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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Dodgers vs. Yankees World Series preview: Predictions, pitching matchups and more
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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Yankees vs. Dodgers: Get ready for an ‘epic’ World Series with so much to savor
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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Yankees, Dodgers to square off in World Series: 5 storylines to watch
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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Rosenthal: With Shohei Ohtani in his first World Series, a chance for greatness on the ‘biggest of stages’
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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How Yankees’ belief in their process, despite doubters, paid off with a World Series berth
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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What we learned in the LCS round: Bullpen dominance, Soto significance, money talks
(Photo of Mookie Betts batting against Luis Gil: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions — or even books. With the Academy Award nominations announced last week, this week’s challenge celebrates past Oscar-winning films that were based on books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their filmed versions.
Not every poem about love is a love poem. This one, from William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” first published in 1794, is more analytical than romantic. Instead of roses and violets, it offers us dirt and rocks.
William Blake (1757-1827), obscure in his own time and a hero to later generations of poets and spiritual seekers, made his living as an engraver and illustrator. He conceived and executed many of his poetic projects as works of visual as well as literary art, etching his verses and images onto copper plates and printing them in vivid color — a style designed to blur the boundary between word and picture.
“The Clod & the Pebble” is set in a rustic tableau populated by wild and domesticated animals. In the print, we can’t quite see the main characters, who are presumably somewhere beneath the hooves and the ripples. But the cows and sheep, the frogs and the duck, are nonetheless connected to the poem’s meaning.
The two sections of “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” are meant to illustrate “the contrary states of the human soul” — the purity and wonder associated with early childhood and the harder knowledge that inevitably follows.
“The Clod & the Pebble” recapitulates this fall from sweetness into disillusionment, and the plate suggests it in contrasting ways. The wild animals down below symbolize a natural condition of innocence, while the livestock above live in confinement, bound to another’s use. At the same time, though, the cows and sheep are peaceful ruminants, while the frogs and the duck are predators.
In the poem, the Clod is an avatar of innocence. As it happens, this is a recurring character in the Blakean poetic universe. In “The Book of Thel,” a fantastical meditation composed a few years before the publication of “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” the Clod appears as a maternal figure selflessly nursing a baby worm:
The Clod of Clay heard the Worms voice, & raisd her pitying head;
She bow’d over the weeping infant, and her life exhal’d
In milky fondness
“We live not for ourselves,” she tells the poem’s heroine, a young girl named Thel. But in Blake’s system self-sacrifice can never be the last word. There is no innocence without the fall into experience, and no experience without the memory of innocence. Giving gives way to wanting.
Question 1/6
Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Get to know the poem better by filling in the missing words below.
First, the Clod’s perspective.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of 21st-century books that were inspired by ancient myths, legends and folk tales. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
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