ESPN’s Jeff Passan on Yankees’ Odds to Unseat Dodgers as World Series Champs

Jeff Passan stopped by The Rich Eisen Show to take the temperature of Major League Baseball one month into the season, and the diagnosis came back the same in both leagues. The Dodgers are still the team to beat in the National League. The Yankees have the inside track in the American League. Everyone else is auditioning.

Passan opened with the Atlanta Braves, the team carrying the best record in the sport despite a rotation that has been gutted by injuries. The offense, he said, finally looks the way it was supposed to look during the years when it floundered. He moved to the Yankees next and the picture got more interesting. New York is doing this without Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodón, and it has essentially replaced Juan Soto with Ben Rice.

Passan was careful not to anoint Rice as the next Soto, but he was not careful about the comparison itself. "I'm not saying that Ben Rice is going to have a Juan Soto-like career, but he's sure playing like him this season," he said. Rice is taking walks, hitting home runs and acting as a linchpin in the lineup. The byproduct, Passan said, is that Aaron Judge no longer has to carry the load entirely on his own.

Rich picked up the thread. He told Passan that he had been watching the Yankees with his youngest son when Rice's numbers came up on the screen, and they jumped off as Soto's numbers. He pivoted to Brian Cashman keeping Anthony Volpe in the minors past the end of his rehab because Caballero is playing too well to displace, and asked if the Yankees were operating differently this year.

Passan thought they were. "When you are the New York Yankees, Rich, and you haven't had a World Series championship since 2009, you have to act with urgency," he said. He listed Cam Schlittler, Max Fried, Will Warren and Ryan Weathers as the kind of arms a team needs in a year when walks are at generational highs and Yankees pitchers are throwing strikes anyway. He flagged that Trent Grisham still needs to hit a little and that third base is open, but said the rest of the American League landscape is so soft that it barely matters.

The AL standings made the case for him. Detroit and Cleveland sit one game over .500 in the Central. The A's are two games over in the West. The Rays at 21 and 12 have outperformed expectations but only have a positive seven run differential, which Passan thinks signals coming regression. Detroit will get better. Seattle will recover. The Yankees, he said, are the distinct AL favorites and have earned the spot.

In the National League, the Dodgers are missing Mookie Betts, Edwin Díaz and Blake Snell. Passan called it a Hall of Famer, a top five closer and a two-time Cy Young winner sitting on the shelf at the same time, and shrugged. The Dodgers plan for October. The payroll buys them depth. They lose Snell, they slot in Justin Wrobleski, and Wrobleski posts a sub-2 ERA. Atlanta, New York and the Cubs are the only teams Passan sees as real challengers.