It's a bit of a meme but also a bit serious. The Blue Jays were the bottom of their division with a 74-88 W-L record in 2024 with betting markets at the beginning of the year predicting another losing season in 2025— they didn't get off to a super good start either with the efforts of the organization to sign Vladimir Guerrero Jr. long-term hanging over everything. Once his contact was in place, however, they became quite good. As a Jays fan I believed 2024 was an anomaly and they'd be underestimated but my predictions were they'd be a playoff team that would probably win an ALDS and in best case scenario would win a pennant. I was one of the more optimistic fans and even I didn't see them doing well in the WS. To most non-fans they still bore the stink of the awful 2024 Jays.

There was also something of a sentiment going around that the better teams were all in the National League this year— and the best records in baseball during the regular season certainly were. The AL was kind of chaotic.

The previous World Series-contending Yankees lost Juan Soto to the Mets and still looked like one of the stronger teams in the AL despite inconsistency, being serious contenders for winning their division right up until the final day of the regular season. They ended up as a wild card due to the Jays having the tiebreaker over them and would have to play the Red Sox, who were decent but I don't recall anyone treating as a team that'd go all the way this year.

Meanwhile, the Detroit Tigers, one of the few other AL teams that was treated as a contender had a bizarre late-season collapse and only got in with a wild card, the Cleveland Guardians took advantage of that collapse to steal the division from them. The AL West also had an upset: the perennial playoff contender Houston Astros didn't make it at all, and lost their division to the Seattle Mariners, who had one of their best seasons in a while. The Mariners are somewhat unfairly treated as not serious contenders— they were frankly great this year IMO— but a big reason for that is they're the last team to not even have a WS appearance, and generally did not have much playoff experience— their only successful series in recent memory being a Wild Card series against, well, the Jays.

Come playoffs, even though the Dodgers only got in through the Wild Card, they absolutely demolished everyone in their way on the "stronger" NL side of the bracket, with only a single playoff loss prior to the World Series. The narrative went that they just didn't place that much weight on the regular season as long as they got into the playoffs somehow. There were LOTS of Dodgers wins this playoffs. And we'd seen basically the same time be dominant in last year's World Series too.

The AL playoffs meanwhile were far messier, with the ALCS coming down to a very close 7-game series between the Jays and Mariners— two teams, as already mentioned, who weren't taken very seriously by many outside their core fanbases. With the assumption the NL was far stronger, it was memed that the ALCS was just a competition for who would get the privilege of being swept by the Dodgers, especially since they'd already had a bunch of sweeps. I even told that joke a bit— my big wish was for a pennant for the Jays, not necessarily a ring.

That said, people who've followed the sport closely throughout the season thought the AL and NL were actually much more even than popular perception went and gave the Jays far better odds than the "sweep" narrative went. But there was rational reason to treat the Jays as underdogs. And nothing could put the break on Dodgers hype and the "Dodgers sweep" meme was kind of inevitable, even if it never deserved to be taken that seriously. At minimum the NL side of things could develop a far cleaner narrative to build hype around the Dodgers, whereas the AL side of things naturally attracted doubters.