Well, the championship round of baseball’s annual victory lap tournament is now set. The defending champ Dodgers will appear in their second consecutive World Series, while the Blue Jays will try to prevent them from being the first club to hoist Rob Manfred’s hunk of metal two years in a row in this millennium.
I know a lot of people (probably even you) are mad about the Dodgers continuing to exist and have the success they are, but I just can’t get my hackles up about this sort of thing. They won
93 games in what was probably a disappointment of a regular season for them, and still finished fifth in position player fWAR and second in pitching fWAR. The only thing meh about them on a team level is their defense — on a player basis, did you know that Michael Conforto and Teoscar Hernandez were fifth and sixth on the Dodgers in PAs this year, and combined for 0.0 fWAR? Stuff like that aside, the Dodgers were supposed to be the best, ended up being merely good in the regular season, and then rolled over their playoff competition. Like I said, I can’t be too mad about a team that’s supposed to be really good having success.
The Blue Jays actually finished the season with around 3 more position player fWAR than the Dodgers, due in huge part to their best-in-MLB defense. Their pitching was actually 21st in fWAR in MLB, with both the rotation and bullpen placing in the bottom half. The rotation, honestly, was kind of a shambles all season — Kevin Gausman was good, Chris Bassitt was fine, and it was a mess after that. By calling on Trey Yesavage and Shane Bieber instead of the non-Gausman guys (except for Max Scherzer), they’ve been able to make it work — but this is a team going places because they hit and catch the ball. I’m not sure the Jays are the most exciting representative for the AL, but honestly, the AL did not have particularly great pitching this year, so meh.
Anyway, you probably care about the matchup a lot more than me, so, what do you think? How would you rate it on a scale of one to ten?
