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ESPN
Oct 25, 2024, 07:00 AM ET
New York Yankees vs. Los Angeles Dodgers. East Coast vs. West Coast. Aaron Judge and Juan Soto vs. Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts.
Yeah, this World Series is going to be big — and we’re here to get you ready for all of the action.
With the first pitch of Game 1 scheduled for 8:08 p.m. ET at Dodger Stadium, we dive into the players and matchups that matter most for both teams. We also asked our ESPN MLB experts to make their picks for who will win the Series, how many games it will take and who will be the MVP of this Fall Classic.
Jump to: Dodgers | Yankees | Our predictions
Los Angeles Dodgers
Chance of winning: 52.2% | ESPN BET odds: -125
What’s on the line for the Dodgers: A much-needed exclamation point on L.A.’s incredible run of 12 consecutive playoff appearances (including 11 division titles), with five 100-win seasons since 2017. The only World Series title in this stretch came in 2020 and — fair or not — it’s a bit diminished because it came during the pandemic with limited attendance for the NLCS and Fall Classic played at Globe Life Field in Texas (along with expanded rosters, which helped a pitching-heavy Dodgers team go heavy on its bullpen). The Dodgers were the best team that season, but a championship in 2024 would be different.
Then, of course, there’s all the money the Dodgers spent this offseason to sign Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and trade for/extend Tyler Glasnow. Over $1 billion in salary commitments. With that money, it’s World Series or bust, and while the Dodgers expect to remain competitive, some of their key players such as Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts and Max Muncy (not to mention Clayton Kershaw) are on the other side of 30. You never know how long they can keep this level of dominance going.
And one more thing: Dave Roberts has the highest winning percentage of any manager in MLB history. With a second World Series title (and a few more years of managing), his Hall of Fame résumé would look pretty good. — David Schoenfield
Three reasons L.A. can win:
1. The depth of the lineup. Max Muncy set a postseason record by reaching base in 12 consecutive plate appearances during the NLCS, and Shohei Ohtani set a Dodgers postseason record by reaching 17 times in the same series. And yet neither was really in consideration for series MVP. That honor, without much pushback, went to Tommy Edman, who hits at the bottom of the lineup when the Dodgers are fully clicking. Given that Mookie Betts has clearly put his bewildering, 0-for-22 postseason slump behind him, Freddie Freeman has had close to a week to rest his sprained right ankle, Teoscar Hernandez and Will Smith showed signs of getting right again in NLCS Game 6, and that Kiké Hernández clearly has a propensity for thriving in October, the Dodgers’ lineup could be at full tilt for this World Series. So, sure, the Yankees can pitch around Ohtani. But there are many concerns behind him
2. The strength of the bullpen. Given the rest days that allowed the Dodgers to line up their three starting pitchers, L.A. might only have to stage one bullpen game in this series. It’s a clear strength, though, NLCS Game 2 notwithstanding. The Dodgers have six high-leverage relievers to deploy in those instances, a list that includes Ryan Brasier, Anthony Banda, Daniel Hudson, Evan Phillips, Michael Kopech and Blake Treinen. If Alex Vesia can return from an intercostal injury, that’s seven. If Brusdar Graterol can bounce back from shoulder inflammation, that’s eight. The Dodgers used a bullpen game to keep their season alive in the NLDS and to clinch a pennant in the following round. Don’t be surprised if they ride the bullpen to a championship.
3. The experience on the roster. The Dodgers could deploy as many as 10 players who were on the World Series roster when they overcame baseball in a bubble to win it all in 2020. Most of the others have been with them through the following three Octobers, which ended in disappointment. The stakes of this stage are not foreign to them. Quite the contrary, actually. Their biggest challenge might have been the five-day layoff that comes with a first-round bye. They finally conquered it this year — and they have the moxie to capture four more wins in what will be the most hyped World Series in recent memory. — Alden Gonzalez
Where the Dodgers are vulnerable: The lack of plentiful left-handed pitching out of the bullpen could be a problem area for L.A. Anthony Banda was the lone lefty reliever on the roster last round against the Mets. If Alex Vesia is healthy (he left Game 5 in the NLDS with an intercostal injury) it could help shore up a potential weakness.
Depending on Vesia’s health, Roberts runs the risk of having to use righties or overusing Banda against a lineup featuring the left-handed hitting Juan Soto, Anthony Rizzo and Alex Verdugo. Even if Banda and/or Vesia are effective against Soto, they will still have to stay in the game to face Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton because of the three-batter minimum rule. That’s a step up from Mets sluggers Pete Alonso and Mark Vientos, and how Dodgers relievers fare in those key matchups could determine the series. — Jesse Rogers
How Dodgers can pitch Soto and Judge: First, let out a long sigh.
Soto does his damage up in the strike zone — and just above it (Hunter Gaddis is nodding). He also does almost all of his chasing out of the zone up there, but it is best to not tempt fate too many times near his nitro zone.
Here’s the best opportunity: Soto’s worst zones for any contact or slugging metrics are the low/in and low/out corners. Now, he doesn’t really chase out of the zone, so you have to throw a strike and hit your spot, probably best to do so with a slider. He will chase a bit below the zone with changeups, so cross your fingers with a fastball above the zone that maybe he fouls off, then when you’re ahead, throw a low slider in the zone or changeup just below the zone and you might have a fighting chance.
Do not throw Judge a middle-in fastball under any circumstances! You have a shot if you nibble around the zone, but even missing inside is a bad idea, so try to stay away and above and below the zone. I would advise to throw almost entirely sliders (especially hard, true sliders that look like fastballs out of the hand) down and away, which is by far his worst pitch and location. The other look you show to get him from leaning out over the plate for a slider is where you might get in trouble. Remember what I said about middle-in fastballs? Don’t do it! — Kiley McDaniel
Jeff Passan’s inside intel:
• Even if you exclude Game 5 of the NLCS, when Los Angeles didn’t manage to strike out a single New York Mets hitter, the Dodgers still have one of the worst strikeout rates this postseason. And as good as the Mets were that game, the Yankees are even more disciplined at the plate. They have a playoff-low 23.2% chase rate on pitches outside the strike zone. “If the Dodgers can strike the Yankees out,” one evaluator who watched Los Angeles all postseason said, “they’re going to be in good shape. I just don’t know that they will.” The flip side for the Dodgers: their hitters have the second-lowest chase rate in the playoffs at 25%
• Watch out, Carlos Rodon, Tim Hill and Nestor Cortes. The Dodgers have feasted on left-handed pitching this postseason, getting on base more than 40% of the time with their righty-stacked lineup. Against lefties, they are hitting 80 points higher. While 15 of Los Angeles’ 20 playoff home runs have come against right-handers, “I like their right-heavy lineup better,” a scout said. “Their left-handed hitters (who play against lefties, Max Muncy and Freddie Freeman) have good eyes and will work ABs. And their righties kill pitchers from the left.”‘
• Speaking of left-handed pitching: The only left-hander certain to be on the Dodgers’ roster is Anthony Banda, who entered this postseason with zero playoff experience. While he has been good in limited time, Banda could be alone in the bullpen after lefty Alex Vesia was left off the NLCS roster with a strained muscle in his ribs. The Yankees’ reliance on left-handedness — Juan Soto, Anthony Rizzo, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Austin Wells and Alex Verdugo all are regulars — might be problematic against other teams. Instead, another scout said, “their reverse-split guys need to do the heavy lifting.”
New York Yankees
Chance of winning: 47.8% | ESPN BET odds: +105
What’s on the line for the Yankees: The obvious stakes are that the Yankees are trying to end a 15-year title drought now that they’ve quenched their pennant thirst. With 27 titles all time, New York’s lead on the cosmic standings board is secure for eons to come but it has been a while. The last time New York won it all, Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter were active and Juan Soto had just celebrated his 11th birthday. More than the unrequited longings of Bronx fans is the reality that this might be the Yankees’ best chance for some time to come. Sure, the Yankees are always contenders to win it all but this Soto-Aaron Judge pairing is a rare thing and if Soto signs elsewhere, it’s also fleeting. When you think of all-time Yankee power duos, the specter of Lou Gehrig bolting for, say, the on-the-other-side-of-the-river Giants was not something the Babe Ruth era Yankees ever had to confront. Soto might stay of course but just in case, this is as good a time as any for the Bombers to take World Series No. 28. — Bradford Doolittle
Three reasons New York can win:
1. The starting rotation. Bullpen games are fashionable, but the surest way to win in October is with great starting pitching. And the Yankees have the advantage in that department. The Yankees have four legitimate starters to cover the seven-game series. Gerrit Cole is the best starting pitcher between the two clubs. Carlos Rodón, Clarke Schmidt and Luis Gil are all capable of quality starts behind him. Cole has logged seven innings once in this postseason. Rodón went six in the ALCS. Starts like those alleviate the pressure on the bullpen, which increasingly matters as the series goes along. The Dodgers, meanwhile, have three starters before Game 4 will be a bullpen game for them. The formula has worked but allows for less margin for error. Expose relievers enough and they’ll get hit. Just ask Emmanuel Clase and Cade Smith
2. The stress the top of the lineup applies on pitchers. Getting through the version of Gleyber Torres we’ve seen this month followed by Soto, Judge and October Stanton atop the lineup is a gauntlet. Torres has a .400 OBP and has reached base in the first inning in eight of nine postseason games. Soto, a proven postseason performer, is 11-for-33 with three home runs, seven walks, seven strikeouts and a 1.106 OPS. Stanton has thrived in October again, swatting five home runs with five walks and a 1.179 OPS. Judge, the presumptive AL MVP, is just 5-for-31, but he has worked seven walks and hit two home runs. They grind pitchers down.
3. Judge is due. The Yankees have made it this far without MVP Judge. Remember the regular season? When Judge posted perhaps the greatest season ever by a right-handed hitter? When he led the majors in home runs, RBIs, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, wRC+ and every version of WAR under the sun? That Judge has not emerged in the postseason, and the Yankees have gone 7-2 anyway. An MVP-level Judge emergence would change the series. — Jorge Castillo
Where the Yankees are vulnerable: The bullpen performance has been a revelation, given the context of mid-September, when manager Aaron Boone talked about the need to be “creative.” What that entailed, in the end, was the shift of Luke Weaver into the closer role, in place of Clay Holmes, and the bullpen has performed spectacularly in the first two rounds of the postseason. But this Dodgers’ lineup is a whole different level of tough, and so Holmes and Tommy Kahnle and Tim Hill and the others will have to respond in big moments in this series. The Yankees need their starters to cover a majority of innings in this series, because the more that New York’s bullpen is exposed, the more likely it is that the Dodgers will get to them. L.A.’s bullpen is deeper. –– Buster Olney
How Yankees can pitch Ohtani and Betts: I’m looking at heat maps of Ohtani’s tendencies, like how his nitro zone is almost the entire strike zone, and I can’t help but hear “Welcome to the Jungle” and Ohtani chuckling at me trying to find a weakness. I’m having trouble finding a type of pitch that he doesn’t have a 1.000 OPS against. He has excellent lateral plate coverage, so he’ll tend to spoil pitches just inside/outside — but he will whiff on stuff just above/below the zone. He has the least success with hard stuff that looks like four-seam fastballs out of the hand, like cutters, sliders and sinkers. I think working down with firm stuff and mixing in a pitch or two above the zone to change his eyeline will give you a shot, maybe after getting ahead from him fouling off a cutter/slider on his hands.
Pitching to Betts is a walk in the park after breaking down Judge, Soto, and Ohtani. Betts’ weakest location is away, along with some struggles just above the zone. He excels down and in and even off the plate down and in. It might start sounding repetitive, but a four-seamer or two above the zone to mix things up is smart to deploy at the right time, with the pitch you’re trying to get to most often being a breaking ball down and/or away. He won’t swing and miss much, so it’ll be hard to strike him out, but his nitro zone is the inner half, while the outer half is less scary and off the plate away is where you’re trying to land those sliders. — Kiley McDaniel
Jeff Passan’s inside intel:
• The Yankees have no problem getting runners on base. Sometimes they just have trouble keeping them there and advancing them. If there is a clear advantage in this series, it’s the Dodgers’ on the basepaths. Not only do the Yankees make too many boneheaded mistakes, they were thrown out a disproportionate number of times on the basepaths and took extra bases (going first to third on a single, first to home on a double and second to home on a single) at the lowest rate in MLB, just 36% of the time. “They’re going to make dumb outs at inopportune times,” one scout said. “They’re just consistently not good at running.” The Dodgers, meanwhile, were the best in baseball (49%).
• Everything is pointing toward Nestor Cortes returning from a flexor strain in his left forearm, and because he hasn’t pitched since Sept. 18 and isn’t built up, the strong likelihood is him slotting into a relief or opener role. New York could be inclined to use him early in the series to see whether his stuff is playing — and if he can be an effective left-on-left counter to a pocket of the lineup that includes Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman. “It’s risky spending a roster spot on a guy you don’t know you can rely on,” an executive involved in postseason roster construction said. “If he’s not good, you can just take him off the roster, but if he costs you a game, you’re already regretting the choice.”
• One thing the Yankees will be happy not to see against the Dodgers: changeups. No Dodgers pitcher regularly throws a change. Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s splitter and Brent Honeywell’s screwball function the same, but considering the Yankees’ OPS against changeups this season was 18th in MLB, Los Angeles — especially its bullpen, in which Evan Phillips, Michael Kopech and Blake Treinen do not offer a change — is doing the Yankees a favor. “It’s something to exploit,” a scout said. “And the Dodgers just don’t have guys who can do that.”
Our predictions
New York Yankees (7 votes)
Los Angeles Dodgers (7 votes)
How many games?
• Yankees in 7 (5 votes)
• Dodgers in 7 (4 votes)
• Dodgers in 6 (3 votes)
• Yankees in 6 (2 votes)
MVP: Juan Soto (4 votes), Aaron Judge (3 votes), Mookie Betts (3 votes), Shohei Ohtani (2 votes), Teoscar Hernandez (1 vote), Max Muncy (1 vote)
Our voting was split, why did you pick the Yankees?
The baseline percentages I use to run the simulations that generate the probabilities you read here are virtually dead even between the Yankees and Dodgers. In other words, this is a coin flip of a matchup with the Dodgers getting an extra home game which, based on what we’ve seen the past couple of years, might or might not be an advantage. My pick of the Yankees, given the hours upon hours I spent working with numbers and trying to appraise every team at each stage of the season, is based on little more than a hunch. Sorry, statheads.
Things I like about the Yankees:
• The Yankees are battle-tested after surviving a gauntlet of young, fast-rising AL Central contenders.
• I like that the Yankees have a more coherent pitching setup entering the series, one sharpened by the long layoff since the ALCS. Yes, you can say that helps the Dodgers and their bullpenning ways even more, but I still think there are diminishing returns in trying to ride that to the end, at least for that team.
• I also think the layoff will give Aaron Judge a chance to get his head together and he is overdue for a heater.
• More than anything: If there is one player I think could dominate this matchup from beginning to end, it’s Juan Soto, who, for now at least, resides in the Yankees’ dugout. — Doolittle
And why do you think the Dodgers will win it all?
Rigorous statistical studies have shown that it would take a best-of-75 series to determine the best team in a matchup of two essentially equal teams, which is what we have here, but given that we can’t really keep playing baseball until mid-January, we’re stuck with a best-of-7.
Here’s why I’m picking the Dodgers:
• I believe more in Shohei Ohtani right now than Aaron Judge.
• The Yankees haven’t been tested in the postseason — the Royals and Guardians, simply put, were average-at-best offensive teams. The Cleveland bullpen was also running on fumes.
• Sure, the Dodgers have issues with the rotation, but they’ve already proved they can overcome that with their bullpen depth.
• I don’t trust the Yankees bullpen. Tim Hill? Jake Cousins? Even Luke Weaver, as good as he has been, was touched up for a couple of home runs in the ALCS.
• Giancarlo Stanton can — and will — be pitched to (though I’m not sure the same can be said for Juan Soto).
• Mookie Betts is back: .342/.419/.763, 4 HR, 12 RBIs over his past nine games. (though I do worry about Freddie Freeman’s ankle)
• Ohtani will deliver in Game 7. — Schoenfield
