No. 6 San Diego Padres over No. 3 Atlanta Braves
No. 5 Philadelphia Phillies over No. 4 Chicago Cubs<\/p>\n
No. 1 Los Angeles Dodgers over No. 5 Philadelphia Phillies
No. 2 Milwaukee Brewers over No. 6 San Diego Padres<\/p>\n
NLCS: No. 1 Los Angeles Dodgers over No. 2 Milwaukee Brewers<\/p>\n
The biggest X-factor on the NL half of the bracket is how much the Phillies will get outside of their big six of Cristopher S\u00e1nchez, Zack Wheeler, Jes\u00fas Luzardo, Jhoan Duran, Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper.<\/p>\n
In winning 16 of their first 21 games of August, they’ve gotten a ton of production from Bryson Stott, Alec Bohm, Justin Crawford and trade deadline acquisition Luis Arraez, not to mention four straight solid outings from Aaron Nola. If that continues, they could be the perfect foil to the Dodgers and a fantastic candidate to win the World Series.<\/p>\n
The Brewers are also a more legitimate threat to the LA dynasty than they were last year, as evidenced by their taking three out of four from the Dodgers a week ago. Granted, they went 6-0 against Los Angeles during the 2025 regular season before getting swept in the NLCS, but their starting rotation has blossomed from “above average” last year to “maybe the best in baseball” this year.<\/p>\n
The only thing we’re reasonably confident in is that the Cubs don’t have the pitching to navigate this gauntlet. But who knows? They could just mash their way through October like the Rangers did in 2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No. 6 San Diego Padres over No. 3 Atlanta BravesNo. 5 Philadelphia Phillies over No. 4 Chicago Cubs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":866615,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,85],"class_list":["post-866614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=866614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/866615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=866614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=866614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=866614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}