Sports
Ohtani, Vlad … and then who? Player rankings and superlatives for the 2025 World Series
The Los Angeles Dodgers are the overwhelming favorites to win the 2025 World Series and become the first repeat champion in a quarter century.
That doesn’t mean they’ve cornered all the talent in this year’s Fall Classic.
In fact, the American League champion Toronto Blue Jays feature two of the top three players heading into the series and nearly half of our top 20.
Let’s dig into the stars — ranking the best of the series participants on how good I think they’ll be in this series and predicting who will take home some superlatives by the time the dust settles.
Top 20 players in the World Series
1. Shohei Ohtani, SP/DH, Dodgers
Ohtani put up a combined 9.4 WAR in the regular season and is a huge favorite to win the National League MVP again. Then, he one-upped himself with one of the greatest athletic performances of all time: six scoreless innings with 10 strikeouts and three home runs in the clinching game of the NL Championship Series.
2. Vladimir Guerrero Jr., 1B, Blue Jays
Guerrero had a big regular season — 3.9 WAR despite the sixth-worst ball-in-play luck in the league — but has been white hot in the playoffs, leading postseason players in most major offensive categories.
3. George Springer, DH, Blue Jays
Springer led the Jays in WAR in the regular season, has been very good this postseason and his iconic ALCS Game 7 homer will live on.
4. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, SP, Dodgers
All four of the Dodgers’ starting pitchers are on a heater, but Yamamoto was the best of the group in the regular season by a lot and one of the top five pitchers in baseball.
5. Blake Snell, SP, Dodgers
Snell missed the first two-thirds of the season with shoulder inflammation but came back looking as good as ever. He might be on the best run of his career right now, with a 0.86 ERA in three playoff starts and the second-best underlying numbers (xFIP and xERA) in the playoffs among starters, behind Detroit’s Tarik Skubal.
6. Mookie Betts, SS, Dodgers
Betts, a clear future Hall of Famer, is 33 years old and has lost the standout power from his peak years but is still an impact player.
7. Freddie Freeman, 1B, Dodgers
One of the most consistently elite hitters of this era, Freeman just keeps performing — and he has a history of coming up large in the playoffs.
8. Alejandro Kirk, C, Blue Jays
Kirk was quietly the second-best all-around catcher in the league this year behind Seattle’s Cal Raleigh, but isn’t a huge star since his value is largely driven by on-base skills and pitch framing.
9. Max Muncy, 3B, Dodgers
Muncy is surprisingly solid as a baserunner and a defensive third baseman, and he’s always been a dangerous hitter.
10. Tyler Glasnow, SP, Dodgers
Glasnow’s walks crept up during the regular season and the playoffs, but he’s been missing bats as always and is inducing weak contact during his current hot streak.
11. Will Smith, C, Dodgers
Smith hasn’t been very good offensively in the playoffs but had the third-best WAR amongst catchers in the majors this season, behind only Raleigh and Kirk.
12. Ernie Clement, 2B/3B, Blue Jays
Clement posted a quietly solid 3.2 WAR this season, driven mostly by contact and defense, but has gone to another level in the postseason, hitting .429 with almost no ball-in-play luck, due to his 4% strikeout rate. He’s on a heater, but the Dodgers’ staff is the type to possibly end that streak.
13. Daulton Varsho, CF, Blue Jays
Varsho is above average at basically everything on the baseball field but isn’t truly elite at much. He missed time with shoulder and hamstring issues this year but was on track for a career-best 4-ish WAR season.
14. Kevin Gausman, SP, Blue Jays
Gausman posted the 10th-best pitcher WAR in baseball this season but has one of the lowest fastball velocities of pitchers in that range and has been hit around in the playoffs, though his career playoff performances are close to his regular season quality.
15. Tommy Edman, 2B, Dodgers
Edman is a good defender at almost any position but had the 12th-least lucky ball-in-play outcomes this regular season. That luck has turned around in the playoffs.
16. Trey Yesavage, SP, Blue Jays
Like Gausman, Yesavage’s splitter is his best secondary pitch, and he doesn’t have standout fastball velocity or breaking ball quality. That said, Yesavage’s splitter has been confounding hitters in his six career big league appearances, half of which have been in the playoffs.
17. Bo Bichette, SS, Blue Jays
It sounds like Bichette will be able to return to the Jays’ lineup for the World Series, but he’s been out the past six weeks with a knee injury and it’s hard to know what he’ll look like in the short term.
18. Addison Barger, RF, Blue Jays
Barger is usable defensively at a number of positions and broke out this year to be an above-average hitter, mostly due to his power.
19. Andy Pages, CF, Dodgers
Pages hasn’t been terrible at the plate this postseason, but he was a standout hitter (.272 average, 24 homers) and defender (plus-7 runs in 117 starts in center field) in the regular season, en route to 4.0 WAR.
20. Teoscar Hernandez, RF, Dodgers
Hernandez hit for power in the regular season (25 homers) but didn’t draw many walks or stand out defensively. This postseason, he’s been hitting for even more power on a rate basis, so he sneaks on this list.
Superlatives
Fastest pitch of the World Series will be thrown by: Roki Sasaki
Sasaki narrowly wins this matchup with the hardest-thrown pitch among these teams in the playoffs at 100.8 mph, and he’s fresher than Louis Varland (100.7 mph) and can go more max effort than Ohtani (100.3 mph).
Others in the mix: Ohtani
Best breaking pitch will be: Emmet Sheehan‘s slider
Sheehan’s slider was, per pitch thrown, the best pitch on the Dodgers’ staff this season. It doesn’t have a gaudy spin rate or crazy movement but he throws it hard and hitters can’t seem to track it.
Others in the mix: Yariel Rodriguez‘s slider, Braydon Fisher‘s slider, Brendon Little‘s curveball, Jack Dreyer‘s slider, Glasnow’s curveball, Shane Bieber‘s curveball
Best changeup/splitter will be: Yesavage’s splitter
Yesavage offers a unique combination of movement profile (his slider moves to his arm side), a very high arm slot, and short extension which brings his release even higher. Hitters haven’t seen something like this before, then add in a killer splitter (which he barely threw at East Carolina, where he was last season) and hitters don’t know what to do.
Others in the mix: Yamamoto’s splitter, Gausman’s splitter, Snell’s changeup
Most whiffs will be thrown by: Snell
Snell has been red-hot in the postseason (I explain why here) and should get two starts, but there’s a number of strong candidates for this.
Others in the mix: Yamamoto, Yesavage, Glasnow
Hardest hit ball in play will be hit by: Guerrero
The odds for this are as close to 50/50 as you can get. Guerrero (120.4) and Ohtani (120.0 mph) were second and third in max exit velo during the regular season behind Cincinnati’s Oneil Cruz (122.9). Ohtani has a slight edge in playoff max EV at 117.7 to Vlad’s 116.0. I’ll lean to Vlad because he’s been running hotter at the plate and thus will get a few more chances to smoke one at a gaudy number, but Ohtani will be facing a weaker pitching staff, so this is still a coin flip.
Also in the mix: Ohtani
Highest sprint speed will be recorded by: Clement
The other main candidates are part-time players who might get only some chances to open it up on the bases, but I expect Clement to be on base often in the series.
Others in the mix: Hyeseong Kim, Edman, Myles Straw
The batter who will record the most hits: Guerrero
Clement (second in postseason hits with 18) might be held back a bit by the quality of the Dodgers’ pitchers while Guerrero (first in postseason hits with 19) also makes a ton of contact but gets the margin for error of having huge power, too.
Others in the mix: Clement, Nathan Lukes, Betts, Freeman, Springer
Best defender will be: Kirk
If you consider framing to be a part of defensive value (you definitely should) and also factor in positional difficulty (I think you should), then Kirk is the answer. He’ll be impacting roughly half of the pitches in the series and he was the second-best framer in the league behind San Francisco’s Patrick Bailey this regular season.
Others in the mix: Clement, Edman, Betts
The U.S. squad was missing some stalwarts in a 2-1 defeat, but Coach Emma Hayes still had a talented lineup that looked out of sync.
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CHESTER, Pa. — U.S. women’s national team head coach Emma Hayes slapped the table repeatedly at Subaru Park on Thursday as she described how she felt watching her team lose to Portugal 2-1 moments earlier.
“I was frustrated this evening because I felt like a game of a Whac-A-Mole,” Hayes said, hitting different parts of the table to illustrate the point. “I felt like if I put something out then I was whacking that. That’s how the game felt for me as a coach, and I’ve been doing this for so long — I hate them games.”
Portugal scored both goals on corner kicks — “no coach likes conceding on f—ing set pieces ever,” Hayes eventually said with a smile as she walked away from the news conference, drawing a laugh from the room — and the U.S. struggled to connect with and without the ball against a well-organized Portuguese team.
“It felt really individual out there,” said midfielder Rose Lavelle, who scored 35 seconds into the match. “I think everyone was trying to fix it on their own.” Captain Lindsey Heaps added that “sometimes it felt a little bit like we were on islands.”
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The tepid performance evoked at least passing memories of the 2023 World Cup, where the USWNT held on for a draw with Portugal by mere inches — with the help of the goalpost in stoppage time — and avoided their first group-stage exit in World Cup history. Alarm bells were literally ringing around Eden Park that day in Auckland, New Zealand due to a malfunctioning sprinkler — a scene that portended the team’s worst World Cup finish a few days later at the hands of Sweden.
But Hayes wasn’t the coach then, and though she was palpably disappointed with Thursday’s “rushed” performance from her team, she isn’t alarmed.
“As Ben Northey, the [Australian] conductor would say, ‘Let it go,'” Hayes said motioning her hand back past her face.
It sounds like an easy out for Hayes, but Thursday’s loss comes 113 days after the U.S. last played — “it looked like a team in preseason to me,” Hayes said. More importantly, it was 609 days ahead of the 2027 World Cup.
The loss on Thursday is the team’s third of the calendar year, which has happened only four other times in the program’s 40-year history. Never has the U.S. team lost four matches in a calendar year.
Portugal’s diamond shape in the midfield allowed it to keep 60% possession in the first half and find the open spaces between the three-player midfield of the U.S. Portugal played around the Americans frequently, although Portugal was generally wasteful in front of goal during open play.
The problems for the U.S. compounded across every line. Hayes lamented mistimed defensive challenges and lost duels. And then there were the set pieces, of course. Diana Gomes outjumped three defenders on the six-yard line to score Portugal’s equalizer just before halftime, and Fátima Pinto added the second after the Americans failed to clear a corner kick..
“I think there was stuff that didn’t work out all over the field,” midfielder Sam Coffey said.
“There’s a million excuses you could make — and we’re not going to. To say that we haven’t been together or we’re young or whatever is a cop-out. The standard of this team is to own when you are not good enough and you’re not playing up to the standard of the crest. There is a standard of winning, and it exceeds all of those things.”
Thursday’s loss is only the third in program history for the USWNT against an opponent outside of the top 20 in FIFA’s rankings. It is a hard lesson for a young American team that Hayes warned not to underestimate Portugal.
The biggest concern wasn’t the result — it was the flat, disjointed performance, and the individual ways in which players tried to solve those problems in real time. The lack of problem-solving and creativity ultimately were the team’s undoing. That description feels like the 2023 World Cup meeting between the U.S. and Portugal.
“Don’t bring me back to that game,” Heaps said with a slight laugh Thursday.
But the good news for the USWNT — at least for now — is that the poor showing is an anomaly in the Hayes era. Hayes took over as coach a few months before the 2024 Olympics and led the team to a gold medal, then proceeded to overhaul the program and win while experimenting to unprecedented levels as she handed out 24 first caps in her first 24 games.
The Hayes era has been off to a flying start in the first 18 months, which is partly why a relatively cheerful Heaps said repeatedly Thursday after the match that her team can’t be too negative. Thursday wasn’t a World Cup, but rather the first game for this core group on the journey to qualifying next year.
Yes, it was ugly. It was disjointed. But it wasn’t entirely discouraging or alarming.
“It’s a game of football, no one died,” Hayes said. “We’ve got to be better, and I promise you we will be better — we better be.”
A rematch Sunday against Portugal in East Hartford, Connecticut, might at least partly explain that optimism. Goalkeeper Phallon Tullis-Joyce said simply about what is on her mind for Sunday: “Revenge, for sure.”
After Toronto’s failed courtships of Shohei Ohtani and Roki Sasaki last winter, it faces them for the title.
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