TORONTO — Asked whether he felt like a villain, Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts tilted his head and widened his eyes, startled that he was being categorized as some baseball equivalent of Lex Luthor or Darth Vader.
Roberts has been the club’s skipper since the 2016 season, and this year the Dodgers have been criticized for spending $509 million on their MLB roster, more than seven times the $69 million of the Miami Marlins, the lowest team in the majors in terms of payroll. The affable Roberts had yelled to the home crowd’s fans after last week’s National League pennant clincher: “They said the Dodgers are ruining baseball. Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball!”
“I was just having a little fun with people that said that about the Dodgers,” he explained Thursday, a day ahead of the World Series opener against the American League champion Toronto Blue Jays, “but I hope I’m not the villain.”
The Dodgers are also the first reigning MLB champions to reach the World Series since the 2009 Philadelphia Phillies, who lost to the New York Yankees. No team has won consecutive titles since the Yankees won three in a row from 1998 to 2000, and no NL team has achieved the feat since the Cincinnati Reds won back-to-back championships in 1975-76, their “Big Red Machine” era.
“The one thing we cannot do is look over there and say that is Goliath,” said Blue Jays manager John Schneider, whose team has home-field advantage after going 94-68 in the regular season this year with one more win than the Dodgers.
“That is a beatable baseball team that has its flaws and that has its really, really good strengths,” Schneider added. “How we expose each of them will determine who wins the series.”
Led at the plate by Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman and Mookie Betts, and on the mound by Ohtani, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, NL West Division champion Los Angeles is 9-1 in this postseason despite starting every series on the road. The Dodgers are 14-1 over the past month.
“Just to win once is hard, and now be this close to being able to do it two times in a row, I don’t know if I’ve really grasped the weight of it,” said Freeman, who was the MVP of last year’s World Series against the Yankees and won the 2021 title with the Atlanta Braves before signing with the Dodgers the following spring. “Last week you’re starting to get the word dynasty thrown out and things of that nature. And if that’s being thrown out, that means the organization’s doing a really, really good job.”
The Blue Jays have been back-to-back champions before. It’s just been a long time.
When the World Series was last played outside of the United States, Toronto won its second straight title in 1993 when Joe Carter hit a ninth-inning homer off Philadelphia’s Mitch Williams in Game 6. It was just the second time a home run had ended a World Series, with the first when Bill Mazeroski delivered for the Pittsburgh Pirates against the Yankees in Game 7 in 1960.
Since then, the Blue Jays became Canada’s sole Major League Baseball team when the Montreal Expos moved to Washington and became the Nationals ahead of the 2005 season.
Toronto’s home was renamed from the SkyDome to Rogers Centre in 2005, a year after Rogers Communications Inc. became the Blue Jays’ sole owner. The ballpark’s capacity was cut from 52,000 to just less than 45,000, and more upgrades are planned ahead of 2026.
Canada Prime Minister Mark Carney attended the Blue Jays’ batting practice.
“We represent this entire country and we’re this country’s team, so we want to go out there and do everything we can to make this country proud of us,” said Trey Yesavage, the 22-year-old right-hander who will take the mound for AL East champion Toronto in Game 1, just the seventh start of his MLB career.
AP photo by David J. Phillip / Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Trey Yesavage speaks during a news conference Thursday, the day before he is set to pitch Game 1 of the World Series against the visiting Los Angeles Dodgers on Friday night.
Snell, a 32-year-old left-hander and two-time Cy Young Award winner, will start for Los Angeles in his first World Series appearance since 2020, when he started Game 6 for the Tampa Bay Rays against the Dodgers.
Trying to overcome a 3-2 deficit in the best-of-seven series, Tampa Bay was ahead 1-0 in the game when Snell allowed a one-out single to Austin Barnes in the sixth inning on his 73rd pitch. Rays manager Kevin Cash brought in Nick Anderson, and the Dodgers rallied to win.
“Probably for like a week I was thinking about it, what could have been different, what I could have done, the ups and downs of just feelings,” Snell said. “But then ultimately it led to — if I would have done more early on in my career to gain his trust, it would have been a different outcome I think.”
Earlier in the series, given a 5-0 lead in Game 2, Snell was removed after allowing Chris Taylor’s two-run homer in the fifth followed by a walk and a single.
“Learn from it and ultimately it made me a better pitcher,” Snell said, “just because I understand the game more than just myself, just the pieces, the parts and how it all works.”
Snell spent the 2021-23 seasons with the San Diego Padres and 2024 with the San Francisco Giants, then signed a $182 million, five-year contract with the Dodgers as he remained in the NL West for the fifth straight season. He regularly faced the Blue Jays during his first four MLB seasons with Tampa Bay, which competes in the AL East.
“I’ve matured. I’ve grown up. I was kind of a kid still in 2020,” Snell said. “I know I only have so much time left. I’m not young. I don’t really think about the ending. For now I’m just more appreciative of the moments, the time and what these mean for my career.”
Fox will televise the entire World Series, including Friday’s Game 1 that’s set for 8 p.m. Eastern.
The Dodgers, who were seeded third in the NL, will be in action for the first time since completing a four-game sweep of the top-seeded Milwaukee Brewers one week earlier in Los Angeles.
The Blue Jays went the distance in the ALCS against the second-seeded Seattle Mariners, not wrapping up the pennant until Monday night.
Since each league’s championship series was extended to seven games in 1985, the four World Series matchups between teams coming off seven-game series and four-game sweeps all were won by the teams who played the lengthier pennant playoffs: the 1988 Dodgers over the Oakland Athletics, the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals against the Detroit Tigers, the 2007 Boston Red Sox over the Colorado Rockies, and the 2012 San Francisco Giants against the Tigers.