Storylines to watch for star-studded World Series Game 1

It has been a very long week waiting for this World Series to start, right? The last NLCS game was played Sunday; Game 1 of the World Series finally begins Friday. That is too many days without baseball, generally, and it’s definitely too many days waiting for the Yankees and the Dodgers to start a Fall Classic.

Here are the five biggest storylines heading into Friday’s Game 1 at Dodger Stadium.

1. Can Cole lead the Yankees to the promised land?
This is the fifth year of the nine-year deal that the Yankees signed Cole to before the 2020 season. It must be a considerable relief to everyone involved — from Cole to the Yankees front office — that he has at last arrived at the exact place they brought him in to occupy: on the mound for Game 1 of the World Series.

The season couldn’t have started out worse for Cole, who was on the injured list with a right elbow issue until mid-June. He hasn’t been the same Cy Young Award winner he was last year (or the shutdown ace he was when he was occupying this same role for the Astros back in the day), but he has rounded into form of late. That was particularly true in an ALDS-clinching Game 4 win over the Royals, in which he gave up just one run in seven innings. His ALCS Game 2 start against the Guardians was less inspiring (4 1/3 innings, two runs), but the World Series is a fresh opportunity.

The Yankees gave Cole $324 million to be their Game 1 World Series starter. Here he is. Now let’s see what happens.

2. Will Freddie Freeman be ready to go?
Have you ever sprained your ankle? It’s terrible! It takes so much longer for it to heal — and for you to get comfortable stepping on it without thinking — than you think it’s going to. Now imagine dealing with that while also having to face the best pitchers in the world in the high-stress venue of postseason baseball.

World Series Game 2 will mark a full month since Freeman badly sprained his right ankle, and it’s fair to say that, in this postseason, he hasn’t much looked like the former NL MVP Award winner and likely future Hall of Famer we’ve all come to know and love. But Freeman is getting a week off between his last game and the start of the World Series, and time is the only thing that truly heals a sprained ankle.

You can still imagine the Dodgers sitting him against, say, lefty Carlos Rodón, but against Cole and any other right-handers, it sure looks like a green light for Freeman. The Dodgers’ lineup has been red-hot without Freeman at his best this October. Imagine what it will look like if he’s healthy.

3. Which Flaherty are we getting?
Never in their wildest dreams could the Dodgers have imagined what they’d get from Flaherty in Game 1 of the NLCS: seven innings, two hits, six strikeouts, no earned runs. For a team that worried it didn’t have any reliable starting pitchers (for the second consecutive postseason), Flaherty came out and looked like a stone-cold ace.

But then came Game 5. Not only did the Mets knock Flaherty around for eight runs in three innings, but Flaherty’s fastball was two ticks slower than it had been in Game 1 — a very ominous development. Flaherty has always been inconsistent, capable of both dominance and frustrating futility in alternating starts, something the NLCS made abundantly clear. The Dodgers are already likely to throw one, maybe two bullpen games out there in this Series, something they did in the NLCS despite Flaherty giving them seven innings in Game 1. If he gets knocked around early in this one, they’ll be behind the eight ball from the get-go.

4. Which star will make this Series his?
It truly is incredible how many stars there are in this World Series. Of the seven players who have the best-selling jerseys in MLB this year, we will be watching four of them: Shohei Ohtani (No. 1), Aaron Judge (No. 3), Mookie Betts (No. 4) and Juan Soto (No. 7). That’s not even accounting for Giancarlo Stanton, Cole and Freeman (No. 18 on the list, by the way). There are a whole bunch of likely future Hall of Famers in this Series, and every single one of them is going to be trying to create a moment that leads their induction reel.

Betts and Soto (and Cole and Freeman) have been to a World Series before, but the two biggest stars, Ohtani and Judge, are here for the first time. They are among the greatest players we have seen in many years, but they are still new to this particular stage. They may never get a better chance to get a ring, and be immortalized while doing so, than right now.

5. Can this possibly live up to the hype?
You really couldn’t ask for much more from this World Series: huge stars, massive markets, teams desperate to win a title, vast fanbases, stands full of famous human beings. It’s a dream Series for just about anyone involved with baseball in any way. (Especially those who collect frequent flier miles.) But eventually, we’ll all stop talking about what we think is going to happen in these games, and they will actually play them. And you can put all the stars on the field you want, you can draw in every eyeball you can, but if these games all turn out to be blowouts, or if this is a lopsided sweep in one direction, it’s going to feel like a disappointment.

Imagine how thrilling it will be to see Ohtani, or Judge, standing at the plate in extra innings, trying to win his first ring. Exciting, right? If that’s going to happen, this Series has to remain close … as taut in reality as it is in our imaginations. This is a Fall Classic begging to go seven games. Game 1 will give us our first sign if we’re well on our way.