The website FiveThirtyEight.com is best known for political predictions and analysis.

But it has a sports component, and today it produced an interesting piece on the best and worst teams in Major League Baseball history, at least according to the Elo statistical tool.

It goes back to 1903, the year when the first World Series was played, and the first thing we all want to know is: Which is the best team ever assembled?

And the answer?

The 1939 New York Yankees. One of the club’s 27 World Series champions.

Many of us might have thought the best team would be the 1927 Yankees, the most celebrated of the Murderers’ Row teams of that decade, featuring Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who went 110-44 and swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series.

But, no, the 1939 Yankees of Joe DiMaggio, Joe Gordon, Red Rolfe and Bill Dickey, a team that went 106-45 in the regular season and swept the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series, comes out on top.

That Yankees team outscored its opponents 967-556; the ’27 Yankees outscored opponents by 35 fewer runs, 975-599.

Second best team in MLB history? The 1906 Chicago Cubs, who won the National League with the game’s best regular-season record, 116-46 … but lost to the Chicago White Sox in the World Series, an event which costs them the top spot in the rankings.

Three parts of this are fun.

–FiveThirtyEight ranks all 2,374 MLB teams, by season, since 1903. You want to know the bottom two, right? Dead last are the 1904 Washington Senators, who went 38-113 and finished last in the American League, and just ahead of them is a team some of us actually saw play, the 2003 Detroit Tigers, who lost 119 games and were, yes, really, really bad.

–Another chart lists the best club in the history of each franchise and then ranks them by their slot in the all-time list. (That is, it traces teams that have moved to their previous locations, and various clubs may well have registered their best club in their earlier home.) The ’39 Yankees and 1906 Cubs are 1-2, but the third-best season for one of the other 28 existing teams was the 1909 Pittsburgh Pirates, ranked No. 4 (behind the ’27 Yankees). Fourth in the club rankings (but only No. 7 all-time) are the 1911 Philadelphia Athletics. The Dodgers are a modest 11th (the 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers, 40th overall), and the Angels are not far behind, at 19th, (the 2002 championship club, which is 81st overall.

(The highest-ranked Los Angeles Dodgers team is the 1974 club, at No. 92, the National League champions of Garvey-Cey-Lopes who went 102-60 but lost to the Oakland Athletics in the World Series.)

–The third fun thing is the chart ranking the worst teams per franchise. The inverse of the above, that is. The worst Yankees team is 25th in these rankings (the 1908 Highlands, 136th-worst all-time). The Dodgers’ worst team is 19th (the 1905 Brooklyn club, 46th-worst all-time) and the Angels’ worst is the 1969 club is at the bottom of these franchise rankings (30th), but this is good, because that club was not shockingly awful (279th from the bottom).

The author notes that the ends of the spectrum of “best” and “worst” are jammed with clubs from before 1950 — but does not speculate why that might be.

I would guess that having fewer teams — only 16 clubs through 1960 — made it easier for a good team to shine and a bad team to get thrashed. Not so many teams in the middle.

Anyway, it’s interesting to look at, and see where your team falls and remember why beating the Yankees (15 of the top 41 teams all-time) was such a big deal for so long.