SI’s change of heart: Magazine picked Astros, then Dodgers to win 2017 World Series

The most popular magazine cover at this year’s World Series is three years old: the Sports Illustrated cover that proclaimed the Houston Astros as “Your 2017 World Series Champs.”

That turned out to be a great call. Too bad Sports Illustrated did not stand by it.

The cover of this year’s Sports Illustrated baseball preview featured the magazine’s prediction for your 2017 World Series champs: the Dodgers, not the Astros.

This might have been understandable had the Astros flopped. But the Astros’ radical rebuilding plan — as detailed in that 2014 SI story — had turned the team from a 111-game loser into one of the finest teams in the league. SI had gone out on a limb, after all, with its bold cover proclamation.

“How do we put such a lousy team on the cover?” SI editor-in-chief Chris Stone said. “We have to sell something, and hopefully we’re selling something plausible.”

George Springer of the Houston Astros is shown on the cover of Sports Illustrated on June 30, 2014. The Astros would become World Series champs in 2017, the magazine predicted.

(Otto Greule Jr. / Getty Images )

In its 2017 MLB preview, Sports Illustrated featured Mike Trout of the Angels. The magazine, on the lower portion of its cover, also predicted a Dodgers victory in this year’s World Series.

(Robert Beck / Getty Images )

The scenario of the Astros winning the World Series became more plausible with each passing season. So, when the SI baseball crew convened to project the World Series winner in the season the magazine already had predicted the Astros would win, the consensus was the Dodgers.

“I said, ‘Look, this prediction is very well known, and besides that, the Astros look awfully good this year. Shouldn’t we go with it?’ ” said Ben Reiter, who wrote the 2014 cover story.

Stone said he sympathized with Reiter but left the final call to Emma Span, SI’s baseball editor.

“It was rooted in a deep belief and, as it turned out a reasonable belief, that this was the Dodgers’ year,” Stone said.

Span said she was not sure the Astros had enough starting pitching; the trade for Justin Verlander was five months away. She also said SI had picked the Astros last year and joked that the magazine did not want to keep getting it wrong.

But here they are, the Astros in the World Series — just as SI called it three years ago.

“Luckily for me the Dodgers also made it,” Span said, “or that would be a tough one to live with.”

bill.shaikin@latimes.com

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