H021
The Yankees outscored the Pirates 55–27. How did the Pirates win the World Series?
New York won three games by a combined score of 38–3. Pittsburgh won four games by a combined score of 24–17.
55–27 Yankees in runs. 4–3 Pirates in games. New York concentrated its runs in three blowouts — 16–3, 10–0, 12–0. Pittsburgh distributed enough runs to win four separate games, sealed by Bill Mazeroski's walk-off home run in Game 7. The Pirates' −28 run differential is still the largest ever posted by a World Series winner.
Same shape as our gerrymandering and bowling exhibits: when a contest is decided by winning individual rounds rather than adding up every point scored, how a total is distributed can matter more than how large it is.
Try it somewhere else
In the 2019 Wimbledon final, Roger Federer won more points and more games than Novak Djokovic.
Djokovic won the title. In the contests you follow, what actually decides the winner?
Explore how this shows up in real district maps
It is the same mechanism our Gerrymandering exhibit shows with voters and districts: winning the units that count — games, or districts — can matter far more than winning the underlying total, whether that total is runs scored or votes cast.
See why total runs do not decide a series
Each World Series game is a separate contest. Winning 16–3 counts as one win, just like winning 3–2. Once a team has scored enough to win a game, additional runs increase the series run total but do not create additional wins.
It gets stranger: Yankees second baseman Bobby Richardson was named Series MVP — the only time a player from the losing team has won the award. He batted .367 and drove in a record 12 runs, mostly in the blowout wins that inflated New York's run total without deciding the series.
Has this happened in presidential elections?
Four times, the candidate with the most popular votes lost the presidency. The Electoral College counts states won, not total votes, so a big margin in one state adds to the national total without adding a single electoral vote.
| Year | Won the popular vote | Won the presidency | Popular-vote margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1876 | Tilden · 50.9%, 184 electoral votes | Hayes · 47.9%, 185 electoral votes | 252,666 |
| 1888 | Cleveland · 48.6%, 168 | Harrison · 47.8%, 233 | 94,530 |
| 2000 | Gore · 48.4%, 266 | Bush · 47.9%, 271 | 543,895 |
| 2016 | Clinton · 48.2%, 227 | Trump · 46.1%, 304 | 2,868,686 |
Samuel Tilden in 1876 is the only candidate to win an outright majority of the popular vote and lose. In 1824, Andrew Jackson won the most popular and electoral votes but not a majority, and the House chose John Quincy Adams; that is a different mechanism, so it is not listed.
Related exhibits
Sources: scores, dates, and MVP result from Baseball Reference and the National Baseball Hall of Fame's official 1960 World Series records. Run totals (55–27) and the −28 run differential are computed directly from the seven final scores above. Presidential results from National Archives Electoral College records and the American Presidency Project (UCSB); percentages are of the total national vote.