say they prefer the run in 2010 or the run in 2012.

And yet, there's just something about the 2014 run that still gives off the feeling of pure madness. Maybe it's some residual disbelief that it was home runs by Joe Panik, Mike Morse and Travis Ishikawa that put the team in the World Series.

Or, maybe it's the still-radiating ridiculousness of the fact that Madison Bumgarner literally did that .

He pitched at least 7.0 innings in all six of his starts, bookended by shutouts in the NL Wild Card Game and in Game 5 of the World Series. That he followed the latter with 5.0 innings of shutout ball to save Game 7 just two days later is one of the great heroic feats in all of MLB history.

For Royals fans, that the 2014 World Series ended with Alex Gordon still on third base is one of the great "What if?" debates of recent memory. For Giants fans, all that matters is that Bumgarner left him stranded there.

The 2019 Nationals are what a team looks like when it refuses to go away.

They came back from 12 games under .500 during the regular season, and they eventually came from behind to win all three of their winner-take-all games in the postseason. And for those, the highlights are forever.

Anthony Rendon and Juan Soto going back-to-back off Clayton Kershaw to tie NLDS Game 5? Epic. Howie Kendrick's go-ahead grand slam in that game? Also epic. Rendon and Kendrick again in Game 7 of the World Series? So epic.

This was also, of course, the October of Stephen Strasburg. He became the first pitcher to ever go 5-0 in a single postseason, and he did so with a 1.98 ERA. He was the reason the Nats were even able to force a Game 7 in the World Series, as he came through with 8.1 innings of two-run ball when they faced elimination in Game 6.

To say that resulting triumph was a long time coming for the franchise would be understating it. Even if the first 35 years were in Montreal and not Washington D.C., it was still the Nationals' first World Series and championship in 50 years of trying.

Lest anyone forget, it took a miracle for the 2011 Cardinals just to get into the playoffs.

They had to erase an 8.5-game deficit, and the final act of that play didn't happen until a day of wild Game 162 action that still lives in baseball lore. Chris Carpenter pitched a two-hitter with 11 strikeouts to seal a wild-card berth, and that turned out to be a prologue of sorts.

Some of us can still picture it now. NLDS Game 5. Chris Carpenter vs. Roy Halladay. One pitches eight one-run innings and the other goes the distance and allows nothing. Final score: Cardinals 1, Phillies 0.

If the NLCS was relatively uneventful, the World Series most definitely was not. Albert Pujols homered three times in a Game 3 blowout, and Game 6 is rightfully counted among the best games of the century so far.

Josh Hamilton was clutch. Lance Berkman was clutch. David Freese was uber- clutch, both tying and winning Game 6 and ultimately finishing the postseason with 21 runs batted in. It was a record for a single October until Adolis García broke it in 2023.

This is the third of three World Series titles the Dodgers have won just since 2020, so perhaps there is some recency bias going on here.

What nobody will soon forget, though, is Shohei Ohtani having the greatest game ever by an individual player in Game 4 of the NLCS. A three-homer game is special. A 10-strikeout game is special. The two together is capital-I Insane .

As if that wasn't enough for Los Angeles and the entire nation of Japan to gloat over, Yoshinobu Yamamoto pitched the first two complete games in the postseason since 2017 in NLCS Game 2 and World Series Game 2. He also became the first pitcher to win three World Series games since Randy Johnson in 2001.

The 2025 World Series otherwise featured two of the best games of the century, and the Dodgers won both of them. Freddie Freeman walked off Game 3 in the 18th inning. In Game 7, there was Andy Pages' catch , Miguel Rojas' game-tying shot * and Will Smith's winning shot .

*Just so it doesn't look like we're glossing over that… seriously, holy [bleep].

In the end, the Dodgers won a World Series that has a strong case as the best ever. And whether you love 'em or hate 'em, everyone should agree that they earned it.

Has it really been a quarter-century since the 2001 Diamondbacks stunned the world? More to the point, has it really been a quarter-century since Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling did that ?

For anyone who's too young to remember, you can basically imagine two guys each having a generational playoff run at the same time. Truly, Johnson and Schilling did not take a series off:

Their final tally? A total of 12 appearances and 89.2 innings, with a 1.30 ERA and 103 strikeouts against only 14 walks.

Though this largely explains how the 2001 D-backs triumphed over the Yankees, it took a team effort to overcome three successive gut punches in Games 3, 4 and 5 in New York. And even after all that, they ultimately faced the prospect of rallying against Mariano Rivera in Game 7.

Luis Gonzalez got all the glory for his walk-off bloop , and rightfully so. But please, do us all a favor and spread the word that Tony Womack's game-tying double was actually the more pivotal hit .

Even after 108 years of misery, the 2016 Cubs looked inevitable. Until they didn't. Then did again. Then didn't again.

Their regular season was a 103-win breeze, and they made relatively easy work of the Giants and Dodgers to get to the World Series. The closest they came to trouble was a 2-1 deficit to Los Angeles in the NLCS, but they then won three straight and outscored the Dodgers by 17 runs in the process.

The World Series? Different story. When they went down 3-1 to Cleveland, history was not on their side. No team had come back from 3-1 in the World Series since the Royals over the Cardinals in 1985.

What happened next is a story that Cubs fans will be telling to their kids and grandkids for a long time. Wins in Game 5 and 6. And then in Game 7, when they refused to let Rajai Davis' home run break them. To that end, Jason Heyward's mouth and Ben Zobrist's bat did the talking.

It was only the fourth World Series Game 7 to go into extra innings, and there was even a rain delay before the 10th inning started. But as any Cubs fan will tell you, after having to wait for 108 years, what's an extra hour or so as long as the W is flying in the end?

World Series: 4-0 vs. St. Louis Cardinals

What's worse than a 108-year wait for a World Series? How about an 86-year wait featuring too many heartbreaking close calls to count.

If you want to get technical, the Red Sox lost five seven-game series that went the distance between 1919 and 2003. There were World Series defeats in 1946, 1967, 1975 and 1986. There was also the 2003 ALCS, which followed the usual script of the Red Sox snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

All that history was not just front and center, but mocking the Red Sox when they went down to the Yankees 3-0 in the 2004 ALCS. It was a death sentence, as no team had ever before erased that kind of deficit in an MLB playoff series.

Instead, heroes arrived as if out of those portals in Avengers: Endgame . Dave Roberts with the stolen base . David Ortiz with the walk-offs in Game 4 and Game 5 . Curt Schilling with the bloody sock . Johnny Damon with the grand slam .

After all that led to the Yankees' demise in the ALCS, actually winning the World Series felt like a formality. For history's sake, all that matters is that the Red Sox got it done to officially turn the "Curse of the Bambino" into history.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference , FanGraphs and Baseball Savant .