The Jays Are Facing Peak Dodgers

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.

With only a single starting pitcher (Yoshinobu Yamamoto) throwing enough innings to qualify for the ERA title and nobody else even coming close, that depth came in handy. Of the team’s five best projected starting pitchers — Yamamoto, Snell, Ohtani, Tyler Glasnow, and Clayton Kershaw — only Yamamoto was essentially healthy for the entire season. Ohtani didn’t debut as pitcher until June, and didn’t throw more than 60 pitches in a game until mid-August. Shoulder injuries limited Snell to 11 starts and Glasnow to 18, and Kershaw missed the first six weeks of the season. But those guys all made effective returns, helping the Dodgers to hold off the Padres in September and win the NL West, and the Blue Jays now have the misfortune of facing the Dodgers while the latter’s intended rotation is on the mound rather than the injured list. As for the bullpen, they still have a number of injuries, but Roki Sasaki’s return has helped make the Dodger relief corps about as solid as it has been at any other point this season.

Los Angeles’ offense didn’t take nearly as many injury hits during the regular season, and with Will Smith healthy, the Dodgers have the entire band back together. Counting lineups versus lefty and righty starters separately, manager Dave Roberts has written out 152 unique batting orders across the regular season and the playoffs this year. Since ZiPS has a basic lineup simulator for questions like these, I ran the current runs-per-game projections for all 152 of those batting orders, highlighting the batting order the Dodgers used for the first two games of the World Series in blue:

In other words, the Dodgers are in position to throw what is essentially their most dangerous lineup at Toronto’s group of right-handed starting pitchers (barring an emergency Eric Lauer start). ZiPS would be slightly happier with Hyeseong Kim in the lineup (likely in center field with Andy Pages moving to left), but given how close it is, I can totally understand not wanting to risk the vengeful wrath of the playoff gods by not playing Enrique Hernández as much as possible.

Combine the team getting its ideal rotation and a nearly ideal lineup, and ZiPS thinks that this version of the Dodgers isn’t a 93-win team (the club’s regular season wins) or a 95-win team (its Pythagorean win total), but a 104-win team, even with a relatively weak bullpen. If the Dodgers are the final boss for the Blue Jays, they’re now in their final form, and Nobuo Uematsu is cueing in the chorus. And if the Blue Jays are the team that ends up with the champagne-soaked uniforms, the victory will be all the sweeter for having come against the best version of their opponent possible. After all, nobody would remember the story of David facing off against Slightly Taller David.