Boston won a major league-best 108 games this year and cut through the Yankees and the Astros like butter.
Las Vegas has the Red Sox as a prohibitive favorite to win the Series.
It's a good thing they play these games on the field, not in a computer simulation.
The Dodgers went to the seventh game of the World Series a year ago only to be denied the ultimate prize.
That's the kind of thing that sticks in your craw for a while.
Boston is good, no doubt about it. But don't be too quick to count out veterans like Clayton Kershaw, Rich Hill, Justin Turner, Matt Kemp and Ryan Madson, who realize their window to get a ring may be closing. And then there's Manny Machado, who hasn't been a Dodger very long but could catch lightning in a bottle as a mid-season acquisition.
As a boy growing up in Bell Gardens, California, me and my buddies (Yeah you Hartnett) use to have summertime wiffle ball and spray can lid (they produce wicked curves) games in my backyard. We used flour to chalk out baselines and even had our own version of the Green Monster, someone's two story garage in the rear of the property.
When I wasn't the Dodgers I liked to be Boston, with Jim Lonborg pitching and Carl Yastremski leading the offense. Boston won the American League pennant in 1967, when I was 11 years old. They reached the World Series by edging out Detroit and Minnesota by one game but lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in the Series.
Years later I was attending a conference in Boston and skipped out on a dinner speaker to take the Green Line to Fenway to watch the Red Sox and Orioles play. Cal Ripken was playing for the Orioles that night as he marched toward the end of an amazing career.
I asked the hotel concierge to get me the best seat available and he rewarded me with a choice spot off third base about three rows in.
Now here we are, a lifetime later, the Dodgers playing in Fenway for all the marbles.
If I hit one over the fig tree it would be a homer.
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