I know, I know, the Brewers aren’t in the World Series. It’s a shame. Still, it will be an interesting series (with possible implications for collective bargaining!) when 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 in a row between 1998 and 2000. The last team to win consecutive championships for 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 haven’t returned since.
Los Angeles finished the regular season with a 93-79 record, giving them their worst winning 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 the World Series with relative ease last year, 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. Expectations for the preseason were sky high, with some commentators expecting to challenge the regular season wins record of the 2001 Seattle Mariners and 1906 Chicago Cubs by 116 games.
But Yates and Scott couldn’t do it. 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-squad 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 would almost certainly 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 question, but they finished third in the National League and thus had to play in the Wild Card round.
But as the season came to an end, it was clear that this team had simply been biding its time. Betts has hit .294/.351/.478 over the past two months and increased his OPS by nearly 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 developed into a pitcher and finished the season fully extended for the first time in two years. Tyler Glasnow, who has yet to throw more than 134 innings in a season in his decade, successfully reached the finish line. And in the final week of the season, Sasaki came out of the bullpen for his first appearances since early May.
Things came together very quickly in the postseason. The Dodgers made mincemeat of the overmatched Cincinnati Reds in two games in the Wild Card round. The Division Series against the Phillies should have been a matchup of colossal strengths, a heavyweight battle 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 overtime in game four, the Dodgers won the series in four games without much trouble. We know what happened to the Brewers in the Championship Series. The Dodgers are 9-1 this postseason and appear ready for anything.
The team that almost all baseball fans outside of Los Angeles and Japan will be rooting for are the Blue Jays, who are fresh off an epic seven-game American League Championship Series victory 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 three-run explosion in the seventh inning off Eduard Bazardo that turned the scoreboard from 3-1 Mariners to 4-3 Jays. They held on for their first postseason appearance in 32 years.
This postseason, the Jays have survived mainly thanks to an offense that at times seemed unstoppable. The ALCS MVP was the team’s biggest star, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who hit .385/.484/.846 with three home runs and three doubles in the series after hitting .529/.550/1.059 with three home runs 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 home runs this season, remains a question. He hasn’t played yet this postseason after suffering a knee injury on September 9, but he has been training this week and it’s not inconceivable he could make the roster. But the Blue Jays have gotten production from seemingly every player they’ve used 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 the volatile Andrés Giménez all have an OPS above .750 posted in the playoffs.
Pitching is a much bigger question for Toronto than it is for the Dodgers. Veteran Kevin Gausman is very solid at the top of the rotation, and Shane Bieber pitched well after returning late in the season after not pitching in nearly two years due to Tommy John surgery. Rookie Trey Yesavage has proven to be an interesting story – he started the season in Single-A – but he’ll have to throw some important innings, and even with the 15 innings he’s thrown this postseason, he’s still only pitched 29 turns as a major leaguer. The bullpen is led by closer Jeff Hoffman, who is not having a good year, but was excellent in six appearances in the playoffs.
The Blue Jays’ best bet, like the Brewers’, is to move to the Dodger bullpen, where another rookie, Sasaki, will be relied on heavily to fill the holes that Yates and Scott were unable to close during the season. Sasaki was outstanding in seven postseason appearances, allowing just one earned run in eight relief innings. But he’s still a rookie, and the Dodgers were still trotting on Blake Treinen’s corpse in big situations against the Brewers. Toronto’s offense has been clicking, so they might just make the Dodgers pay in those situations.
Everyone hates the Dodgers, and I have no reputation here, so let’s do the nice thing and pick the Blue Jays. In reality I am Doing 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 could be in trouble. (We’ll ignore the fact that I don’t feel much better about Toronto’s bullpen than I do about the Dodgers.) Blue Jays in six.
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