This World Series ended the only way it could, which was frenzied and late. The clocks turned back just a few hours after that; the next day was in another season, shorter and darker. The day after that, basically every MLB player eligible to do so, with all due respect to Tyler O'Neill, opted for free agency. It was instantly and overwhelmingly the offseason, and where once there had been a baseball season there was another sunny parade in Los Angeles, the spectacle of a sauced and puffy Blake Snell saying "6-7" on a stage 31 days before his 33rd birthday, and a sun that was already on the way down again. Soon, and for some time, there will be nothing left of baseball but Discourse.
A World Series as great as the one that ended over the weekend throws off enough light to reveal the relative shabbiness and artifice of its staging; the things that it was supposed to Be About naturally look small and dull relative to what it actually was. Before the National League Championship Series, the matchup between the Dodgers and Brewers was framed as a battle for baseball's future. The Dodgers are rich and spend a lot of money, and so stood for a future that was comparatively cold and small for how readily it could be bought; the Brewers won 97 games in simultaneously confounding and convincing fashion with a roster of players available on the waiver wires of most 10-team fantasy leagues, and so were the avatar for the belief that anything really could happen, up to and including that a team of Caleb Durbins and Sal Frelicks really could add up to much more than the sum of those humble and inexpensive parts. It's not a complicated binary. It's more or less the grim inevitability of what can be bought against the unquantifiable possibility of everything that exists outside of that.
There is a political valence to that, but not one that maps neatly over actual politics. It is much more fun to believe in magic than it is to believe in money, but the shape that argument takes within the game invariably involves the teams doing and spending the most doing and spending less, and so makes that confluence of savvy and magic feel overdetermined and cynical. The Brewers really did work angles and plug holes and do more with less; that they were also extremely and ruthlessly cheap was much less interesting than the ways in which they were smart. The Dodgers, on the other hand, are just the Dodgers, which is to say that they do all the stuff the Brewers and other industry-leading organizations do while also spending the necessary amount of money to be better than all of them.
That series was a walkover, and the Dodgers coolly closed out every chance the Brewers had in a way that felt disconcertingly uncomplicated. One relentless turn after another, the Dodgers disproved and dispelled whatever had kept the Brewers aloft up to that point. The Dodgers really did look like the future, if only because of how easily they turned the kismet-kissed Brewers into a bunch of .720-OPS guys casting meek grounders toward second base. Whatever ineffable thing had been at work there was, by the series' end, pretty convincingly effed. Anyone who watched it would have made the Dodgers the favorites against just about anyone else.
But even at their most inexorable, the idea that the Dodgers had somehow permanently or even temporarily solved baseball was never really very convincing. The game doesn't work like that, and the shape and scale of the postseason makes it even more chaotic. The roundnesses of the bat and ball just don't fit together cleanly enough to create a sufficiently sheer surface, and haven't since the sport was dragged out of its feudal era. More than that, the game just has too much wildness in it to be brought to heel. What was objectionable about the Dodgers came down to the fear that enough money and expertise really might solve every unsolvable thing about baseball, or just make it all much less fun. As it turned out, the Dodgers won it all for the second consecutive year. If you watched the World Series, you already know that there was nothing inevitable about it.
Great baseball teams are great because of how well they generate opportunities for themselves while denying them to opponents; great baseball organizations, which operate on a longer timetable, are primarily in the chance-generation business. Baseball is too big and too busy and too contingent and too difficult to solve in any meaningful way; the name of the game, from one game to the next but also more broadly, is creating more opportunities for things to work. Even the worst teams will begin each season with a chance; you can tell the good teams from the bad not just by how long those odds are, but by how many opportunities they have afforded themselves for things to work out. A good organization becomes good by creating more and more chances to be right—by spending big when and where necessary, but also by doing all the difficult and prosaic developmental stuff that makes the players they have better, and knowing enough to swipe players from teams that don't know their value, and by finding things that other teams don't know how to look for.
What sets the Dodgers apart isn't that they are better at all that than other MLB teams, so much as it is that they do more. They are richer, but also they are trying harder—scouting and evaluating more effectively, coaching more comprehensively, being where other clubs aren't, and then also spending in ways that other teams can't or just don't. They are not always right, their prospects and reclamation projects bust just like every other team's do, but they know enough to have a chance, and are determined enough to try. That these industry-leading practices have resulted in industry-leading big-league teams isn't surprising, but the way in which those teams have been great reflects both the excellence of the organization and its limitations: They are good enough to make a lot of extra chances and redeem a helpful amount of those, but not nearly good enough to remove the element of chance from the equation altogether. The game cannot really be made easier; the difference is in how many opportunities you can create for yourself, and also in making it harder for the opponent.
Part of what made the World Series great was that the Dodgers were up against a team that had managed something like the same feat. The Blue Jays spent on big-league talent in the way contenders must, and did so in a way that built a team that manufactured and denied chances in the ways that great teams must. That refusal to capitulate is what got them to the World Series, and it very nearly made the Jays champions; the individual brilliance of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. or George Springer or Addison Barger was a big part of that, but everything else had to work for any of that to matter.
If you have watched a great team beat one you care about, you know how this feels in the moment. Sometimes it is a matter of five straight hits at triple-digit exit velocities off a pitcher who's out of answers or just out of gas, but as often as not it is just one unresolved chance after another—a dorky grounder that gets through for them and doesn't for you, a pitcher's pitch that gets fouled off and fouled off again, a mistake that doesn't get made. Great opponents are stressful because they give themselves chance after chance. Both the Dodgers and the Jays were exhausting that way, stubborn in generating chances for themselves and stingy in affording them to their opponents.
One of the more astonishing aspects of this retrospectively astonishing World Series was that the Dodgers didn't really play like that against the Blue Jays. They were, on balance, not really the better team in this series; they made a lot of mistakes on the basepaths and in the field, and let the Blue Jays get away with a ton of mistakes in turn. The Dodgers lineup was lousy with dead spots and miscast parts; it took Miguel Rojas hitting a homer, and Andy Pages trucking Kiké Hernández at a dead run in deep left in Game 7, and a host of other similarly strange and stupid outcomes in previous games, to get the Dodgers through. Last year's World Series win went more or less the same way. This sort of thing only ever looks easy by accident.
This does not take anything away from the Dodgers, really. It is just how World Series are won, and where great teams come from. The Dodgers' dominance is to some extent a zero-sum affair; there is literally and figuratively only one Shohei Ohtani, and so only one team gets to have him. There are things that the Dodgers can offer, beyond all that money, that other organizations cannot: beautiful weather, a great tradition, a decade-and-a-half of sustained and self-sustaining success, unparalleled access to Jason Bateman. But none of those fundamentally alter the difference-making thing that the Dodgers have figured out.
That is mostly about taking and making chances, about trying stuff and trying stuff and trying stuff. The offseason signings that supposedly made the Dodgers inevitable wound up not really helping them at all: Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates, whom the Dodgers added to their bullpen only after the rest of the league took a pass, were unavailable in October and ineffective before that. Treinen, whom the team brought back at a top-market rate after a brilliant 2024, was unusable in October; Michael Conforto, signed for $17 million, was one of the least productive players in the sport. The Dodgers were not really wrong much less often or less expensively than other teams in their small actually-trying-to-win cohort, the Blue Jays included. They just carved out more chances to succeed than they could squander.
In the cold and noisy month ahead, the fact that all those chances broke the way they did will start to feel much more inevitable than it was; a World Series whose outcome still doesn't quite scan will be made rational, and then just, and then meaningful. It will be worth remembering what it was actually like, and how the Dodgers were so obviously losing this series right up until they didn't—how much doubt there was in it, how narrow and strange it was at the end, and how every moment felt not like a beat in a story whose ending everyone already knew but like a chance that might really have become something else, until it became this.
