World Series Preview: Can the Juggernaut Dodgers End the 25-Year Repeat Drought? (With Audio Podcast)

(Audio companion piece below the article)

Shohei Ohtani is on the plane to Toronto after all.

Okay, yes, technically he and the Dodgers made a trip to Toronto last April (the Dodgers took two of three from the eventual-last-place Jays, if you’re wondering), but suffice it to say the stakes are a little bit higher this time.

Derek Jeter said it, so I stole it: this Dodgers team is a juggernaut.

Can you remember a team this dominant in at least the last quarter century? The 2018 Red Sox and 2022 Astros were probably pretty close, and of course going back just a couple years prior to 2000, the 1998 Yankees are the highest-win-total World Series champion ever and looked every bit the part.

But crazy enough, this Dodgers team “only” won 93 regular season games? Why? For one this, the rotation was not often fully healthy at the same time. For another, Roki Sasaki wasn’t available much, and he certainly wasn’t closing, so a suspect bullpen gave away an alarming number of late leads. So a 93-win team should have, in all likelihood, been a 100-win-plus team.

The consensus for much of the season — and maybe still at this moment — is that the National League was the superior league. But the Blue Jays (who, along with the Marlins are the only teams to appear in multiple World Series without a series loss) haven’t exactly had an easy road to get here, dispatching a Yankees team that was 36-15 entering the ALDS and a Seattle team with a very strong pitching staff and a lot of thump in its lineup. The Blue Jays looked down the barrel of an 0-2 deficit, and then a two-run lead in the seventh inning of an elimination game, and survived. We’ve seen teams do that before and find the next gear later in October (the 2019 Nationals, 2015 Royals, and 2007 and 2004 Red Sox come to mind).

George Springer is still an extremely clutch postseason player, and Vladimir Guerrero is having an equally incredible October. The return of Bichette takes a deep lineup that specializes in making contact and battling pitcher and makes it comparable — or almost comparable — to that of the Dodgers with the star-studded trio of Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman (not to mention those “other” guys like Will Smith, Teoscar Hernandez, Max Muncy, 2024 NLCS MVP Tommy Edman, Andy Pages, and the Barry Bonds of October, Kíke Hernandez).

In its own way, Los Angeles also stared down the barrel of the gun last year going down 2-1 to San Diego in the NLDS, surviving, and then winning its first full-season championship in 36 years. No longer is there the perception that it can’t win the big games, or the fear that it will go title-less during the Ohtani era. In many ways, the pressure is off the Dodgers, making this juggernaut that much more dangerous.

I don’t believe the Dodgers, for as good as they are, will get through this postseason with only one loss. Toronto is too deep, has come too far, and has too much momentum to simply get here and fall flat the way the Phillies and Brewers did this year and to perhaps a lesser extent the Yankees did last year. The Dodgers will be tested more than they’ve been all postseason (which admittedly isn’t saying all that much), but I believe their star power, depth, and experience will be too much for the Blue Jays to handle. A quarter-century later, MLB will have a repeat World Series winner. Prediction: Dodgers in 6.