John Candelaria

The "Candy Man" left a complicated legacy, including a late-career stop in Toronto

We love lists, don't we? Well, here I am making a top-ten list of what I consider to be the most entertaining World Series-winning teams. (I'm using “entertaining” here to describe either an assemblage of interesting individuals and/or the style in which these teams played and/or the path by which the team travelled to become champions.)

*Important note: there is a lot of recency bias here. I've watched a lot of footage of most of these teams and I find them entertaining. There is little to no footage of teams before the 1950s, and so while I am sure that a team like, say, the 1913 Philadelphia Athletics, and the drunken, carousing, outlaw style of baseball played in that era is significantly more “entertaining” than it has been in the last seventy years, I have little basis on which to properly judge these teams.*

1. 1986 New York Mets (kinda by a wide margin)

2. 1980 Philadelphia Phillies

3. 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates

4. 1978 New York Yankees

5. Any of the 1972-1974 Oakland Athletics teams

6. 1934 St. Louis Cardinals (the Gashouse Gang! Don't need footage to know how fun they were.)

7. 1991 Minnesota Twins

8. 2015 Kansas City Royals (Let's call a spade a spade Jays fans, they were fun. Too soon?)

9. 1969 New York Mets

10. 2004 Boston Red Sox

Number three on this list might well be remembered as the nicest group of people to win a World Series: Willie Stargell and the We Are Family 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates. This crew fascinates me, and they are probably my favourite of the above Series winners. This seemingly tight-knit and well-rounded team captured the National League East division with a 98-64-1 record, steamrolled the Cincinnati Reds in the Championship Series, and met the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. They fell behind three games to one, then rallied for three straight wins and the Series title. Their lineup had Stargell, and Dave Parker, and Omar Moreno, and Bill Madlock, and Phil Garner, and Manny Sanguillen. On the bump they featured Bert Blyleven, Bruce Kison, Don Robinson, Kent Tekulve, and John Candelaria. Four players on this team also played for the Blue Jays at some point in their careers: Parker, Steve Nicosia, Joe Coleman, and Candelaria. I've written a piece about Parker. No shade to Nicosia or Coleman, but there may not be quite enough there to merit ~1,500 words about their impact on the Blue Jays and baseball more broadly. And then there's Candelaria - an often overlooked, perhaps underrated, personally troubled nineteen-year major league veteran, whose impact on the game through the 1970s and 1980s is pretty immense. And in a more nomadic phase of his career, “The Candy Man” brought his talents to Toronto for the final two months of the 1990 season.

Candelaria in 1990 with the Blue Jays