Quick thoughts on baseball and the classics during the 2025 World Series.

---

Readers who look for baseball posts on MTC (and I know all five of you!) may have wondered why I’ve been silent this postseason. First, it is hard to watch baseball in Europe, where I was through the wildcard and into a bit of the divisional series. Then I had to catch up on other things after a month away. Yada, yada, yada.

I will do a postseason wrap-up once the World Series is complete. Promise. Game 3 is tonight with the series tied 1-1.

In the meantime, I want to STRONGLY encourage you to check out Joe Posnanski’s essays on the series. Today’s—following the first two games—was priceless. Let me quote just a bit:

Joe begins with Posnanskeys to the Game:

• If the Blue Jays can get into the Dodgers’ gruesome bullpen, they will win.
• If the Dodgers can avoid using their gruesome bullpen, they will win.

“This is exactly how Games 1 and 2 played out, and while two games is an insignificant sample size, it really feels like this is how the series will go. The Dodgers are Achilles. They were dipped into the River Styx by the Baseball Gods, and thus they are Shohei and Mookie and Freddie and Yoshi and Blake and Teo and Tyler and all the rest, and thus are mostly invulnerable.

But they were held by the heel, and the heel is not invulnerable, and the heel is that ghastly bullpen. The individual pitchers in that bullpen should be able to get some outs. But they can’t. It’s like they believe themselves cursed. In Game 1, the Blue Jays were able to pick and prod and annoy Blake Snell enough to get him out of the game in the sixth inning with the bases loaded. The Dodgers’ bullpen did its worst. And it was a blowout.“

Oh, with that reference to Achilles I could just see my good friend and brilliant reader—the classics scholar and baseball fan Elizabeth Bobrick—grinning from ear-to-ear. In addition to subscribing to JoeBlogs you should also sign up for Elizabeth’s Substack newsletter This Won’t End Well: On Loving Greek Tragedy.

Now, back to Joe’s column:

“It looked like the Blue Jays might do the same to Yoshinobu Yamamoto in Game 2 — they knocked two hits off him in the first and made him throw 23 pitches. They knocked another hit off him in the second and scored a run off him in the third, had him at 46 pitches through three innings. You know that scene in action movies where the hacker pounds a bunch of keys on his computer, then smiles and turns to the Tom Cruise/George Clooney ringleader and says, “I’M IN!” That was undoubtedly how Blue Jays manager John Schneider felt in that moment. He was into that bullpen.

Only he wasn’t because Yamamoto decided at that point to go thermonuclear.”

It is a brilliant post (as was Yamamoto) and I could just see the Dodgers being dipped into the River Styx, being held by their metaphorical bullpen. (If I was any good at AI I’d put this baby in Dodger blue!)

Joe also talked about the cringe-inducing moment in Game 2 when MLB decided to cut into their most consequential game of the season . . . for a Jonas Brothers song! Seriously!! How stupid can MLB be? Don’t answer . . . that’s a rhetorical question. As my friend the writer Robyn Ryle once wrote:

“Let me put it more plainly—the players want baseball to be good. The owners just want to make money. Period. End of story.”

Anyway, I can’t wait to see what happens next, especially since Mad Max is on the mound for the Blue Jays tonight. Max—when he was a member of the Nationals—was the subject of one of my most frequently viewed posts on the national pastime: Baseball is boring. Then suddenly it isn’t.

Here is Joe’s take on Max’s moment in the 2025 League Championship Series:

“Speaking of pitchers demanding to stay in games — wasn’t it a blast watching Max Scherzer tell John Schneider to get the #@%@ off his mound in Game 6 of the ALCS? Yes, of course, some of it was show … but that doesn’t make it less delightful. Baseball needs more show. Max starts tonight, and I hope he’s awesome, and I hope Schneider tries to take the ball away from him, and I hope Scherzer goes medieval on him. I’m pretty sure Schneider hopes for that, too.”

Go to 4:42 in this video to get to the good stuff.

I won’t tell you which team I’m rooting for, since I don’t want to jinx them. Enjoy the series . . . and I’ll be back with some additional thoughts (including what I think about those stupid Google AI commercials) once we have a world champion.

Play ball!

More to come . . .

DJB

Artwork depicting Thetis as she dips her son Achilles into the River Styx in the hopes of making him immortal by Antoine Borel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons