So... Can the Blue Jays Actually Beat the Dodgers?

Answering the question on everyone's mind as the 2025 World Series gets underway this week.

It took an incredible seven back-and-forth games in the American League, but the 2025 World Series is now set between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays. We’ll still have to wait a few more days for Game 1 — first pitch is 8:00pm ET on Friday evening — but that just gives us a few days to digest the intricacies of the matchup ahead.

If there are any intricacies, that is. The general public perception seems to be that the Dodgers are an unassailable juggernaut en route to their second consecutive title — and the way they steamrolled a Milwaukee Brewers squad who’d seemed far more competitive on paper in the NLCS doesn’t exactly offer hope for a Fall Classic that comes right down to the wire. (Some are even arguing that L.A.’s sweep all but guaranteed a 2027 MLB lockout, regardless of the title outcome.)

The Blue Jays are a good team, to be sure, but the Dodgers are, well, the Dodgers. Yes, Toronto had the league’s fifth-highest payroll this year, but the No. 1 Dodgers spent 40 percent more on players than the Jays did; put another way, the difference between L.A. and Toronto ($96.1M) would itself be enough to cover nearly the entire Brewers’ $97.4M payroll. Even if you acknowledge that spending is far from everything in baseball, that’s still a crazy stat.

So that helps explain why Los Angeles is a huge favorite in the betting markets — here is Polymarket, for instance, giving the Dodgers nearly a 70 percent chance to win it all (and to hear some people talk, that’s a conservative prediction):

Even if we mix in other not-quite-as-bullish odds from FanDuel, FanGraphs and my MLB Elo forecast — the latter being especially cautious on the Dodgers, since it still has a lot of their good-not-great regular season baked into it¹ — Los Angeles is still a very strong favorite no matter how you slice it:

So in lieu of a standard preview like I did for the LCS, I’m going to present four reasons why the Dodgers are unbeatable — and four possible rebuttals from the Jays’ perspective — before rendering my own verdict on each (🌴 = Dodgers are properly hyped; 🍁 = Jays are underrated) to decide whether a Dodgers’ championship really is that inevitable.

⚾ The Dodgers’ aces are untouchable.