Game 5 Was Perfect: The 2024 World Series Through Every Pitch

The 2024 World Series ended on October 30 with Game 5 — gamePk 775296. It's the single best showcase game for what The Best Box Score does: every pitch tracked, every call graded, every moment measured in win probability.

This is what a box score looks like when you go beyond hits, runs, and errors.

The WPA Chart Tells the Story

Traditional box scores are summaries. They tell you what happened over nine innings compressed into a grid of numbers. The win probability chart tells you when it happened — and when it mattered.

Every play in Game 5 moved the win probability needle. Some by fractions of a percent (a routine groundout in the 2nd inning, a called strike on 0-1). Some by double digits (a go-ahead run in a late inning, a bases-loaded walk).

Our WPA chart for Game 5 plots every one of these moments on an interactive timeline. The x-axis is the game's chronological progress. The y-axis is the home team's win probability, from 0% to 100%. The line rises when the home team's chances improve and falls when they don't.

The shape of the line tells you what kind of game it was:

• A line that stays flat near 90% is a blowout
• A line that oscillates wildly between 30% and 70% is a classic
• A line that plunges and recovers is a comeback

Game 5's line tells its own story. Click into the chart on the game page to see exactly where each inflection point occurred, with video highlights embedded at the key moments.

The Plays That Decided It

Our top WPA plays sidebar ranks every play by how much it shifted win probability. The biggest WPA plays in a game are, by definition, the moments that most determined the outcome.

In a traditional box score, a sacrifice fly in the 8th inning and a solo homer in the 2nd look equally important — each is one RBI, one run scored. In the WPA view, they're not even close. The 8th-inning sacrifice fly in a tie game might swing WPA by 15-20%. The 2nd-inning solo shot in a game that's already 4-0 might swing it by 1%.

The WPA rankings don't just identify the biggest moments. They identify the right biggest moments — the ones that actually determined whether the home team's championship probability went up or down.

The Umpire Scorecard

Every game on our site includes an umpire audit when Statcast data is available. For Game 5, the umpire scorecard shows:

• The accuracy percentage and letter grade for the home plate umpire
• A strike zone SVG with every missed call plotted — filled dots for balls called strikes, hollow dots for strikes called balls
• The net WPA favor (how much the missed calls collectively shifted win probability toward one team)
• Each missed call listed individually with its leverage label and WPA impact

In a World Series game, every missed call matters more. Leverage is naturally higher in elimination and clinching games because the stakes amplify the win probability swings. A missed call that would shift WPA by 5% in a random June game might shift it by 8-10% in October.

The Box Score, Enhanced

The traditional batting and pitching lines are there — you can see every player's at-bats, hits, RBIs, strikeouts, and more. But we layer on Statcast data where available:

• Exit velocity on batted balls — who hit the ball hardest?
• Expected batting average (xBA) — were the hits lucky or well-struck?
• Expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) — a more complete picture of batted-ball quality

These numbers reveal the texture underneath the box score. A player who went 0-for-4 but made hard contact with high xBA was unlucky, not bad. A player who went 2-for-4 on soft contact was lucky, not dominant. In a World Series game, these distinctions shape how we understand what actually happened versus what the score says happened.

Shareable Views

Every component of the game page is independently shareable:

• /game/775296/box — the enhanced box score
• /game/775296/wpa — the WPA chart with key plays
• /game/775296/umpire — the umpire scorecard

Each view generates its own Open Graph metadata, so when you share the link on Twitter, Bluesky, or in a group chat, the preview shows what you're sharing. The umpire view even generates its own OG image with the strike zone visualization.

Why This Matters

The box score is 140 years old. It was designed for newspaper columns — a compact summary you could scan over coffee. It's good at what it does: telling you who played, who hit, who pitched, and what the final score was.

But it doesn't tell you when things mattered. It doesn't show you the umpire's zone. It doesn't tell you whether that 2-for-4 was hard contact or bloops. It doesn't capture the feeling of a game that swung three times in the last two innings.

That's what we're building: the box score for the era of pitch tracking, win probability, and umpire accountability. Game 5 of the 2024 World Series is the best demonstration of why it matters.

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Explore Game 5 yourself — WPA chart, umpire scorecard, enhanced box score, video highlights — or browse today's games on the home page.