Path to the World Series goes through the Los Angeles Dodgers

TORONTO, ON - OCTOBER 24: Shohei Ohtani #17 and Mookie Betts #50 of the Los Angeles Dodgers joke on the field prior to Game One of the 2025 World Series presented by Capital One between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays at Rogers Centre on Friday, October 24, 2025 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (Photo by Rob Tringali/MLB Photos via Getty Images) | MLB Photos via Getty Images The Los Angeles Dodgers won a World Series title in the abbreviated 2020 season, doing so with the likes of Clayton Kershaw, Cody Bellinger, Walker Buehler, Justin Turner, Kenley Jansen, and Corey Seager as key parts of their core. Every last one of those players is now gone, with all but Kershaw having skipped town long before the 2024 season (when the Dodgers also won a World Series).

Kershaw stuck around through the end of the 2025 season before hanging up his spikes for good, and he managed to get a ring as part of the 2025 World Series champion Dodgers, too. The Dodgers franchise has become an absolute juggernaut, the latest iteration of an Evil Empire that Major League Baseball has so often featured during its glory days. With a trio of titles over the last six seasons, they have seized ownership of the league from the likes of the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, and San Francisco Giants, staking claim as the behemoth on every single team’s schedule.

And if they continue to have their way with the league this season, it’ll be a three-peat for them come October. So, it’s not at all surprising that a significant plurality of MLB fans in the latest MLB Reacts poll think it’s the Dodgers who will win the 2026 World Series, too, putting together a three-peat on the backs of Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, & Co. It only took two games for the Dodgers to dispatch the upstart Cincinnati Reds in the first round of last year’s playoffs, an amount of time that makes it hard to even remember the Reds participating on that grand stage.

And while the Reds went out and acquired Eugenio Suárez to bolster their offense and can now lean into Sal Stewart for a full season, the Reds face a mountain to climb to even get the chance to take down the Dodgers again at the end of this season. In fact, the Reds aren’t even on the shortlist of likeliest suitors to tackle the Dodger dynasty. That honor goes to the Toronto Blue Jays, who battled the Dodgers to a scintillating Game 7 just last fall before ultimately dropping the series on a dramatic Will Smith home run.