Culture
World Series predictions: Our experts make their picks
No more cute underdog stories. The World Series is here and the Goliaths are set to battle for the trophy. It’s a marquee match-up — at least in the line-ups — with the game’s presumptive league MVPs set to square off. There’s a lot to be excited about, even if this series is missing those premier starting pitching match-ups that October classics have been built on.
The last time the Yankees were in a World Series, bullpen games weren’t a thing, Sully Sullenberger was landing jet planes in the Hudson River, and Derek Jeter was still five years away from retirement. The Dodgers haven’t won a World Series with fans at full capacity in the stands since people made their crushes mix tapes, the disks were still floppy, Kirk Gibson hobbled around first base and Orel Hershiser became allergic to allowing runs. This World Series match-up of coastal behemoths may have seemed inevitable but it has, in fact, been a rarity in the expanded playoff era.
For the last time in 2024, our panel of experts will look deep in their crystal balls to see which blue blood MLB franchise will be crowned the king of baseball. Here are our picks…
(Note: Playoff seed in brackets)
New York Yankees (1) vs. Los Angeles Dodgers (1)
Staff predictions for World Series champ
| Team | Percent of votes |
|---|---|
|
63% |
|
|
37% |
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Eno Sarris (Yankees): The Yankees seemingly have three Babe Ruths in the lineup. The longer this series goes, and the more times they see those Dodgers relievers, the more likely it is that they will break through and put some big numbers on the board.
Zack Meisel (Dodgers): Rob Manfred’s October dream won’t end until Shohei Ohtani delivers a walk-off hit in Game 7.
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Sam Blum (Yankees): The Dodgers have a very good bullpen, but they’ve been relied on so much. And their relievers will be needed even more in this World Series. That usage hasn’t caught up to them yet, but it stands to reason that, in this series, it will.
Jen McCaffrey (Dodgers): Their offenses are both juggernauts and their rotations are both flawed. The bullpen is always relied on more heavily in the postseason and the Dodgers have the edge there. In what figures to be a tight series, the Dodgers seem to have a slight advantage, but it won’t be easy.
Kaitlyn McGrath (Yankees): This series feels like a toss-up. It’s two teams, full of stars, that are relatively evenly matched. The Yankees might have the edge pitching-wise, and I’m predicting that Aaron Judge will bust out of this postseason slump and be the difference-maker on the biggest stage.
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C. Trent Rosecrans (Dodgers): It’s the depth of the lineup. There are so many questions with each team about where the innings come from on the mound that, in the end, I’m going with the offense and the Dodgers’ lineup is longer. In the end, runs win games and the Dodgers can put up a ton of runs.
Keith Law (Yankees): I think the Yankees enter the World Series a much healthier team, and I think their offense will be too much for the Dodgers’ bullpen games — which in turn might spill over into games where the Dodgers’ regular starter can’t work deep into the outing because the Yankees’ lineup is so patient.
Brittany Ghiroli (Yankees): This seems like a coin flip of a series to me, and it would be amazing to end an incredible playoff month with a World Series that goes to seven games. I do think the Yankees’ rotation edge is significant, especially as bullpens start to wear down from being push to the brink again and again. Dave Roberts may be doing his best managerial work to date. If we’re lucky, we’ll get an epic clash across coasts. Still, give me New York in seven, complete with Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani exchanging blows and Juan Soto adding zeroes to next year’s paycheck.
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Brendan Kuty (Yankees): The Yankees have better pitching and Giancarlo Stanton is going to go off playing at Dodger Stadium, not far from where he grew up.
Andy McCullough (Dodgers): The four-day layoff could be huge for the Dodgers, if key relievers Alex Vesia and Brusdar Graterol have time to recover from injuries. The Dodgers can use Yoshinobu Yamamoto twice in this series, unlike in the NLCS against the Mets. With a better rested pitching staff, the group should be able to subdue the Yankees. But it should be fun!
Tyler Kepner (Yankees): While the Dodgers have a much more dangerous offense than Cleveland, their pitching sets up the same way: minimal starting and a lot of bullpening. The Yankees broke the Guardians’ formula, and they’ll do it again to the Dodgers.
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Will Sammon (Yankees): The Dodgers’ pitching situation looked concerning during the NLCS. Can they continue to expertly shield top relievers from exposure and high workloads while doing more bullpen games? Against a Yankees lineup featuring these sluggers?
Sahadev Sharma (Yankees): The Dodgers run out of pitching and Yankees will barely have enough to get by.
Chandler Rome (Dodgers): The Dodgers have traveled the more difficult path while displaying more depth in both their lineup and bullpen. An extra five days of rest for Freddie Freeman will only help, too.
Stephen Nesbitt (Yankees): This is the best team in the American League against the best team in the National League. We’re splitting hairs with any comparison. Both lineups are loaded. Both pitching staffs are supremely talented, and undeniably flawed. It just feels like there’s no other way Juan Soto’s first (only?) season in the Bronx will end — with him raising the World Series MVP trophy.
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Dave Roberts kept the Dodgers’ train on the tracks and got back to the World Series
Patrick Mooney (Yankees): This World Series is a total coin flip.
Steve Berman (Dodgers): We heard about all of L.A.’s supposed problems, particularly the health questions about Freddie Freeman and the rotation as the postseason drew near. Then the October games started and none of it mattered — every time you looked up, Dodgers were sprinting around the bases and doing that silly arm-wave thing. Since the Yankees’ rotation isn’t overwhelmingly dominant, it’s tough to see why we should expect that to change.
Ken Rosenthal (Yankees): The Yankees have more stable pitching.
Noah Furtado (Dodgers): They have Shohei Ohtani.
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(Photo of Mookie Betts batting against Luis Gil: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
Take me to visit a dysfunctional family with oceanfront real estate
by Meg Mitchell Moore
Moore is a dependable ingredient in any summer reading soufflé. Her airy novels accomplish what they came to do: entertain and transport, without the pyrotechnics of, say, books that eschew quotation marks. In “Down With the Shipmans,” three sisters, laden with baggage, converge on their late mother’s beach cottage, only to learn that their father and his much younger wife are planning to sell the place.
The stakes are high, the drama is juicy and the views are sublime. Moore even provides two beach dogs — Leo (an unruly pit bull mix) and Cinnamon (“golden retriever, red bandanna, long pink tongue”) — to keep things lively. (Comes out June 2)
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