I know, I know, the Brewers aren’t in the World Series. It’s unfortunate. Still, it will be an interesting series (with potential collective bargaining ramifications!) as the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays take the field. Check out some of the connections these teams have to Wisconsin and the Brewers here!
The Dodgers are playing for their third title in six years and are looking to become the first team to successfully defend a championship since the New York Yankees won three straight from 1998-2000. The last team to win consecutive championships before those Yankees were, in fact, the Blue Jays, who won the Series in 1992 and 1993 (with World Series MVP Paul Molitor in the latter) and have not been back since.
Los Angeles finished the regular season with a 93-79 record, giving them their worst win percentage since 2018. But make no mistake: this is certainly not the worst Dodger team of the last seven years. After the Dodgers spent a billion dollars on Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and won last year’s World Series with relative ease, they added mega-prospect Roki Sasaki, two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell, and two relievers who had incredible seasons in 2024, Kirby Yates and Tanner Scott. Preseason expectations were sky high, with some commentators expecting they could challenge the regular season wins record, held by the 2001 Seattle Mariners and 1906 Chicago Cubs at 116 games.
But Yates and Scott didn’t work out. Sasaki spent most of the season on the injured list. Snell made two starts at the beginning of the season and then didn’t pitch for the big-league team for four months. Mookie Betts, who recently turned 33, had the worst offensive season of his Hall-of-Fame career. The bullpen was unhealthy and ineffective. Ohtani still did enough that he seems almost certain to win his fourth MVP, Yamamoto had one of the best seasons of any starter in the NL, and the Dodgers got a typically good year from another future Hall of Famer, Freddie Freeman, so their status as a postseason team was never in doubt, but they finished third in the National League and thus had to play in the Wild Card round.
But as the season came to a close, it was clear that this team had just been biding its time. Betts hit .294/.351/.478 over the last two months and raised his OPS by almost 60 points. Snell pitched to a 2.41 ERA with 68 strikeouts in 52 1/3 innings in the nine starts he made after returning from the injured list. Ohtani ramped up as a pitcher and finished the season fully stretched out for the first time in two years. Tyler Glasnow, who still hasn’t thrown more than 134 innings in a season in any of his 10 years, was successfully load-managed to the finish line. And in the last week of the season, Sasaki came out of the bullpen for his first appearances since early May.
It came together very quickly in the postseason. The Dodgers made mincemeat out of the overmatched Cincinnati Reds in two games in the Wild Card round. The Division Series against the Phillies was supposed to be a matchup of juggernauts, a heavyweight bout of epic proportions. Instead, the Dodgers won the first two games on the road in Philadelphia, and despite a Phillies win in game three and extra innings in game four, the Dodgers won the series without much trouble in four games. We know what happened with the Brewers in the Championship Series. The Dodgers are 9-1 this postseason and look ready for anything.
The team who almost all baseball fans outside of Los Angeles and Japan will be rooting for will be the Blue Jays, who just came out of an epic seven-game American League Championship Series triumph over the Seattle Mariners. In that Game 7, George Springer hit what may be remembered as one of the more famous home runs in baseball history, a seventh-inning three-run blast of Eduard Bazardo that flipped the scoreboard from 3-1 Mariners to 4-3 Jays. They held on to clinch their first postseason appearance in 32 years.
This postseason, the Jays have gotten by primarily on the strength of an offense that has looked, at times, unstoppable. The ALCS MVP was the team’s biggest star, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who hit .385/.484/.846 with three homers and three doubles in the series after hitting .529/.550/1.059 with three homers in four games against the Yankees in the Division Series. Vladdy had a good, not great, season, but we’ve seen in the past what the 26-year-old slugger is capable of.
The status of second baseman Bo Bichette, who hit .311 with 44 doubles and 18 homers this season, remains a question. He has not played yet this postseason after suffering a knee injury on September 9, but he’s been working out this week and it’s not inconceivable that he could make the roster. But the Blue Jays have gotten production from seemingly every player they’ve thrown out there this postseason: Springer, Guerrero, Ernie Clement, and Addison Barger all have an OPS of at least .889 this postseason, and Alejandro Kirk, Daulton Varsho, Nathan Lukes, and even light-hitting Andrés Giménez have all posted an OPS over .750 in the playoffs.
The pitching is a much bigger question with Toronto than it is with the Dodgers. The veteran Kevin Gausman is very solid at the top of the rotation, and Shane Bieber has pitched okay after returning late in the season after not having pitched in almost two years because of Tommy John surgery. Rookie Trey Yesavage has emerged as an interesting story — he started the season at Single-A — but he is going to have to pitch some important innings, and even including the 15 innings he’s thrown this postseason, he has still only thrown 29 innings as a major leaguer. The bullpen is led by closer Jeff Hoffman, who did not have a good year but has been excellent in six appearances in the playoffs.
The Blue Jays’ best bet, as the Brewers’ was, is to get to the Dodger bullpen, where another rookie, Sasaki, is being heavily relied upon to cover up the gaps that Yates and Scott failed to cover during the season. Sasaki has been excellent in seven postseason appearances: he’s allowed only one earned run in eight relief innings. But he’s still a rookie, and the Dodgers were still trotting out the corpse of Blake Treinen in big situations against the Brewers. Toronto’s offense has been clicking, so they might actually be able to make the Dodgers pay in those situations.
Everyone hates the Dodgers, and I’ve got no reputation on the line here, so let’s do the fun thing and pick the Blue Jays. In reality, I do think the Jays are equipped to do what the Brewers couldn’t and put enough pressure on the Dodger starting pitching that they can get into that bullpen. If the Dodgers are forced to use multiple relievers in high-leverage situations, they might be in trouble. (We’ll ignore the fact that I don’t feel much better about Toronto’s bullpen than I do the Dodgers’.) Blue Jays in six.
