MLB World Series winners since 2000 ranked 1-25: Which champ was best?

USA TODAY Sports ranks the 25 World Series champions from, shall we say, least-accomplished to greatest in this century .

2006 St. Louis Cardinals were 10 games out of first on Sept. 5 , won 90 games and needed some acts of nature to get in the playoffs.

2003 Miami Marlins had an amazingly effective throwback duo of slap-and-run dudes in Juan Pierre and Luis Castillo .

2014 San Francisco Giants are the weakest of their three even-year champions.

2002 Anaheim Angels crafted the modern ideal of a playoff team: Make contact but also slug home runs, get by with nominal starting pitching and turn it over to a dominant bullpen.

2012 San Francisco Giants lost Melky Cabrera to a PED suspension, trailed St. Louis 3-1 in the NLCS and trusted shaky veteran Barry Zito in Game 5 .

The Nationals' pitching staff included future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer , World Series MVP Stephen Strasburg .

The Dodgers won more postseason games 13 than any champion to that point, 11 of them at a neutral site.

The 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks Game 7 of the ’01 World Series has been referred to as " The Last Night Of The Yankee Dynasty " The Royals were one win or 90 feet plus some extra-inning luck shy of a championship in 2014 , then came back and finished the job a year later .