Ranking every player in Dodgers vs. Yankees World Series - ESPN

The most anticipated World Series in some time will begin Friday night when the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers take the field at Dodger Stadium. It's a meeting of the top teams in the two biggest media markets, potentially leading to record ratings and hopefully a long, tightly contested series.

The matchup is also loaded with star power, featuring possibly the three best players in the entire sport and a list of potential Hall of Famers and perennial All-Stars following them.

Now it's time to take a look at how the players on both sides stack up. Teams have not revealed their 26-man rosters yet, so here's how we're looking at both rosters for this exercise: I'm ranking every player in the series as if there were a fantasy redraft held today to build the best team for this series.

Regular-season performance is the most important factor since that has the largest sample size to draw from, but the different roles needed during playoff baseball and how each player is playing of late is also factored in here.

Let's rank the top 52 players in this World Series, from the all-time greats all the way down to the bench players and long relievers.

1. Shohei Ohtani, DH, Dodgers
What else can be said? Ohtani just had one of the most memorable regular seasons in our lifetimes after signing a record $700 million contract. He doesn't play in the field and he doesn't pitch (right now), but he does everything else at an incredible level. Ohtani hadn't been in the playoffs until this season, but he seems pretty comfortable now.

2. Aaron Judge, CF, Yankees
Judge put up more WAR and was a slightly better hitter than Ohtani during the regular season, but Judge has been just OK in the playoffs relative to the very high bar he has