ANTHONY GETTINO
Special to The Leader
The final series of the 2018 MLB season has been set after Saturday night. The Boston Red Sox will face off against the Los Angeles Dodgers for the crown of World Series champions.
The Red Sox will be representing the American League after beating the Houston Astros with relative ease in the ALCS. The Red Sox should be the favorite to win it all.
Their lineup is explosive from top to bottom. JD Martinez and Mookie Betts are two of the best hitters in all of baseball.
They also have a pretty formidable pitching staff. Chris Sale, Rick Porcello and David Price will be starting for them in this series. The only weakness of the team is the bullpen. The Dodgers best chance of winning is by getting to the relievers early.
As for the Dodgers, they had to go seven games against the Brew Crew in the NLCS just to make it to this point. They have a shotty bullpen just like the Red Sox, but they don’t have the lineup to make up for it.
They do have a great rotation that’s led by Clayton Kershaw and includes Walker Buehler and Hyun-Jin Ryu as the other playoff starters.
It seems as though the Red Sox will be claiming another World Series. The American League has been stronger than the National League all season, with three super teams in the Red Sox, the Astros and the New York Yankees. Any of these three teams would have been favored to win against any National League team that was in the playoffs.
Hopefully this series goes seven games, but from what each teams seasons have looked like, the Dodgers would be lucky to go six games. Boston is just a juggernaut of a team in comparison to them.
The Dodgers will also have trouble with Boston because of how lefty heavy their lineup is. This makes the righty batters have to carry more weight against the lefty pitchers of the Sox like Chris Sale and David Price. The key batter for the Dodgers may be Yasiel Puig. He can be a dynamic bat in a lineup when his head is in the right place.
Boston has a pretty even lineup, and have fared well against lefty pitchers all season long. This takes the advantage of Los Angeles’ lefty heavy pitching staff away.