The Lords of Baseball can put their thumb across the spectrum of this great game as they see fit. They can fire up baseball National League style, its original version. They can offer an hour. They could expand the postseason so that not one but two 86-win teams have a chance to win the World Series.
What they can’t do is present the World Series as they dream of it, like a Hollywood producer. That ranking is still up to the baseball gods.
This season started with 36 possible sets for a World Series match. Just one of them has the power to catapult the game forward, inspire one of the three largest viewing audiences of this generation, and, however surgically, chip away at professional and college football’s hold on American culture come October.
Dodgers Yankees
This would be epic. Clash of giants and cultures.
Los Angeles-New York.
Otani-Judge.
MVP-MVP.
Magic Bird.
Miss Mantle.
West Coast – East Coast.
Very popular.
This is not a knock on the remaining six teams. They’re full of loyal fan bases and interesting stories. But you can stand around the office water cooler and say you dig art films all you want. We had one last year when the sixth-seeded Texas Rangers met the sixth-seeded Arizona Diamondbacks. Nice. Hazar. unexpected. And low rating.
What really draws most people to the movies are the Marvel characters and animation. Proven algorithmic perks. This is our society. We only tell the algorithms so they can judge them.
Dodgers-Yankees is the perfect algorithmic model. It’s been a long time coming. From 1941 to 1981, the Dodgers played the Yankees in the World Series 11 times in 41 seasons. Now that’s a surefire success.
That hasn’t happened in 43 years.
The last Dodgers-Yankees event occurred in 1981 — an eon ago in media terms — drew the third-largest audience in World Series history: 41.4 million viewers. It was just short of the all-time record: 44.3 million viewers three years ago for…the Dodgers-Yankees.
Recently amid a fractured media landscape, the highest World Series viewership in the past 22 years occurred due to the breaking of curses: by the Boston Red Sox in 2004 (15.8 million viewers) and the Chicago Cubs in 2016 (12.9 million). The Yankees are facing a drought of their own: 14 years since they last played in the World Series, which equals their longest absence in the 103 years since they reached their first game of the Fall Classic.
Since their last meeting in the World Series in 1981, the Dodgers and Yankees have reached the postseason in the same year 11 times. Both have reached the League Championship Series just twice: 2009, when Los Angeles fell to Philadelphia in five games, and 2017, when the Yankees came one game away from giving us World Series Armageddon. Up three games to two, they scored one run while losing two games to the infamous Houston Astros.
This season, the Dodgers and Yankees are chalk to a World Series run. Both are No. 1 seeds. But then, with the expanded playoffs, how often do the teams with the best record in each league meet in the World Series? Not often. In the 27 full seasons in the Wild Card Era, that has happened only twice: 1999 (Yankees-Braves) and 2013 (Red Sox-Cardinals).
Ohtani (17) looks to cap off his historic 50-50 season with a trip to the Fall Classic. / Photos by Brad Penner-Imagine
Don’t book your flights yet. The Yankees’ path seemed to be a bit clear as Detroit and Kansas City, two 86-win teams, knocked off Houston and Baltimore. But now the Tigers and Royals are playing so loosely and confidently as if they think the baseball gods have jumped on their wagons. The Dodgers face a formidable Division Series opponent in the San Diego Padres, the team best suited to make the playoffs ever.
But let’s cut to the chase. The Dodgers and Yankees are two of the biggest franchises in baseball. Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge are the best players in baseball. They are the consensus presumptive best players. Neither played in a World Series.
There have been 50 seasons of 50 seasons. Only 13 times have multiple players reached the 50 in the same year. This is only the third time two hitters have had 50 homers in the same postseason. (Sammy Sosa and Greg Vaughn in 1998; Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle in 1961). It’s been 23 years since we’ve seen a single 50-man player in the Fall Classic (Luis Gonzalez in 2001, who had a single). The Ohtani-Judge showdown would mark the first World Series with a 50-man baseball team on each side.
Ohtani, 30, has faced every other challenge with historic brilliance. In the first of September, Ohtani hit .393 and became the first player ever to hit the month with 10 homers and 16 stolen bases. He is the first 50-50 player in history.
The 32-year-old Judge has hit 196 home runs in just the last four years with a slash line of .300/.418/.639. He hit a whole host of homers, 52, three times. He and Babe Ruth are the only players to do so without coming into contact with PEDs.
Ohtani has the best-selling jersey this year and last. Al-Qadi topped shirt sales in 2017, 2018 and 2019.
How big was the meeting between Ohtani and the judge? It would bring back stories of Willie Mays and the San Francisco Giants meeting Mickey Mantle and the Yankees in the 1962 World Series, when both stars were in their prime and close to the age Ohtani and Judge are now.
Mays, 31, won his second home title that season, scoring 49 goals. He was runner-up for best player. Mantle, 30, hit 30 home runs and won his third MVP award. The Yankees won the World Series with a 1-0 victory in Game 7. And the Mays-Mantle fireworks never happened. They combined to hit .189 with no home runs and one RBI.
You might also think of Miguel Cabrera and Buster Posey in 2012, Jose Canseco and Kirk Gibson in 1988, George Brett and Mike Schmidt in 1980, Thurman Munson and Joe Morgan in 1976, Fred Lynn and Joe Morgan in 1975 or Bug Powell and Johnny Bench . In 1970 – when the best soon-to-be-named World Series players of the past six decades competed. But Ohtani-Judge would be even bigger, given their undisputed status as the game’s two best players and given the historic rivalry between the Dodgers and Yankees.
A long road full of unexpected October nights with twists and turns must be traversed between this dream and reality. If you’ve watched just a few postseason baseball games in the expanded playoff format, you know that chalk often quickly turns to dust. Five of the past six No. 1 seeds have been eliminated in their first series. The one exception, Houston in 2022, won the World Series.
But here we are with the Dodgers and Yankees starting Saturday’s postseason as the No. 1 seeds. Ohtani and Judge, though on the cusp of winning their third and second straight MVP awards, have their best chance of reaching the World Series for the first time.
On October 28, 1981, Bob Watson flied Ken Landreau off Steve Howe for the final of the eleventh time the Dodgers and Yankees have met in the World Series, the most common game in the Fall Classic. Forty-three years have passed. And now each franchise is seven wins away from reproducing baseball’s greatest game.
