The Dodgers’ run at a three-peat ended Thursday night in Milwaukee, and with it went one of baseball’s strangest little streaks: every World Series winner since 2020 had featured a player named Will Smith.
Los Angeles fell to the Brewers in Game 4 of the National League Championship, and that defeat closed the book on a bizarre six-year stretch that started when the Dodgers beat the Tampa Bay Rays in the 2020 World Series and stretched all the way through 2025.
The first Will Smith to get on the board was the Dodgers’ catcher, who claimed his first championship when Los Angeles beat the Rays in six games. Then the other Will Smith took over.
The veteran left-handed reliever, in his ninth Major League season, won the World Series with the Atlanta Braves in 2021. It was his first Fall Classic appearance after debuting in 2012.
He kept the streak rolling the next two years, first with the Houston Astros in 2022 and then with the Texas Rangers in 2023. That gave him three titles in his career.
Then the Dodgers’ backstop picked up the thread again. Los Angeles returned to the World Series in 2024 and beat the New York Yankees in five games, giving Smith his second ring. The streak continued in 2025, when the Dodgers outlasted the Toronto Blue Jays in seven games to become the first team in 25 years to repeat as champions, and Smith earned his third World Series ring.
He also delivered one of the defining swings of that title run, launching a go-ahead home run off Shane Bieber in the 11th inning of Game 7 to put the Dodgers ahead 5-4.
This October, though, the Brewers had the upper hand. Milwaukee swept Los Angeles in the 2026 NLCS, and Smith was quiet for most of the series, finishing with two hits in 15 at-bats. His two-run double in Game 3 stood as the Dodgers’ most important hit of the series up to that point, but the offense couldn’t do enough around it.
The result brought an end to a quirky streak that linked six straight champions to one name: Will Smith.
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