Beantown vs LaLa Land

Boston vs. Los Angeles. East Coast vs. West Coast. Highest payroll in the game vs. the third highest (the Giants are second).

This is certainly the series Fox was hoping for (and anything Fox wants I almost reflexively oppose). And while it's not necessarily the best agains the best, it's pretty close to that.

Boston, as we know, won 108 games in the regular season and really didn't have much trouble dealing with a pair of 100-win teams in the division and championship series. We can find flaws if we want, but the Red Sox were pretty clearly the best team in the American League, and the AL seems to be superior to the National League.

Which, in my AL-centric way of viewing thing, makes the Red Sox the favorite to win the World Series.

But I've been watching baseball since 1969, and the one thing I'm absoutely certain of is that the lesser team always has a good shot at winning a short series. This is why the best records so seldom even reach the World Series in this era of multi-layered postseasons.

And we should remember about the Dodgers: This is basically the same team that won 104 games last year and looked until the last month like an historically great team. It is basically the same team that took Houston to the seventh game of the World Series and could easily have won it.

They won "only" 92 games in the regular season, but their run differential suggests they "should" have won 102, which would look a lot like 2017's record. They didn't have the best record in the National League, but they easily could have.

It should be a good series. I don't find either franchise particularly fun to root for, and I won't have any emotional investment in the series, but I'll turn the TV sound off, put one on the radio feeds on my iPad and enjoy two outstanding teams going for the title.