LOS ANGELES — One of the beautiful things about modern baseball is the divergent paths available for teams seeking to claim the sport’s biggest prize. A year ago, the Houston Astros clinched a World Series title at Dodger Stadium using the most aggressive and all-encompassing embrace of analytics the game had ever seen.
And on Sunday night, also at Dodger Stadium, the 2018 Boston Red Sox reached the same apex — winning the World Series and cementing their place as one of the best teams in recent baseball history — at the end of a three-year cycle that began with a sudden and public disavowal of the analytics-based approach.