Photo credit: Tom Szczerbowski/ Getty

If you hadn’t watched a single baseball game this year, you could have gotten pretty well caught up on how things are playing out just by watching the Dodgers and Astros close out their first halves of the season yesterday. These are the two best teams in baseball, and yesterday they showed us precisely why.




The Astros currently lead the league in runs, home runs, OBP, and slugging, and yesterday was a a nine-inning flex of those muscles. They got 17 hits and scored 19 runs against the Blue Jays, securing a 60-29 record going into the All-Star break. Five of those hits were home runs—Yuli Gurriel, Evan Gattis, and Jose Altuve each went deep; Carlos Correa did it twice—and another four them were doubles.

A glance at Houston’s lineup is a somewhat disorienting experience. Leadoff hitter George Springer has 27 dingers and a .611 slugging percentage; four players in the regular lineup have an OPS+ over 160; Altuve is hitting .347 and slugging 20 points higher than he did last season; Marwin Gonzalez has 16 damn homers and a .967 OPS. Feel free to wring your hands about the depth of the starting pitching behind Dallas Keuchel and Lance McCullers, but it’s hard for any rotation to short-circuit a squad with an offense that scores almost six runs per game. Besides, Houston is probably trading for Chris Archer this month.


Meanwhile, the Dodgers have Clayton Kershaw, who might be fed up with people saying that Max Scherzer is the best starting pitcher in the game. He struck out 13 guys in a complete-game victory against the Royals yesterday, giving his team a 61-29 record heading into the break. Not only did he mow down 13 jamokes in nine innings, he did it in under 100 pitches. That, uh, has never happened before:

Kershaw’s been a demon over his last three starts, striking out 36 in 25 innings and allowing just 11 hits. Despite a brief run where he was giving up a home run every other inning and appeared to be dead, the Dodgers haven’t lost a game he started since the beginning of May.

The Dodgers have been winning the same way they did last year, but with even better results. Justin Turner is carrying the offense with a .377 batting average and a 1.056 OPS, Corey Seager remains one of the best offensive shortstops in the league, and even Yasiel Puig has managed a bit of a bounce-back season, accumulating 1.1 WAR through the first half. This year’s guys-who-came-out-of-nowhere are Alex Wood and Cody Bellinger. Wood, a 26-year-old starter who previously floated between the rotation and the bullpen, has a 246 ERA+ and has struck out 97 guys in 80 innings. Bellinger you should know all about by now—the big rookie with the sweet power stroke has 25 homers in just 257 at-bats.


Only four teams in the 162-game era have won 109 games in a single season; the Astros are on pace to win 109 games, and the Dodgers are on pace to win 110. There’s been a lot of thrilling baseball played through the first half of the season, but these months have belonged to the Astros and Dodgers. It’s too early to say that they are guaranteed to meet each other in the World Series, but barring any significant injuries, it’s hard to imagine too many teams mounting a defense against either of them (glares at the Cubs). If you want to start getting excited about the prospect of Kershaw facing the Astros’ lineup in Game 1 of the World Series, you can’t be blamed.