MLB Bullets or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Dodgers

Our World Series participants are all set and ready to go on Tuesday night in Boston.

Puig my friend.

• Michael Baumann sums up the Dodgers game 7 win in the National League Championship Series over the Brewers and credits the victory to the Dodgers finally remembering that they’re better than everyone else. To be fair, it’s hard for the Dodgers to remember that since they can’t watch themselves play on TV in Los Angeles.
• Bradford Doolittle salutes the Brewers for doing everything that they could think of to win, but in the end, the Dodgers just had too much talent for the Brewers. Even Milwaukee had to admit that Los Angeles outplayed them in the series when it mattered.
• Grant Brisbee credits the Dodgers superior starting pitching for the NL pennant. As in, they actually had some. (That’s not fair, really. Wade Miley and Jhoulys Chacin were pretty good in 2018. But it’s hard to go with “Miley and Chacin and pray for rain” when you play in a dome.”)
• Eric Stephen credits the Dodgers’ depth for the victory.
• Tim Brown credits (in part) that wonderful yet very frustrating comet that is Yasiel Puig for the win. Brown gets some of the new Dodgers players to admit that they didn’t care much for Puig when they played for a different team, but that they have a new perspective on him as a teammate.
• Puig certainly enjoyed himself when he hit that huge three-run home run in game 7 to put the game out of reach of the Brewers.
• Alden Gonzalez writes that Puig and Manny Machado are ready to be the villains in the World Series.
• Tom Verducci goes further in profiling Machado and how he’s ready-made to be the villain in the movie that is the 2018 World Series. They don’t like him in Boston any more than in Milwaukee.
• Dodgers reliever Julio Urias pitched in game 7 with a heavy heart as his grandmother had died just the night before.
• Before we leave the Brewers, Zach Kram writes that the Brewers team is young and talented enough to compete for the pennant again in 2019.
• They will need more in the playoffs from likely-MVP Christian Yelich, who all but disappeared in the NLCS. Whitney McIntosh speculates that he opened a cursed mummy’s tomb in-between the NLDS and NLCS.
• And the loser of the ALCS, the Astros, are likely to be a contender for the next several years. But what if they aren’t? Craig Edwards notes that a lot of things would have to go wrong for the Astros to not be competitive in 2019 but it’s not impossible.
• For the World Series, the Dodgers are in a position they aren’t used to but embrace anyway: the Dodgers are the underdog to the 108-win Red Sox. Although I guess that 115 wins for Boston now.
• David Adler has five key stories for the World Series.
• Mike Axisa has a piece on how the Red Sox team was put together.
• And Axisa has a companion piece on the building of the Dodgers.
• Craig Calcaterra notes that this is a rematch of the 1916 World Series and gives the background on that previous series. For one, the Los Angeles Dodgers were known as the Brooklyn Robins back then.
• Richard Justice has nine players (four Red Sox and five Dodgers) who had comeback seasons to make it to the World Series.
• Red Sox ace claims that he was hospitalized because of an infection from a belly-button ring. And yes, no one thinks he’s being serious but he’s says he’s sticking to that story.
• The Red Sox other ace, David Price, slew a lot of demons when he won the clinching game 5 of the ALCS. Jay Jaffe looks at how bad Price had been in the postseason before that game and then makes a good point about Price’s game 5: Don’t ever assume that “hasn’t” means “can’t.”
• Red Sox closer Craig Kimbrel was struggling because he was tipping his pitches and former Dodgers closer Eric Gagné was the one who told Boston that Kimbrel was doing that. Kimbrel has now fixed that and he was very good at the end of the ALCS.
• The Red Sox may play outfielder Mookie Betts at second base in the World Series to get J.D. Martinez’s bat in the lineup during the games at Dodger Stadium. He’s played six innings of second base since 2014, yet he was drafted as a middle infielder and does have some experience at the position. I don’t think Tigers manager Mayo Smith gets enough credit for moving center fielder Mickey Stanley to shortstop for the 1968 World Series, a position he’d never played professionally until just over a week before the Series began. That took guts and it worked. I think it helped that there wasn’t Twitter back then.
• Ben Lindbergh raises a good point about the playoffs. The postseason brings out all of the worst aspects of the game and then takes them to 11. So why are the games so entertaining? (Basically, he argues that the drama is carrying the action but that MLB can’t count on that forever.)
• The Angels named former Tigers manager Brad Ausmus as their new manager. Curious in that Ausmus didn’t exactly cover himself in glory in Detroit, but then again, Astros manager A.J. Hinch was fired to cheers by the Arizona faithful when he was managing the Diamondbacks. Now look at him.
• The Reds hired David Bell as their new manager. Bell never played for the Reds, but he was born in Cincinnati when he dad was playing for them. He also managed in the Reds minor league system for five years from 2008 to 2012.
• And this relates to something that is going to raise eyebrows around here. Joe Girardi pulled his name from consideration for the Reds job and Jon Heyman reports that Girardi is hoping to land a managerial job in Chicago after next season. Hmmm.
• Former MVP Dale Murphy writes about what makes a good manager and he says that managning in-game situations is a really minor part of the job and that it should be way down any team’s priority list. (The Athletic sub. req.)
• The Marlins are expected to announce that they are signing both Mesa brothers today, two of the top international free agents. The fact that the brothers put out a photo of themselves with a Cuban flag on social media with them in the Marlins clubhouse was a bit of a tell.
• Astros second baseman Jose Altuve underwent knee surgery.
• R.J. Anderson ranks 29 MLB teams on how likely they are to trade for Diamondbacks first baseman Paul Goldschmidt.
• It just goes to show you how little I follow the NFL these days that I didn’t realize that the starting quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs is the son of former Cubs (and a bunch of other teams) reliever Pat Mahomes. Well, Patrick Mahomes II wore his dad’s old Mets jersey to his Sunday night game in KC.
• And finally, if you’ve got a subscription to The Athletic, everyone is talking about this piece by Marc Carig about the somewhat-sad history behind the man who created the Brewers’ now-iconic “M-B baseball glove” logo.

And tomorrow will be a better day than today, Buster. Because the World Series will be underway. Go Dodgers? That just sounds awful. But I’ll go with it for now.