A lot has been made about the World Series being one of the closest sweeps in history. That's a somewhat fair assessment as all the games were close, but if you dig deeper into the stats you can see that the White Sox clearly outplayed the Astros.
The Sox cranked out 15 more hits in the 4 games and had 5 more extra base hits, including 3 more homers (4 if you don't count LaneÂ’s bogus home run). Sox batters hit the ball well, putting up a line of:
286/360/487
This was a much better line than what they posted in the regular season and came against the top pitching staff in the National League.
The Astros hit:
203/307/336
With that line, its surprising that they were able to score as many runs as they did (14). Just imagine what the 'Stros line would have been had the Sox not handed out 12 walks in Game 3.
The Sox championship has been compared to the Yanks sweep of the Phillies in 1950. There are similarities including the 6 run differential in total runs scored. Like the 2005 version of the Series, the Yanks also won Games 2 and 3 in the last inning. It featured on extra inning game (game 2 instead of game 3) and one 1-0 game (game 1 instead of game 4). The main difference is how the series ended with the Yanks taking Game 4 easily 5-2.
But looking at the hitting lines suggest the 1950 series was played a bit more evenly with the Yanks hitting 222/295/304 and the Phils 203/250/266.
I think we all remember the many scoring opportunities the Astros failed to take advantage of throughout the series and that leads you to believe the every game could have gone either way. But we often forget that the winning team also failed to take advantage of scoring opportunities. Numerous times the Sox failed to get key hits that would have put a game away. Fortunatelytely, in this series these missed opportunities evened out and the better team came out on top.