Well, my year is ruined.

After dedicating the entirety of my previous column to explaining how unbelievably badly I wanted the Los Angeles Dodgers to lose the 2025 World Series, the Dodgers decided they didn’t care what I wanted and won it anyway. Like all true sports fans, I allow my emotional state to be dictated by a bunch of grown men playing with a ball, so this turn of events has absolutely wrecked my mood for the past week and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Congratulations, Dodgers fans! Turns out that all it takes to win back-to-back championships is grit, determination and giving your four starting pitchers a combined $1.3 billion. You really earned this one. I hope you find solace in watching postseason highlight reels when the league doesn’t have a season in 2027.

Cynicism aside, though … what a series, man.

Coming into this postseason, the World Series was on a lengthy streak of some pretty boring outcomes. After four Fall Classics went to seven games in a six-year stretch from 2014 to 2019, we had seen five straight without a winner-take-all game, and the last two didn’t even make it to game six.

Sure, each of those years had its memorable moments, but none of them were really that entertaining as an overall series. The 2024 World Series featured two games that will never be forgotten — Freddie Freeman’s walk-off grand slam in Game 1and the New York Yankees’ historic meltdown in Game 5— but I couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened in the three games separating those two.

2025, on the other hand — where do I even begin?

The best part of the series was Game 1, with the Toronto Blue Jays exploding for nine runs in a wildly entertaining sixth inning. Oh, except the best part was actually in Game 2, when Yoshinobu Yamamoto threw the first World Series complete game in 10 years. But actually, the best part was an unbelievable Game 3 that ended after 18 innings and nearly seven hours on another Freeman walk-off home run. Unless …

You get the idea: a captivating, back-and-forth series from start to finish. It was only fitting that we would get a Game 7, which actually was the best part of the series: a game-tying home run in the top of the ninth; a game-saving catch in the bottom of the ninth; both teams leaving the bases loaded; an 11th-inning home run to put the Dodgers on top; a double play from outfielder-turned-shortstop Mookie Betts to win the series.

Oh, I almost forgot. The Dodgers’ pitcher during the last three innings? Yamamoto. He threw 96 pitches the day before in Game 6. That’s the type of thing you expect from a guy named Shoelace Jones from the 1892 Charleston Carpenters, not from a $300-million modern pitcher with a 94-mph cutter. Unreal.

As painful as the outcome was for me to watch, this year’s World Series finally gave us a genuinely exciting finish to the season, full of highlight-reel plays and instant-classic games. The numbers speak for themselves: Game 7 averaged more than 27 million viewers in the United States alone — triple the all-time low of 9 million from the 2023 series — and 51 million viewers globally, the most for any MLB game since 1991.

After years of boring finales and dwindling viewership, the World Series just might be back. And at a perfect time, too; with a labor battle looming and the future of the game uncertain, baseball needed a slam dunk like this one. Or, wait … a grand slam? I’m getting my sports confused.

In any case, as I’m now mentioning for the third straight article — call me Sports Editor Sean Campbell writing about DJ Wingfield back in August — the sport appears headed for a lockout after the 2026 season. 

MLB owners want a salary cap, and, after the ultra-mega-budget Dodgers won back-to-back championships by shelling out nine figures to any pitcher with a pulse, they’ve got a compelling argument for it. The only thing standing in their way is the players’ union, which has clearly expressed its willingness to forego the 2027 season altogether before agreeing to a payroll limit.

I don’t want that to happen. Exciting take, I know — imagine wanting your favorite sport to keep existing — but it makes the incredible World Series we just saw a little bittersweet. It’s hard to celebrate such an entertaining postseason knowing there might not be one in two years.

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, if you’re reading this, as I’m sure you frequently do for columns in student newspapers … lock in, man. Lock in so there isn’t a lock out.

Eh? See what I did there? Now that’s journalism, baby.

But I digress. For all I know, the owners and players might come to an agreement next week, leaving us to enjoy baseball in peace for the foreseeable future. 

For now, however, we get to experience the worst part of being a fan of a particular sport: waiting. We’ve got 138 days to go before the first pitch of the 2026 MLB season — which is actually a much shorter wait than the NFL, but who’s counting?

Thankfully, while we’re waiting for baseball to return, we can enjoy the second-greatest sport in the world: college basketball. Maybe I’ll turn this column into “Courtside Chronicles” in the meantime. Surely this is finally going to be Mizzou’s year, right?

Bennett Christofferson is a junior writing about baseball’s biggest stories and controversies in his column, “Dugout Diaries,” which typically runs every other Thursday. He is also a sports editor at the Daily Trojan.