It would appear that none of these teams are actually going to win the World Series.
The Dodgers look gassed, and their bullpen is a science experiment. The Yankees’ bullpen is also shaky, and so is the Blue Jays’. Upon closer inspection, almost all of these bullpens are shaky, though the Padres have a great one. That’s important because it helps paper over the fact that the Padres had five of the least productive lineup spots in baseball. I won’t even get started on the Guardians’ lineup because you, the person reading this, is hitting leadoff for Game 1, and I don’t want you to get discouraged. The Tigers have lost 14 of their last 13 games, give or take. The entire Brewers roster is a bunch of commons whose baseball cards wouldn’t appear in an issue of “Beckett’s Baseball Card Monthly.” The Red Sox have a top-heavy rotation, the Phillies will be without Zack Wheeler and the Mariners wish they had last year’s rotation. The Cubs had the best lineup in the National League according to OPS+, but they were merely average in the second half. The Reds also appear to be in the postseason, possibly because of a typographical error.
The Mets and Astros aren’t even in the danged thing.
Yet one of these teams will actually win the World Series*. It will make sense after it happens, and everyone will know about the postseason heroics of some previously overlooked player, like Alec Bohm or Will Warren. Until then, we have to look at the assembled contenders and guess. They’re all good enough to win the World Series, but none of them are so great that you’ll actually predict them to win it. Not with any confidence, at least.
All we can do is sort them into postseason tiers and wait.
* Except for the Mets or Astros.
Tier 4 – Championship or bust
Note that these tiers aren’t necessarily about which teams are the best. They’re arbitrary groupings that are being used to create content for hungry, hungry eyeballs, and you fell right into my trap. But it also makes sense to lump these teams together. Two of them won the pennant last season, and the other team won consecutive pennants in the two seasons before that. They’re the teams that will consider the entire 2025 season a disappointment if they don’t have a parade come November.
It’s a longstanding conviction around these parts that winning the pennant is a special gift, and bringing the World Series through your town is an incredible accomplishment that shouldn’t be diminished by what happens in the series. However, there is one amendment to this, and it’s that after about two or three pennants without a championship, you’re right to freak out. Here are the teams that will freak out as the rest of baseball points and laughs.
It could work. Roki Sasaki’s lone inning in a major-league bullpen was mighty impressive. Here he is dispatching an MVP candidate on a third straight splitter:
They’ll have Clayton Kershaw in the bullpen, too, and he’s still effective against lefties and righties alike. It could work?
Few Dodgers teams have limped into the postseason quite like this one, though. Sure, they won the NL West for the 12th time in 13 years, but they won only 93 games, and they’ll have to suffer the indignity of playing a first-round series in the new postseason format. This round wasn’t supposed to be for the special teams. Why are they down here with the riff raff, the commoners, the hoi polloi?
On the other hand, they have a couple of excellent starters and a middle of the order that they’ll still remember in 2125. Teams have won championships with less. Much, much less. They might even still be the favorites.
That bullpen is truly radioactive, though, so the Sasaki gambit isn’t a nice-to-have but a need-to-have. If it works, the Dodgers might be the boring World Series champ that everyone picked before the season started, though they’ll have taken a circuitous route to get there.
If it doesn’t work, they’ll be very upset, which should scare you. They can’t go out and buy another Shohei Ohtani, but they can always build one.
The Yankees were 18-7 in September. It was their best month, even if the last bits of it came at the expense of the White Sox and Orioles. There are a few teams entering the postseason with plenty of momentum, but the Yankees have to be feeling better about how they’re playing. Back when they were in the doldrums of June and July, it was an entirely different league. The Brewers were an also-ran, the Tigers had an insurmountable lead in the AL Central and the Guardians had the fourth-worst record in the AL. If we can forget how they started, why can’t we forget about the Yankees’ trials and tribulations?
Because they’re supposed to be better than all of them. And all of us. They’re supposed to be better than everybody, dang it, at all times. They’re living through the clever punishment of a Greek myth, carrying the burden of 27 championships around as the price they have to pay for winning them. Let me tell you about a team that also used to win all of the championships in their sport, only to stop doing so, apparently forever. They’ve also been around for more than a century, and they even play in the biggest city in their country, too.
Are the Yankees the new Toronto Maple Leafs? We’ll need another 42 years to get to that point, but they’re mad that I even asked the question. It’s also not unthinkable, which should scare the bejeepers out of them.
Can you imagine the narrative if the Phillies had lost in the World Series last season, instead of losing in the NLDS? It would have been insufferable. Buffalo Bills this, Buffalo Bills that. (I know that losing three of four in this hypothetical isn’t the same as the Bills losing three straight, but adjusted for sport, it’s even more impressive.) Then imagine them actually getting to the World Series for the second time in three seasons (three straight if not for that near miss in the 2023 NLCS). What an accomplishment! What a run! What a lot of pressure to actually win it this time! So while I don’t think Phillies fans have a lot of fond memories about losing in the NLDS, the Mets were actually doing them a favor. Mark Vientos was their friend all along.
There might not be a postseason favorite this year, but the Phillies have as much of an argument as anyone else.
Tier 3 – When we look in the mirror, we’re still the precious li’l underdogs that everyone roots for
A tier for the two teams that used to revel in the underdog story. They’re like a famous child actor who grew up into a weird-looking adult. You want to tousle their hair and say, “Didn’t you used to have that curse?”, but they’re all grown up now. They still want your best regards and warmest wishes, which you will not give them. They’ve won the World Series already. Now get a job.
Check out the history of championship droughts among the 12 postseason teams this year:
Well, well, well. Look who the spoiled brats are, relatively speaking.
A sneaky pick to win it all, if only because nobody’s talking about them. It’s too glib to say that random teams should be favored to win the World Series, especially when the Dodgers and Yankees were the last two teams to play in one, but the Red Sox have that look about them. They didn’t have a wild hot streak where they surged up the power rankings this season, and they didn’t have a pathetic losing streak where everyone assumed they were cooked. They won 89 games by being the most 89-win team imaginable, with a lineup, rotation and bullpen that were all good enough to make the postseason, but not good enough to moon the teams behind them on their way there.
Their bullpen had a 3.44 ERA in the first half and a 3.40 ERA in the second half. C’mon. That’s the 88-win team of bullpens, and that’s not a dig. A team this OK should scare everyone in the postseason. Extremely OK teams are the ones that like to set small fires throughout the month of October.
The Cubs had a .771 OPS in the first half and a .723 in the second half, even as temperatures warmed up around the country. That split is a bit deceptive, though, because they finished September with one of their strongest offensive months of the season. The second-half splits fell off so much because of a brutal August, but they’re probably fine now.
If there’s a stat that you should overreact to, though, it’s that the Cubs were under .500 against winning teams this season. Every one of their pitchers with at least 20 starts has an ERA that’s well below their FIP, and while most of that credit goes to generational up-the-middle defense, it feels like a rotation that’s built to fluster the Pirates, not the Phillies.
Still good enough to win the World Series, of course. I’m not going to put that at the end of every capsule, but it’ll be there in spirit.
Tier 2 – OK, it’s been long enough, please let us out of championship jail
The last time the Reds won a World Series, their owner, Marge Schott, was mad at them for sweeping it because that cost her ticket revenue for the rest of the series. She refused to pay for a celebration, which led to the team eating fast food in an empty hotel banquet room. The point of recounting this isn’t because it’s an incredible story, although it is, but because it was kind of a whispered story at the time, something that you’d find out years later as a “Did you know?” sort of tidbit. It wasn’t the topic of conversation that it would be now.
That’s how you know it’s been long enough to consider a drought. Their owner was mad at them for winning the World Series, and it wasn’t the topic of conversation on every radio show? There weren’t grown men yelling at each other on ESPN about it? There wasn’t even one TikTok? There wasn’t a single piece of social media talking about it, unless you count alt.sports.baseball.cinci-reds. We didn’t have 56K modems back then. We would glue two 28K modems together, and we were happy to get even that.
It’s been a while, in other words. And while the Reds are only here because the Mets licked the third rail, over and over again, they know that postseason nonsense turns a fringe wild-card team into a champ. They’ve seen other teams use them as trampolines to get there over the last 25 years.
Would you accept a 31-year championship drought in exchange for back-to-back titles? Depends on how old you are, but those are good odds for a 30-team league. Only the Yankees, Red Sox and Giants have won more since then. Yeah, take that deal.
Except it might not be just a 31-year championship drought. It can go another 10 years. Maybe another 20. This is right around the time when fans of a team start to get incredibly antsy. You don’t know if they’re in a capital-D drought or a temporary dead zone. I’m a San Francisco 49ers fan, so you can trust me on this. The team that once had the most championships in Super Bowl history now exists in this purgatory. Pretty sure it’s a drought. It sucks here.
That’s where the Blue Jays are, and if they want the good news, it’s that they have just about as good of a chance at winning it all as anybody. If they want the bad news, that’s still a 1/12 chance, give or take a few percentage points.
Remember: This is one of the most recent champions among the postseason teams, and they still get to complain. What a postseason field for the drought-haters among us. It’s how you know the Dodgers are going to win.
What were you doing the last time the Tigers won the World Series? Some of you were playing an Atari 2600 and wearing leg warmers, as was the style of the time. I was an up-and-coming intern at the Ministry of Truth. A lot of you — even some of the balding ones — weren’t even born.
It’s been a while. And it will continue being a while. That bit from the Cubs’ capsule about how all of these teams are “still good enough to win the World Series, of course” doesn’t apply to the Tigers, who were 7-16 in September and 28-36 in the second half. They were up 10 games on September 3! A team that blows that kind of lead should not be here at all. In fact, I’m pulling them from the postseason. They’re out. We’re not putting the Astros in their place because nobody likes them, so congratulations to the Rays. You’re in. You play the Guardians in Cleveland on Tuesday. Wear layers.
Is this an attempt at a reverse jinx to repay my karmic debt from my 2012 World Series prediction? Perhaps. But also the Tigers are the 12th-best team in the postseason, and they have negative momentum. I triple-dog dare them to win the World Series. Baseball likes to pull pranks, but it’s not this wacky.
Tier 1 – It’s our turn. Everybody back the heck off. We’re serious this time.
They have a 60-homer catcher with a cheeky nickname. That’s enough to win the World Series of vibes, but they’ll need more to win the World Series of World Serieses. They’ll also need to get to a World Series before they win one, and that’s been tough enough. The Mariners have played 48 pennant-less seasons. When they get to 50 pennant-less seasons, they hand in their punch card and their next pennant-less season is free.
The Mariners and their fans can deal with the Cubs and the Red Sox finally winning a World Series, and I’m sure they were almost happy for the White Sox in 2008. But the Rangers? The Astros twice, even if that came with some complications? The Mariners haven’t even been to one. It’s their turn, back off.
(It’s probably not their turn. But it should be. Unless it should be the turn of someone below …)
Milwaukee has celebrated a World Series win before. The year was 1957, and the Milwaukee Braves defeated the New York Yankees in seven games. According to the Janesville Weekly Gazette, “The combined excitement of Armistice Day after World War I and V-J Day after World War II hardly matched the pandemonium which gripped this town Thursday night,” with almost 750,000 people flooding the streets in a metropolitan area that was then around 1 million.
The Milwaukee Brewers, though? Not so much. They’ve been to a World Series before, but that was when they were in the American League. (I hope Mariners fans stopped reading before that part.) These Brewers have been contending since 2017, with their peak being an NLCS appearance back in 2018. That’s as close to a championship as they’ve come since 1982, which was as close as the city had come since 1957. This is the best Brewers team in history, by record, which means it might be their best chance ever. It’s their turn, back off.
(It’s probably not their turn. But it should be. Unless it should be the turn of someone below …)
The Padres have won two pennants since coming into the league in 1969, but they’ve won only one World Series game. That factlet isn’t sadder than the Mariners’ pennant drought, but it’s almost as impressive. Take the DeLorean back to 1984, and tell Padres fans after an exciting, taut Game 2 that they wouldn’t see another Fall Classic win for at least four decades, and you would break hearts. Not as many as the Padres, year after year after year after year, but you’d break a few.
What does it take to avoid winning a World Series game for 41 years? Bad luck, certainly, but also general fecklessness, which is the perfect description of the Padres’ franchise for most of their existence. Except it’s different now, pal. This is a team that’s built to win and it’s hungry for it. A.J. Preller hasn’t slept since he was hired in 2014, and he is so very tired. Won’t anybody think of him? It’s their turn, back off.
(It’s probably not their turn. But it should be. Unless it should be the turn of someone below …)
The last of the old curses and the purest championship drought in the sport. It was 71 years ago that Willie Mays, in an emphatic stroke of Byzantine whimsy, made his over-the-shoulder catch off of Vic Wertz. It was not unlike watching Atlantis rise again from the sea, the bones of its kings newly covered with flesh. And it was a helluva long time ago. That’s not even the last time the franchise won a World Series, either. That was back in 1948.
It would definitely be amusing for the team with the worst on-base percentage from a postseason team in MLB history to end the drought. Guardians fans wouldn’t mind if this was the team that finally broke the drought, even if it’s almost certainly the worst postseason team in franchise history. They scored nine runs in their regular season finale, and that seems like a good over-under for how many runs they’ll score in the postseason.
They just might win the World Series if they get those nine runs. Pretty sure the definition of “Guards Ball” includes forfeits, too. It’s their turn, back off.
(It’s probably not their turn. But it should be. All four of these teams should share the trophy for a year, and they can all take turns watching it the first night, like Radioactive Man No. 1.)
(Photo of Cubs Dansby Swanson, Pete Crow-Armstrong and Matt Shaw: Daniel Bartel / Getty Images)
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