A 3-0 series lead is golden:

After five hours and 41 minutes, after 17 pitchers combined to throw 482 pitches, the White Sox became the 22nd team to win the first three games of the Series. The first 21 teams to get that kind of head start went on to win the Series. Eighteen of those Series ended in sweeps, thus reducing the Astros to trying to reinvent themselves as idiots, Boston Red Sox-style.

One would figure that a team up 3-0 would go to five games about 1/2 the time. But given the propensity of sweeps after a 3-0 start, I wonder if this start isn't telling us something about the superiority of the sweeper. That in these cases, the team with the big lead is really the better team. The probability of evenly matched teams only going to a fifth game three times in 21 tries is 0.0007. It may be a demoralizing effect of losing three in a row, but teams get swept way too often.