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 »

Ben and Meg banter about Ben’s trip to a World Series-obsessed city, whether Game 1 of a best-of-seven series can be “must-win,” the Jays-as-underdogs narrative, the global audience for the matchup, and a few factors they’re following throughout the series, before reacting to two California clubs’ managerial hirings: the Angels’ choice of Kurt Suzuki and the Giants’ choice of Tony Vitello (plus a postgame postscript).

Audio intro: Gabriel-Ernest, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Philip Tapley and Michael Stokes, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to “Must-win” article
Link to best-of-seven probability
Link to ZiPS odds
Link to Bichette article
Link to Mickey Stanley article
Link to global viewership
Link to Pharrell announcement
Link to Pharrell performance
Link to Hoffman names
Link to Snell fashion
Link to subjective age
Link to plate-tapping promo
Link to Ben on SP as RP
Link to Pujols/Angels article
Link to Suzuki hiring
Link to Minasian story
Link to HVAC story
Link to Trout testimony
Link to Hundley article
Link to Vitello article
Link to Baumann on Vitello
Link to “eyes of the world” message

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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 »

When the World Series opens on Friday night at the Rogers Centre, Blake Snell will take the ball for the Dodgers against the Blue Jays, hoping to replicate the success he’s had thus far in October. After an injury-shortened regular season, the two-time Cy Young winner has thoroughly dominated opposing hitters through his first three postseason starts, putting together one of the most impressive October runs in recent memory.

Runs — remember those? — have been hard to come by during Snell’s starts this postseason. He surrendered two during the seventh inning in the Wild Card Series opener against the Reds after holding them scoreless on one hit and one walk (against nine strikeouts) through the first six frames. Since then, he’s logged 14 consecutive scoreless innings, six against the Phillies in Game 2 of the Division Series and then eight against the Brewers in Game 1 of the Championship Series. He allowed just one hit in each of those last two starts, and while he walked four Phillies (and again struck out nine), he didn’t walk a single Brewer while punching out 10.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Sometimes Shohei Ohtani pulls his elbows gently to the left. He stands there at the plate still as a statue, the bat way out in front of him and his arms spread wide like they’re wrapped around an invisible trash can lid. Sometimes, every once in a while, he’ll gently rock the whole package – the elbows, the invisible trash can lid, the handle of the bat, his broad shoulders – to the left, back toward the catcher, the bat head dipping to describe a quiet circle in the air. And then he rocks the whole package to the right again, just as gently, toward the pitcher. It’s a matter of an inch or two. It’s the only sign that he’s human.

Once he’s settled into his batting stance, that little reset, rocking back and then forward like he’s absorbing a wave that no one else on the field is attuned enough to feel, is the only movement Ohtani will make. He doesn’t have a bat waggle. He doesn’t flex and unflex his fingers like Max Muncy. He doesn’t flare his back elbow like Bobby Witt Jr. He doesn’t rock his shoulders like Alex Bregman, lean back like Rowdy Tellez, twitch his hips like Juan Soto, fire his back knee toward the pitcher like Marcus Semien, or test the dirt with his front foot like Cal Raleigh. He’s a mountain, unapproachable, indecipherable. Read the rest of this entry »

You can’t win if you don’t score. The Brewers, who scored exactly one run in each game of their doomed NLCS campaign, learned that the hard way. The Phillies scored eight runs in their single NLDS victory — five of those coming as tack-on runs against mopup relievers — and a total of seven in their three losses.

The Dodgers have a 2.45 ERA this postseason. Among 21st century World Series contestants, that’s tied for the third-best mark with the 2012 Tigers, who had three World Series winners in their rotation. The only pennant winners to allow fewer runs per game were the 2001 Diamondbacks (who had a rather famous 1-2 punch at the top of their rotation) and the 2022 Astros, who threw a combined no-hitter in the World Series. 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 »

Read the rest of this entry »