The most anticipated World Series in some time will begin Friday night when the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers take the field at Dodger Stadium. It's a meeting of the top teams in the two biggest media markets, potentially leading to record ratings and hopefully a long, tightly contested series.
The matchup is also loaded with star power, featuring possibly the three best players in the entire sport and a list of potential Hall of Famers and perennial All-Stars following them.
Now it's time to take a look at how the players on both sides stack up. Teams have not revealed their 26-man rosters yet, so here's how we're looking at both rosters for this exercise: I'm ranking every player in the series as if there were a fantasy redraft held today to build the best team for this series.
Regular-season performance is the most important factor since that has the largest sample size to draw from, but the different roles needed during playoff baseball and how each player is playing of late is also factored in here.
Let's rank the top 52 players in this World Series, from the all-time greats all the way down to the bench players and long relievers.