Baseball is the ultimate team sport. Managers can’t send their best hitters up to the plate as many times as they want—no, they have to wait their turn in line like everybody else. Similarly, pitching plans tend to veer toward all-hands-on-deck territory in October. And given the day in, day out, 162-game slog of a season, it takes dozens of players to get clubs to this point in the year.
Our World Series matchup is now set, and a season in which over 2,000 players saw game action will now come down to this group of 52 names. Both the defending champion Dodgers and Blue Jays have impressive rosters (this is the World Series, after all), and to set things up for Friday’s Game 1, we’ll rank each player from 52 to 1.
