What a dumb garbage World Series

I don't care for it

This sucks.

When it became clear that America was not going to have any sweethearts to root for in the World Series this year — no underdog Cleveland Guardians, no cool San Diego Padres, no unlikely New York Mets — the conversation inevitably pivoted. “Isn’t it great that we’re going to see the sport’s biggest stars in the Fall Classic? Aren’t you excited to see Judge and Ohtani on the biggest stage?”

My answer to that was basically no — give me Tanner Bibee outfoxing Willy Adames and article after article about how ratings are down, thank you — but I could see the appeal. Dudes hit dingers. Dingers are cool. Dudes are famous for being good at baseball, so it’s fun to watch them play baseball. Sure. I get it.

But Ohtani and Judge have both been non-factors. Juan Soto has been great, and Freddie Freeman is the frontrunner for World Series MVP, but the mega-ultra stars whose coronation we were supposed to be watching? They haven’t performed, and with Ohtani’s injury and the Dodgers’ 3-0 lead in the series, it’s not likely that he’ll get much better. Judge too has looked lost at the plate not just in this series, but over this whole postseason. The argument for Hey Look At These Big Stars has not worked out at all.

The games have also not been that interesting. Yes, Game 1 was objectively a great game, even if I personally was not thrilled with the outcome, but in both Game 2 and Game 3, the Dodgers jumped out to medium-sized leads, and the Yankees did basically nothing until the ninth inning, giving what should have been tense games the air of inevitability. As a non-Dodger fan — I do not just mean a Dodger hater, like me, but literally anyone who does not regularly root for the Dodgers — this is incredibly dull.

The Yankees are avoiding swinging at fastballs like they’re the Giants, and so the Dodgers are blowing fastballs right by them. Their offense has been pretty much just Soto and Giancarlo Stanton, with a few Anthony Rizzo walks and a too-little-too-late Alex Verdugo Game 3 homer thrown in for good measure. Beyond those guys, Gleyber Torres has a .630 OPS, Jazz Chisholm Jr has a .462 OPS, and Judge, Anthony Volpe, and Austin Wells are all in the .200s. That’s half of a lineup that is simply not producing anything, and you really can’t entertain viewers like that, much less win a World Series.

On the other side, the Dodgers have everything going for them. It’s not just that they’re going to win, though they are. It’s that the Dodgers have all the vibes on their side. They have Ohtani, battling his way back from injury, and Freeman, also battling his way back from injury, and a cobbled together starting rotation that wasn’t good during the regular season but has been excellent in October, and a bullpen that, no matter how hard Dave Roberts rides them, refuses to fall apart. Freeman, who might have not even played in October, set a record for consecutive World Series games with a homer, and because of Ohtani there are more Japanese viewers than American ones, and it’s enough to make me sick.

Is it too much to ask that the Dodgers never get to have nice things? That their undeniable regular season dominance never gets rewarded on the biggest stage? That they get caught in the eternal Buffalo Bills trap, forever frustrating fans who nevertheless can’t keep from hoping that this is finally the season they win a real World Series? That we, fans of the Giants, who are not likely to be at the Dodgers’ level anytime soon, can lord our team’s postseason success over them, even though the team has been relevant exactly once in the last 8 seasons?

There’s just not a lot to recommend this World Series on any level. The games are mostly dull, ending in a result that I dislike. The stars aren’t performing. And even if the Yankees were good, like, God, who wants to root for the Yankees? I’m doing this because I have to, and they refuse to give me even a gram of sugar to make the medicine go down.

For me, then, this is pretty much as bad of a series as possible. The Dodgers have battled back from adversity and made their opponents look like rubes along the way. They have shown no signs of choking, to the extent that Bob Nightengale, the Wrongest Man In Baseball, tweeted this and was unequivocally right:

The games would be kind of worth watching if the Yankees were playing well, but they’re not. They’d be kind of worth watching if there was a lot of action, but there isn’t. They’d be kind of worth watching if they were tense at all, but they aren’t. Instead, we’re getting a slow Dodger march across the countryside, as they easily dispatch all opposition, and close it out with the MAGAiest man in baseball, Blake Treinen, on the mound. Everything about it is repulsive, sickening, and wrong.

For Dodgers fans it’s great, of course but who wants to think about them right now?