2024 World Series Preview: This is What You Came For

Rihanna said it best. Or maybe it was Russell Crowe. This is the main event. The top seed in the American League meets the top seed in the National League. The presumptive AL MVP is leading his team against the presumptive NL winner. Those guys, coincidentally, are the two biggest free agents in history – Shohei Ohtani broke the bank this past offseason, only a year after Aaron Judge signed a historic deal of his own. Juan Soto might eclipse them both this winter. And while those three are the biggest stars in the game right now, they have three previous MVP winners – Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Giancarlo Stanton – as sidekicks. Oh yeah, and the two highest-paid pitchers in history are the aces of their respective teams. Heck, I’ve allowed this paragraph to run to a ridiculous length, and I’m only now mentioning 2024 Home Run Derby winner Teoscar Hernández.

By any objective measure, this World Series matchup is absolutely loaded with star power. But the current players are only half the story. This is the 12th Yankees-Dodgers matchup in World Series history – the Dodgers have played in 22 of these things, and they’ve faced one team more than half the time. This isn’t quite Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Fall Classic anymore, where the two preeminent teams are a subway ride apart, but the next best thing is a rivalry between the two biggest cities in the country.

Want an example of how good the players in this series are? Here are the top five hitters in baseball by wRC+ this year:

Jay Jaffe dove into how rare it is to see the best player in each league in the World Series – turns out, it’s quite rare! Fifty-homer sluggers have also never faced each other in the Series before now, and that leaves out the fact that Ohtani stole 50 bags too. Soto is an absurdly over-qualified second banana. Betts isn’t on this list, and he was in the MVP running before missing time with injury. The star power on display is simply staggering, as Davy Andrews noted Wednesday.

You probably already know all that. Those are just the FanGraphs previews, and you’re not exactly coming in here having not read other baseball analysis. So while I could rehash the same headlines with my typical mix of literary and musical nods shoehorned in, I thought I’d try something a little bit different in this preview. Ohtani is amazing. Judge is a modern-day titan. Soto is your favorite hitter’s favorite hitter. Betts is my favorite player to watch. Those are all givens. But there are a bunch of other guys playing too, and how they fare against each other and against the stars will go a long way towards determining which of these iconic franchises takes home the trophy next week.

The Dodgers’ Secret Bullpen Plan
The Dodgers rotation feels like it’s stapled together, or at best held in place by strategically applied duct tape. The team is only carrying three starters, and Jack Flaherty is the only one of them to pitch into the sixth inning so far this October. The Dodgers have played 11 games, and three of those have been full-on bullpen games. Their bullpen has covered 18.1 more innings than their New York counterparts.

At first blush, that feels like a recipe for disaster against the Yankees, who just picked apart the best bullpen in baseball in the ALCS. But the Dodgers have thus far used a secret recipe to prevent their ‘pen from getting over-exposed. If you’re up by six runs, you can use pretty much any reliever you want, and Los Angeles’ offense has done a great job of putting up crooked numbers and taking all the drama out of games in the early innings.

Want that expressed mathematically? In the aggregate, Dodgers relievers have dealt with a 0.65 leverage index in their 57 innings of work this postseason. Leverage index averages 1.0 by definition, and 0.65 is extremely low. That’s pure mop-up territory. Ryan Yarbrough and Nabil Crismatt, neither of whom are still on the team, were Dodgers relievers with that average leverage index during the regular season. Those guys are filler; they pitch when the outcome of the game isn’t in doubt. For a Yankees equivalent, think Ron Marinaccio or Dennis Santana. The point is, while Dodgers relievers are doing a lot, they’re doing it in forgiving conditions. They’ve been on the receiving end of a few blowouts, and they’ve also scored 6.4 runs per game, so there hasn’t been a ton of drama either way.

Those blowouts function like a release valve for the relief corps. Despite the most team bullpen innings, only one Dodgers reliever, Blake Treinen, features in the top 10 for postseason relief innings pitched. The Dodgers reliever to cover the second-most innings is long man Brent Honeywell, and he’s done it in two appearances, soaking up three to four innings at a time. Both teams ease off the gas in blowouts, and reasonably so: There’s no point in spending good pitchers in a game with a six-run score differential.

That lets the Dodgers keep their top arms fresh even as their starters scuffle, and “scuffle” might be too polite of a term for what the rotation has done so far this postseason. The only “starter” with an ERA below five is opener Ryan Brasier. The three actual starters have an aggregate ERA of 6.14, and they’re only covering four and a half innings per game. Another way of thinking about it is that they’ve only accounted for 38% of the batters the Dodgers have faced this October. Yankees starters are at 54%, and the Dodgers were also in that ballpark (54.5%) in the regular season. With such meager contributions from the workhorses, every single reliever has had to work to pick up the slack.

All of those innings can take a toll beyond simple fatigue. I’ve focused on repeat matchups between relievers and hitters this postseason, because those feel like a key point of failure. You don’t want to give Judge and Soto a ton of looks at the same pitcher, no matter how good that guy is. So far, the Dodgers have done a spectacular job of avoiding repeat matchups. Their top three relievers are Treinen, Michael Kopech, and Evan Phillips. In total, those three have tripled up on a batter matchup three times – Treinen and Phillips faced Fernando Tatis Jr. three times, and Treinen also got Luis Arraez thrice. Contrast that with the Yankees: closer Luke Weaver has faced three batters three times and two batters four times already. Clay Holmes has a four-spot and two threes of his own. Tommy Kahnle, who only throws changeups and thus presumably faces a meaningful familiarity penalty, has as many same-batter-three-times encounters as the Dodgers’ top trio combined.

Dave Roberts has also been diligent about moving his matchups around. He has enough high-leverage arms that he doesn’t need to attack the top of the opposing lineup the same way every day, which has proven helpful. Could a lefty get the bottom of the Yankees order through Soto before giving way to a righty? Sure. Could Brasier get a few bites at the apple? Indubitably.

Another thing to keep an eye on: In the NLCS, Los Angeles went without Alex Vesia. He strained his back while warming up in Game 5 of the divisional round, which left the team in a bind. He’s their best lefty reliever, and also one of just two southpaws, along with Anthony Banda, on the playoff roster. That was mostly fine against the Mets, who are light on lefty power, but the Yankees have five lefties in their everyday lineup, so Vesia’s health could make a huge difference. His recovery has gone well, and he’s expected to make the roster, but any flare-up could give the Dodgers an even tougher puzzle to solve. The options behind him – perhaps Joe Kelly, probably not Brusdar Graterol, maybe Edgardo Henriquez – have question marks of their own.

However you slice it, Dodgers relievers are going to have a ton of work to do in the next week. How much of that work is high leverage – and who gets the bulk of it – remains to be seen. If the games are mostly close, this series will look quite different than the last few they’ve played.

Anthony Volpe’s Batting Eye
Coming into the playoffs, I expected that Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Austin Wells would be a key part of New York’s supporting cast. They’ve both struggled mightily. Stanton has, of course, picked up all of that slack; he’s hitting .294/.385/.794 to pace the team. But Anthony Volpe has quietly contributed from the bottom half of the order by getting on base and bringing up the thunderous heart of the lineup more frequently.

Volpe isn’t hitting for power, but he’s walked more than 20% of the time, leading to a sterling .459 OBP. That’s tough to do when you’re one of the hitters people want to face. Heck, Soto and Judge are each walking 17.1% of the time, despite one intentional walk each, and they’re striking out more frequently than Volpe to boot.

Some of this comes down to scattershot pitching on the part of his opponents. Most of it, though, is because Volpe flat out stopped chasing. He’s swung at 11.7% of pitches outside the strike zone in the playoffs, easily the lowest mark for anyone with more than a handful of plate appearances. He’s not swinging very much at all, in fact; before reaching two strikes, he’s only swinging at 20.6% of pitches. Not balls – pitches. He’s seen 58 pitches outside of the strike zone before two strikes, and he’s swung at two of them.

Clearly, the solution for opposing pitchers is to flood the zone, but even when they do that, Volpe isn’t a sitting duck. With two strikes, he’s been nearly perfect. He has a 90.5% zone swing rate – 19 swings in 21 pitches. He still only chases 22.2% of the time. He’s making more contact overall than he made on swings in the strike zone for the year as a whole. It’s only been nine games, but he’s never had a nine-game plate discipline stretch this good in his entire major league career.

Why does that matter? You can think of the Yankees lineup as a fearsome foursome – shout out to Gleyber Torres – and then five guys whose job is to get the boppers up again. Every trip through the order is another stress point for the opposing pitching staff, another grueling encounter with Soto’s power/patience combination, Judge’s near-peerless thump, and the sheer terror that Stanton puts in pitchers with the hardest swings in the game. Volpe – and Anthony Rizzo – have been the key cogs turning things over and giving Judge and crew extra opportunities.

Can Volpe keep it up? I mean, probably not. It’s the best stretch of his career! Surely some amount of regression is coming. But the more he battles, the more he squeezes out walks and extends at-bats and generally plays the pest, the tougher things will be for the Dodgers.

Tommy Two Bags and the Down-Ballot Sluggers
The Dodgers lineup doesn’t quite reach the nosebleed heights of the Yankees lineup at the very top. After all, that chart of the best three hitters in baseball had two Yankees and only one Dodger. Ohtani also leads off, so he bats with runners on base less frequently than Soto and Judge. That means the Dodgers need to generate more extra-base hits from the no. 5-9 part of the order than the Yankees do, particularly given Freeman’s injury-marred nightmare of a postseason.

Or, maybe I should be saying the no. 4-9 part of the order. NLCS MVP Tommy Edman has batted fourth, fifth, sixth, eighth, and ninth this month, and he’s played both center field and shortstop while doing it. He keeps moving up in the lineup because he keeps producing. If it seems like the Dodgers always have this kind of guy, well, Enrique Hernández has posted a 145 wRC+ in a platoon role, just like he’s done for the past 37 years of Dodgers World Series appearances (I’m approximating, I don’t have the actual data in front of me). And the hits don’t stop there.

Andy Pages has chipped in two dingers of his own. Max Muncy is sneakily one of the best playoff performers of our generation – .235/.404/.481 over 240 plate appearances. Or maybe I should say he’s one of the best playoff performers ever – his 146 wRC+ is 11th all-time among batters with 200 or more plate appearances, sandwiched between Mickey Mantle (147 wRC+) and David Ortiz (144).

It hasn’t all been roses. Will Smith and Teoscar Hernández are supposed to be the supporting players, and they’ve both had lackluster months. But the aggregate production has still been there, with Edman, Enrique Hernández, and Muncy all key parts of it. I expect the Yankees to treat Ohtani and Betts very carefully. That’s going to mean a ton of opportunities for Edman and the gang to drive in runs. The genius of the Dodgers lineup is that they never need any particular supporting hitter to click – they just throw a ton of bodies at the problem and figure one will work. That’s going to be put to the test again in the World Series.

Luke Weaver, The Most Important Yankee
It feels pretty strange to have someone named Luke locking things down for the Evil Empire, but perhaps this is what noted baseball fan and voice of Darth Vader James Earl Jones was alluding to all along. Weaver has been the reliever this October. He has the most innings pitched. He enters in the highest-leverage spots, against the best batters on the other team, and pitches multiple innings. In a month of reliever blowups, he leads all pitchers in win probability added. He has five shutdowns and only one meltdown, if you’re into that way of looking at bullpens.

This is hardly a fluke; Weaver threw an absurd 84 innings in the regular season and took the closer job thanks to his phenomenal performance. He struck out more than 30% of opposing hitters, and his changeup might be the very best in baseball. He’s continued to do so in the playoffs even as the New York rotation has been uneven. Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodon both look solid, but that’s only half of a rotation. Weaver has shouldered a huge workload to help make up for that shortfall. But – earmuffs, AL Central fans – his postseason performance has come against middling competition.

The aggregate regular season wOBA of the batters he’s faced this October works out to just about league average, and that’s with three battles against Bobby Witt Jr. and four against José Ramírez. The Dodgers aren’t just about league average – they were the top hitting team in baseball this year. The degree of difficulty is going up.

I’m sure the Yankees would love to use Weaver in plenty of big spots this series. You could imagine a seven-game set where there are three blowouts and he pitches four times, with those four appearances more or less determining the series. That’s less crazy than it sounds: He’s faced 38 batters, while Judge, for example, has batted 41 times. And Weaver’s playing time has come in far more important situations. If he’s bad, it will be in spots where the Yankees absolutely can’t afford slip ups. If he’s good, it’ll be in spots where the Dodgers desperately need runs.

Any of these four areas might determine the winner of the series. But of course, maybe none of them will. Baseball isn’t Steph Curry and LeBron James going shot-for-shot down the stretch. It isn’t Patrick Mahomes finding Travis Kelce six times in a row when the team needs it most. Baseball isn’t predictable like that. You can’t anticipate David Freese, Steve Pearce, and Jeremy Peña, World Series MVPs all. If someone tells you they know who will determine the outcome of this series, they’re mistaken. That’s part of why I love this sport – and why it’s worth looking all over the roster for potential difference-makers.