An all-time World Series classic was played on October 27, 1991. That was the Game 7 where Jack Morris and John Smoltz matched zeros until the Minnesota Twins ultimately edged the Atlanta Braves 1-0 in 10 innings. Thirteen years later, on that same date in 2004, the Boston Red Sox won their first World Series championship since 1918. In both cases, baseball history was made in memorable fashion.

What took place on October 27, 2025 at Dodger Stadium ranks right up there with the best World Series games ever played. In an affair that lasted deep into the night and featured heroics from multiple players, it was Freddie Freeman who finally ended it. Leading off the bottom of the 18th inning, the Dodgers first baseman launched a home run to straightaway center field to walk off the Blue Jays, 6-5, in Game 3 and give Los Angeles a two-games-to-one lead in the World Series.

The game started uneventfully, with Dodgers starter Tyler Glasnow retiring the side in order in the first. But from that point forward the word “uneventful” was nowhere to be found — not for the remainder of a Monday night that turned into the wee hours of Tuesday for most of Canada and the continental United States, for all but the time zone in which Game 3 was played. Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to this World Series, determining which team is the favorite and which is the underdog is a fairly easy exercise. The Blue Jays won one more game during the regular season than the Dodgers did, but Dodger Blue has tended to be strongly favored over Labatt Blue. The Vegas odds for the Dodgers opened at -215, implying a better than two-in-three chance of a Los Angeles championship; per the research of CakesRacer522 on Reddit, only the 2019 Astros started off with better odds. For our part, the FanGraphs World Series odds were nearly as lopsided going into the series, projecting a 66.3% chance of the Dodgers prevailing. The ZiPS projections weren’t quite as bullish, but the computer’s 60/40 split isn’t quiet a coin flip. The Dodgers also spend money like they have their own currency, and won the World Series in both 2020 and 2024, while the Jays, though themselves a top five payroll team, haven’t sniffed the Fall Classic in more than 30 years.

So are the Blue Jays doomed? That’s a preposterous question in a game as coin-flippy as baseball tends to be; after all, if the Dodgers were fated to win, the projections would sit at 100%, not 68% or 66% or 60%. That said, if the Blue Jays do come out ahead, it’ll be an especially big plaudit, because they’re not just facing the 2025 Dodgers, they’re facing the best version of the 2025 Dodgers.

As is their wont, the Dodgers suffered more than their share of injuries in 2025. As of mid-September, I had them losing the third-most potential wins due to injury in the majors. In 2024, they were the “champions” of this sad category. Last winter, the Dodgers spent nearly $400 million on free agents, most notably Blake Snell, Teoscar Hernández, and Tanner Scott, after having signed Shohei Ohtani the prior offseason. It fueled some pretty crazy projections before the 2025 season, such that the 98 wins forecast by ZiPS actually got a lot of pushback for being too negative about the team’s hopes. But as I said before Opening Day, the Dodgers are so good that they’re at the point where signing great players comes with increasingly diminishing returns, because those guys are covering for a good number of plate appearances and innings that were already much better than replacement level. Indeed, the team’s biggest improvement — at least as ZiPS saw it — was in making their floor absurdly high rather than their ceiling. Read the rest of this entry »

Cal Raleigh’s tremendous season ended with the elimination of the Mariners from the ALCS, but that hasn’t meant the disappearance of high-impact hitting from catchers during the postseason. So far in the World Series, both the Blue Jays’ Alejandro Kirk and the Dodgers’ Will Smith have been central to their teams’ respective offensive attacks, building on their stellar contributions during the regular season.

Neither Kirk nor Smith had seasons on the level of Raleigh, but the same is true for nearly every other catcher in AL/NL history. That said, the two starting backstops in this World Series each made their respective All-Star teams and ranked second and third in the majors in catcher WAR behind Raleigh’s 9.1. The 26-year-old Kirk hit .282/.348/.421 (116 wRC+) while clubbing a career-high 15 home runs, and he also posted the majors’ second-highest marks in Statcast Fielding Run Value (21) and our own framing metric (11.3 runs), with the latter fueling his career-high 4.7 WAR. The 30-year-old Smith spent much of the season vying for the NL batting title, finishing at .296/.404/.497 with 17 homers and a 153 wRC+, his highest over a full season and the second-best mark on the team behind Shohei Ohtani. Despite subpar defense (-8 FRV and -6.8 FRM) and just 10 plate appearances in September, he produced a solid 4.1 WAR.

The Dodgers couldn’t get Kirk out on Friday night in Toronto, as he not only went 3-for-3 but also drew a first-inning walk that helped set the tone for the Blue Jays, even though it didn’t lead to a run. Facing Blake Snell with two outs and runners on the corners, Kirk got ahead 3-1, then fouled off four straight pitches before finally laying off a curveball in the dirt. His tenacious plate appearance lasted nine pitches; by the time Snell retired Daulton Varsho on a fly ball to end the threat, the two-time Cy Young winner had thrown 29 pitches.

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This postseason, I’m continuing my use of a new format for our managerial report cards. In the past, I went through every game from every manager, whether they played 22 games en route to winning the World Series or got swept out of the Wild Card round. To be honest, I hated writing those brief blurbs. No one is all that interested in the manager who ran out the same lineup twice, or saw his starters get trounced and used his best relievers anyway because the series was so short. This year, I’m skipping the first round, and grading only the managers who survived until at least the best-of-five series. So far this year, I have graded the efforts of A.J. Hinch and Aaron Boone, as well as Craig Counsell and Rob Thomson, while Dan Szymborski scrutinized Pat Murphy’s performance. Today, it’s Dan Wilson’s turn.

My goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of the outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things — getting team buy-in for new strategies or unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable — but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but guys like Bryce Miller and Addison Barger have also been great this October. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Josh Naylor is important because he’s great, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process. Read the rest of this entry »

Rhett Lowder has his eyes on Yoshinobu Yamamoto as he works back from a pair of injuries that wreaked havoc on his 2025 campaign. Expected to be a part of the Cincinnati Reds’ starting rotation, the 23-year-old right-hander instead experienced a forearm issue in the spring, and that was followed by a more serious oblique strain. He ended up pitching just nine-a-third innings, all of them down on the farm.

Lowder is currently taking the mound for the Arizona Fall League’s Peoria Javelinas, and I caught up with him following a recent outing to learn what he’s been focusing on. Along with making up for lost innings, what is he doing to make himself a better pitcher?

“There are a couple things in the delivery, trying to take some pressure off the arm and the oblique, helping set myself up to be healthy,” replied Lowder, who’d logged a 1.17 ERA over six late-season starts with the Reds in 2024. “I’ve watched a little bit of Yamamoto and how he moves. Everything looks so effortless when he throws. I’ve tended to leak a little bit to the third base side, then compensate by over-rotating. That puts more pressure on the oblique, which is a rotational muscle, so I want to be more direct toward home plate with my delivery.”

Being direct to home plate is a common goal for pitchers. Appearance of effortlessness aside, what specifically made Yamamoto a point of study? Read the rest of this entry »

Opportunity knocks for everyone. In some cases, opportunity knocks, rings the doorbell, shouts into your Ring camera, tosses pebbles at your bedroom window, then goes out to its convertible in the driveway and starts singing “Thunder Road.”

Kevin Gausman and Yoshinobu Yamamoto were both terrific, but all duels end with one man standing and the other getting stabbed. Yamamoto twirled his second straight complete game, giving him the first streak of playoff complete games in 24 years. Gausman fell off the tightrope in the seventh inning, as home runs by Will Smith and Max Muncy put the visiting team in front for good. The Dodgers’ 5-1 win wasn’t as splashy as Toronto’s home run party the night before, but it evens the series.

Gausman was all but out of the first inning. He had two strikes on Freddie Freeman, who’d fouled off a splitter at his ankles, then a middle-middle fastball, then another heater up at his hands. Gausman went back to the splitter, the pitch that made him famous, and buried another. Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue Jays and Dodgers players arrived at the World Series with wildly different points of view. The Dodgers are the seasoned defending champs with multiple former MVPs and Cy Young Award winners, dealing with the gravity of global expectations. The Blue Jays, though they have a few vets with World Series experience, are mostly a legion of talented upstarts who’ve reached unfamiliar heights. They also bear the weight of a city (and perhaps an entire country) that has waited three decades to return to the World Series. In a raucous Rogers Centre atmosphere in Toronto, the Jays harnessed the energy of that weight and used it to hammer the crap out of the Dodgers in a decisive 11-4 Game 1 victory. Read the rest of this entry »

This October, the biggest-spending, best-run franchises in baseball have been flexing their muscles. Case in point: The team with the largest TV audience in the game, one with a monopoly on an entire country’s fandom and a huge payroll to match, a team that takes over opposing stadiums on “road trips” — that team is headlining the World Series. There, on the biggest stage in the sport, they’ll take on the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Oh, you thought the Toronto Blue Jays were David facing the Dodgers’ Goliath? Get out of here. The Jays are a Goliath, too. They have a top five payroll, just like the Dodgers. Of the nine hitters, four starters, and three relievers I expect to play the biggest roles for Toronto this series, just four are homegrown. They’ve filled in the gaps with canny additions in free agency and made excellent trades to bolster their roster even further. Their ace and their leadoff hitter were both high-profile free agents. They have literally Max Scherzer, the embodiment of a well-paid veteran.

That’s not to say that Los Angeles is punching up here. The Dodgers’ best players need little introduction. Shohei Ohtani. Mookie Betts. Freddie Freeman. Blake Snell. I could keep writing one-name sentences for quite a while before I ran out of stars to highlight. Sure, all of Canada roots for the Jays, but all of Japan roots for the Dodgers, and Japan is three times as big by population. California is the size of Canada, for that matter, and there are a few Dodgers fans there, too. In fact, the Dodgers are an even bigger Goliath than the Jays, but that doesn’t make Toronto any less of a big-market club. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I published the first half of my votes for this year’s Fielding Bible awards, which will be released at 2 PM ET today. This morning, I’m going to cover my ballots for the three outfield positions, as well as the pitchers, multi-positional defenders, defensive player of the year, and defensive team of the year. Update: the awards have been handed out. Winners are denoted below by an asterisk.

If you’re curious about the methodology I used to help guide my voting, you can read about it in yesterday’s article, but here’s a bite-sized refresher: I used a weighted blend of DRS, FRV, and DRP (the three flagship public defensive metrics), with the weights based on how well each metric did on reliability and consistency. I created different weights for catcher, first base, the non-first-base infield positions, and the outfield. That gave me an initial rough order. From there, I used my own expertise, both in terms of deeper statistical dives on individual players and the copious amounts of baseball I watched this year, to assemble my final rankings. I deferred to advanced defensive metrics when the gaps were big, but for close calls, I leaned heavily on my own judgment.

That’s the kind of explanation that I have to put in front of any article outlining my ballot; if you don’t know what I’m looking for, my votes wouldn’t make as much sense. With that out of the way, we can get to the good stuff: the actual players who played the defense I’m writing about. So let’s get right to my last seven ballots — it’s a voluminous set of awards! Read the rest of this entry »

At last, we’ve got a World Series matchup to wrap our heads around. Representing the American League are the Blue Jays, who are back in the Fall Classic — making it a truly international World Series — for the first time since 1993. They’ll face the Dodgers, who are vying to become the first back-to-back champions since the 1999–2000 Yankees. They’re the first defending champions to repeat as pennant winners since the 2009 Phillies, who lost that World Series to the Yankees. If that matchup feels like a long time ago, consider that it’s been twice as long since the Blue Jays were here.

Though the core of the lineup is largely unchanged, this year’s Dodgers team differs from last year’s in that it has reached the World Series on the strength of its starting pitching rather than in spite of it. Due to a slew of injuries in the rotation last year, manager Dave Roberts resorted to using bullpen games four times to augment a rickety three-man staff consisting of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Jack Flaherty, and Walker Buehler. Even as those starters (or “starters,” in some cases) put up a 5.25 ERA while averaging just 3.75 innings per turn, the bullpen and offense more than picked up the slack, and the Dodgers took home their second championship of the Roberts era.

This time around, with Flaherty and Buehler elsewhere and Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, and Shohei Ohtani joining Yamamoto, Dodgers starters have been absolutely dominant, posting a microscopic 1.40 ERA while averaging 6.43 innings per turn through the first three rounds, helping the team to paper over a shaky bullpen. After Snell utterly dominated the Brewers, holding them to just one hit over eight innings while facing the minimum number of batters in Game 1 of the NLCS, Yamamoto followed with a three-hit, one-run masterpiece — the first complete game in the postseason since the Astros’ Justin Verlander went the distance against the Yankees in Game 2 of the 2017 ALCS. Glasnow, who began the postseason in the bullpen, allowed one run across 5 2/3 innings in Game 3 of the NLCS, while Ohtani backed his 10 strikeouts over six shutout innings in Game 4 with a three-homer game in what for my money stands as the greatest single-game postseason performance in baseball history. Read the rest of this entry »