In baseball, no one player can win or lose a championship: This isn’t the NBA. Every roster spot is its own cog, every matchup is just one man against another man -- you can’t hit a six-run homer. Neither Ted Williams nor Barry Bonds, we remind you, won a World Series.

But one player still can make a huge difference in a series, which we have seen throughout this postseason. The same will be true in the World Series, which starts Friday night in Toronto, with the Blue Jays hosting the defending champion Dodgers.

Here’s a look at four players on each team who could prove the most important in this Series, and we’ve broken them down into four categories:

Category 1: The Stars

Dodgers: DH/SP Shohei Ohtani

Is it possible to say anything about Ohtani that hasn’t been said? I don’t know, b

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