This is the dream World Series, even if a lot of the country between New York and Los Angeles doesn’t necessarily look at it that way. Between here and Out There they look at the money the Yankees spend on players and the money the Dodgers spend on players and see this being the baseball equivalent of Apple — the Big Apple, in this case — against Microsoft battling it out for the title.
But this is the dream World Series anyway, like Celtics vs. Lakers and Bird vs. Magic in their sport, when they were the biggest game. There really is a magic about this, the way there was back in the 1940s and ’50s, when it was the Yankees against the Boys of Summer Brooklyn Dodgers, when those two teams played six times in the Series between 1947 and 1956, when the history of all that included names like DiMaggio and Mantle and Berra and Rizzuto, Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider and Campy and Pee Wee Reese.
Later, after the Dodgers were in LA, there were three Yankees-Dodgers World Series between 1977 and 1981, the first one ending with Reggie Jackson hitting three home runs at the old Stadium one October night, before the Dodgers finally got the Yankees back in ’81, when Reggie was on his way out the door in New York.
Now we get this one, and it feels as big as a modern World Series could ever possibly be, as big as we’ve had, and not just because of size of Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani and Giancarlo Stanton. They’ve all won MVPs, of course. Judge and Ohtani are each about to win another. Mookie Betts has been MVP and so has Freddie Freeman and someday you just know Juan Soto will win one of his own, and probably more than that.
Judge and Soto and Stanton, the three best guys in the Yankee batting order, against Ohtani and Betts and Freeman. New York and Los Angeles. Judge hit 58 homers for the Yankees. Ohtani hit 54 for the Dodgers. Never a Home Run Derby like this in a Series. Never a better matchup, at least going in.
In all ways, this one is about money and power, more than $550 million in total payroll for the two teams. Stanton was the first of these guys to sign a contract worth more than $300 million. Then Betts did that when he got to LA, then Gerrit Cole. Then Judge. Ohtani signed one with the Dodgers worth $700 million, no matter how much of that money is deferred. And guess what? Soto might score a deal just as big as Ohtani’s for himself when the season is over.
And with all that, and even though money has bought all these winning records and all those first-place finishes in the years since the Yankees last played in the World Series 15 years ago, the Yankees haven’t won a World Series since 2009 and the Dodgers have won one, in 2020, in baseball’s COVID year. And they haven’t fought for the title in 43 years. We have gotten New York vs. Los Angeles three times in the postseason since then, but it was always the Dodgers against the Mets.
Now we once again get Yankees vs. Dodgers in October, and maybe into November if this thing goes at least six games. The Red Sox have won four World Series in this century, and the San Francisco Giants have won three. But since the Subway Series of 2000, the Yankees and the Dodgers have combined to win two.
Now one of them is going to win another, in the 12th time a Yankees team and a Dodgers team have played in an event that was once commonplace at this time of year, when New York pretty much owned October baseball, and the Yankees owned the Dodgers, until the Dodgers finally beat the Yankees in seven in 1955.
Then came the late ’70s, loud and hot, and Reggie and George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin and the Bronx Zoo and all that jazz. The Dodgers were managed by a dream character named Tommy Lasorda. They were Steve Garvey in those years, and Pedro Guerrero and a proud old baseball warrior named Dusty Baker. Finally their pitching star was Fernando Valenzuela, who just died the other day, and who won as big a game as he ever pitched in his life when he won Game 3 of the ’81 Series.
Aaron Boone was talking the other day about watching all that as a kid, even before the Yankees and Dodgers got together in the World Series of ’77, when the Yankees finally got back on top of the baseball world, something they’re trying to do again.
“Just some legendary teams with Reggie and Thurman Munson, Willie Randolph, and on and on,” Boone said. “And the Dodgers, the stars they had with their infield of [Steve] Garvey, [Davey] Lopes, [Ron] Cey, Dusty [Baker] in the outfield.”
Those series did feel like heavyweight fights in those days, and not just because Steinbrenner himself said he had an elevator fight in L.A. during the ’81 series (I put a bandage on my right hand the next day at batting practice, just as a show of solidarity with Clubber George). This one feels like more. There isn’t a Super Bowl matchup that could provide this kind of history.
This is about power, and about star power, as much as you could have with any two teams in the sport. If Clayton Kershaw were healthy, it would make it six former MVPs involved in the 2024 World Series. We even have the crossover history of both the great Joe Torre and Don Mattingly, Donnie Baseball himself, having both managed the Dodgers.
All that Yankees-Dodgers history, as these two teams and all these star players try to make more, starting Friday night. Judge tries to win his first World Series. So does Ohtani. Two biggest stars in the game. Two biggest cities. Let’s do this. Once and for all.
