The Yankees against the Dodgers isn’t something old this weekend at what still feels like the new Yankee Stadium to Yankee fans. Doesn’t feel like something out of the Subway Series, baseball romance of the ’50s in New York City, or the ’60s, when it was the Yankees against Sandy Koufax, or those two World Series when it was Reggie and the Yankees against the Dodgers at the end of the ’70s. Or even one more Series between the two teams in 1981, when the Dodgers got them bad before the Yankees were out of the Series for the next 15 years.
No, this series between the Yankees and Dodgers this weekend feels brand spanking new, and like the main event, even if these Dodgers aren’t rolling through the early season the way the Yankees are. The Dodgers still come to town with every bit as much star power as the Yankees have, in what is going to feel like an All-Star Weekend at the Stadium.
They come with Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, the three former MVPs at the top of their batting order. The Yankees are waiting for them with Aaron Judge, hitting home runs like it’s ’22 all over again and No. 22, Juan Soto, hitting like gangbusters ahead of Judge; and even Giancarlo Stanton, a former MVP the way Judge is, quietly chipping in with some loud homers of his own, 15 through Tuesday night, which made it 53 combined for him and Judge and Soto.
After the Dodgers paid a combined billion bucks or so for Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto in the offseason, they were supposed to be the best team. And they’re still in first place in the NL West. And look as if they could run away with things again Out There. But they haven’t dominated, and even got dominated in a 1-0 game by a 22-year-old Pirates fastball kid named Jared Jones the other night in Pittsburgh.
It is the Yankees who have looked like the most complete team in baseball, even as they wait for Gerrit Cole to come all the way back off the injured list to complete the picture. It is Luis Gil, the Yankees’ kid, who has pitched like the $300 million guy that Yamamoto is, and been every bit the ace of Aaron Boone’s staff that Cole would have been if not for his elbow problems in spring training.
After Cole’s rehab start Tuesday night, during which he hit 97 on the radar gun during three-plus innings, he was asked if there was anything he didn’t like about his start against the Hartford Yard Goats for the Double-A Somerset Patriots.
“No,” was Cole’s answer.
It is the same answer you would get from any Yankee about their whole team to here, with essentially a 100-game regular season left to play. They have been Judge and Soto, who have a chance to become only the third combination of Yankee hitters in history — Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig was one, Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle were the other — to hit 40 home runs or more in the same season. Ruth and Gehrig did it three times. Roger and Mickey did it the one magic time, in ’61. Now Judge and Soto, if they both stay healthy, have their chance.
Anthony Volpe has merely been terrific leading off. The starting pitchers have been routinely terrific through the first 60 or so games. The bullpen has pretty much bullpenned the way everybody thought it would, all the way through the closer, Clay Holmes, who really only had that one bad 9th inning against the Mariners a couple of weeks ago. The Yankees will go into this weekend ahead of the Orioles in the AL East. They will be right there with the Orioles and Phillies and the Guardians — wait, what? — for the best record in the whole sport.
Now here come the Dodgers to officially start the baseball summer at the Stadium a couple of weeks early. And if you want to think about what it would be like for Yankees and Dodgers and New York and L.A. in October, feel free. This is a very good time to be a Yankee fan, best in a long time. So this seems to be a perfect time to get a Big Series like this, especially against the Dodgers, who don’t show up here very often.
The Dodgers have hit so far (4th in batting average, 7th in runs), they sure have. They just haven’t been the wrecking crew everybody expected them to be once they got Ohtani. Ohtani has 14 home runs, by the way. But Judge and Soto and Stanton all had more through Tuesday night’s games.
They’re still the Dodgers, though, and still something to see. They made the very biggest move of the baseball winter signing Ohtani to that $700 million contract. But the trade that the Yankees made for Soto has turned out to be even more important for them than Ohtani has been for the Dodgers.
Even as the Dodgers wait for Clayton Kershaw to come back, they still have the third-best pitching as a staff in baseball. But nobody is pitching better than the Yankees, even without Cole. You always knew the Yankees would hit, even before Judge started hitting again in May the way he did. Again and again: No one could have ever expected them to get the kind of starting pitching they’ve gotten.
So here they are, and here come the Dodgers. Sometimes there’s a few nights on the schedule when the lights get turned way up, even in early June. This is one of them. A year ago the two teams played at almost this exact point in the baseball calendar, and Judge ran into that wall on a Saturday night in L.A., and the Yankees season changed in that moment. A whole lot has changed since, for both teams. Check it out this weekend at the Stadium.
