The Dodgers and the Blue Jays.
The U.S. vs. Canada.
Prominent players from Japan, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, South Korea and Venezuela. I may have missed an island or a continent or two.
Toronto’s franchise star, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., was born in Canada and is a full-time citizen. I’m sure Canadian-born Baseball Hall of Famers Ferguson Jenkins and Larry Walker approve. Ditto, Joey Votto.
Earlier this year the Dodgers signed a 17-year old pitching prospect from South Sudan. Give him some time. He’ll be striking out major-league hitters soon enough.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts was born in Okinawa, Japan. Blue Jays skipper John Schneider was born in Princeton, N.J. Does Jersey count as a foreign land? Probably not.
It’s the United Nations World Series.
These powerhouse teams won their respective divisions and had a nearly identical win total, with the Blue Jays taking the AL East with 94 wins, and the Dodgers maintaining control of the NL West with 93 victories.
As you might imagine, the defending champion Dodgers are expected to win their second consecutive World Series. But I’m not overlooking the Blue Jays. They’re a very good team. They have power and depth and can punch back and rally their way to victories.
Toronto’s seven-game takedown of the Seattle Mariners was a testament to their talent and competitive hardwiring. The Jays were also helped by the Seattle manager having no idea what he was doing with the bullpen in Game 7. Watching that, I had chilling and horrifying flashbacks to watching Mike Matheny making moves in the postseason. Michael Wacha? In relief? What?
Los Angeles blitzed through the National League playoffs in only 10 games, winning nine times, and outsourcing the Reds, Phillies and Brewers by 21 runs.
According to DraftKings Sportsbook, the Dodgers are a minus 215 favorite to win the Series. Translation: to earn $100 in profit, you’d have to wager $215 on LA. Toronto is plus 180 – which means a $100 bet on the Blue Jays to win, would net a $180 profit if they topple the Dodgers.
The Dodgers have an astronomical payroll that ranks No. 1 on the majors. But the Blue Jays are hardly indigent, ranking No. 5 overall in payroll.
But as analyst Neil Paine points out: the 2025 Dodgers spent 40 percent more on players than the Blue Jays did. And the difference between their payrolls ($96 million) would be enough to cover most of Milwaukee’s entire Brewers’ payroll this season.
The betting markets are all over the Dodgers. As of Wednesday afternoon, 70 percent of the money that’s been poured into Polymarket has been wagered on the Dodgers. So, yeah, a Toronto victory would be an upset. The Blue Jays have the underdog vibe, but will it matter? The Brewers had that too. And the Dodgers slapped them out of the way in four games.
My World Series preview is brief.
Toronto has a tough assignment in facing LA’s fearsome starting pitchers in this series.
In sweeping the Brewers in the NLCS, the Dodger starters had a 0.63 ERA that was the best – ever – in a league championship series since MLB switched to a new playoff format (at the time) in 1969.
Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani combined to hold the Brewers to a .096 batting average, struck out 34.7 percent of the hitters faced, allowed 0.25 home runs per 9 innings, and stranded 96 percent of the Milwaukee runners who reached base. The LA starters’ adjusted ERA was a blistering 85 percent above the league average. I mean, this is preposterous … but it was real.
The Dodgers starting-pitching ERA over all three NL playoff rounds this month was 1.40, which ranks No. 1 among the 109 teams that played in at least 10 postseason games since the championship-series format was put in place in 1969.
The Blue Jays counter with a highly capable offense that averaged 6.45 runs in their 11-game march through the AL playoffs. Toronto comes into this World Series toting some gaudy postseason statistics so far: .296 average, .523 slugging percentage, .878 OPS and a wRC+ that’s 43 percent above league average offensively. The Blue Jays have pounded pitchers for 20 home runs, 26 doubles and 47 extra-base hits in 11 games.
So how can the Blue Jays cool the Dodgers and seize the World Series trophy?
1. Try to grind out at-bats that can shorten the number of innings worked by Los Angeles starting pitchers. The Dodgers’ starters are averaging 6.4 innings per assignment this postseason, and that gives the team tremendous cover.
2. Why? Because the LA bullpen has been brutal for a while now and enters the World Series with a 4.88 ERA during the 2025 postseason. The Dodger bullpen has received a valuable October boost from rookie starting pitcher Roki Sasaki, who has a 1.13 ERA in seven relief appearances this month.
3. If the Blue Jays can get into the Los Angeles bullpen earlier in the game, they’ll have a much better chance to position themselves to win late. Toronto led the majors with 49 comeback triumphs during the regular season, and has come through with additional comeback rallies this postseason. During the regular season the Blue Jays had the best late-inning offense (statistically) in the majors, batting .274 with a .440 slug and .785 OPS from the seventh inning on. In the late innings Toronto’s .295 average with runners in scoring position ranked No. 1 in the majors.
Now: all of that said, Toronto’s bullpen has gotten battered for a 5.52 ERA this postseason and has been smashed for an alarming 2.17 home runs per nine innings. The team’s overall bullpen performance during the AL playoffs was 36 percent below league average in adjusted ERA.
I find it hard to believe that LA’s experienced and savvy collection of hitters will be tamed by Toronto’s bullpen.
There’s a reason why the Dodgers are an amazing 20-6 over the last two postseasons: they’re the best team in baseball.
Dodgers in 6.
Thanks for reading …
–Bernie
Bernie was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2023. During a St. Louis sports-media career that goes back to 1985, he’s won multiple national awards for column writing and sports-talk hosting – and was the lead sports columnist at the Post-Dispatch from 1989 through 2015.
You can access his columns, videos and the podcast version of the videos here on STLSportsCentral, catch him weekdays on the “Gashouse Gang” or “Redbird Rush Hour” on KMOX, and Bernie does a weekly “Seeing Red” podcast on the Cardinals with his longtime pal Will Leitch. Bernie joins Katie Woo on the “Cardinal Territory” video-podcast each week, and you can catch a weekly “reunion” segment here at STL Sports with Bernie’s appearance on the Randy Karraker Show.