Dodgers try to be first to repeat as World Series champ in 25 years

Asked whether he felt like a villain, Dave Roberts tilted his head and widened his eyes, startled that he was being categorized as some baseball equivalent of Darth Vader or Lex Luthor.

His Los Angeles Dodgers have been criticized for spending $509 million on its big league roster, more than seven times the $69 million of the big league-low Miami Marlins. The affable manager had yelled to LA 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 Toronto Blue Jays, “but I hope I’m not the villain.”

Los Angeles is the first defending champion to reach the World Series since the 2009 Philadelphia Phillies, who lost to the New York Yankees. No team has won consecutive titles since three in a row by the 1998-2000 Yankees, and no NL team has achieved the feat since Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine in 1975-76.

“The one thing we cannot do is look over there and say that is Goliath,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said. “That is a beatable baseball team that has its flaws, and that has its really, really good strengths. 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, the Dodgers are 9-1 in the postseason despite starting every series on the road. They are 14-1 over the past month.

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.

“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 who opens the Series on the mound for Toronto in just his seventh big league start.

Left-hander Blake Snell will start for Los Angeles in his first Series appearance since 2020, when he started Game 6 for Tampa Bay against the Dodgers.

Toronto’s Vladimir Guerrero Jr. enters hitting .442 with six homers and 12 RBIs in 11 postseason games.



(AP Photo Brynn Anderson)