The Lords of Baseball can put their thumb on the scale of this great game as they see fit. They can extinguish National League style baseball, its original version. They can introduce a clock. They can expand the postseason so that not one but two teams with 86 wins have a chance to win the World Series.
What they cannot do is cast the World Series as they dream it, like a Hollywood producer. That arrangement is still left to the baseball gods.
This postseason began with 36 possible combinations for a World Series matchup. Only one of them has the power to propel the game fast forward, to inspire one of the three largest viewing audiences of this generation and to cut into, however surgically, the hold professional and college football has on American culture in October.
This would be epic. A clash of titans and of cultures.
Los Angeles-New York.
MVP-MVP.
Magic-Bird.
Mays-Mantle.
West Coast-East Coast.
Blockbuster.
This is no knock on the other six remaining teams. They are chock full of loyal fan bases and interesting stories. But you can stand around the office water cooler and say you dig art house flicks all you want. We had one last year when the sixth-seeded Texas Rangers met the sixth-seeded Arizona Diamondbacks. Cute. Fun. Unexpected. And low rated.
What really gets the most people to the movies are Marvel characters and animation. Algorithm-proven franchises. Such is our society. We inform algorithms only to become ruled by them.
Dodgers-Yankees is the algorithmic ideal. It has been a long time coming. From 1941-1981, the Dodgers played the Yankees in the World Series 11 times in 41 seasons. Now that’s a proven franchise hit.
It has not happened in 43 years since.
The last Dodgers-Yankees happening, in 1981—an eon ago in media terms—drew the third biggest audience in World Series history: 41.4 million viewers. It was just short of the all-time record: 44.3 million viewers three years earlier for … Dodgers-Yankees.
In more recent times amid the fractured media landscape, the biggest World Series audiences in the past 22 years happened because of the breaking of curses: by the 2004 Boston Red Sox (15.8 million viewers) and the 2016 Chicago Cubs (12.9 million). The Yankees have their own drought to bear: 14 years since they last played in the World Series, matching their longest absence in the 103 years since they reached their first Fall Classic.
Since their last World Series meeting in 1981, the Dodgers and Yankees have reached the postseason in the same year 11 times. Only twice did they both reach the League Championship Series: 2009, when L.A. fell to Philadelphia in five games, and 2017, when the Yankees came within one game of 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 the chalk to get to the World Series. Both are No. 1 seeds. But then, with expanded playoffs, how often do teams with the outright best record in each league meet in the World Series? Not often. In the 27 full seasons in the Wild Card Era, it has happened only two times: 1999 (Yankees-Braves) and 2013 (Red Sox-Cardinals).
Don’t book your flights just yet. The Yankees’ path seemingly did clear a bit as Detroit and Kansas City, two teams with 86 wins, dismissed Houston and Baltimore. But now the Tigers and Royals are playing as loose and confident as if they believe the baseball gods jumped on their bandwagons. The Dodgers face a formidable Division Series opponent in the San Diego Padres, the most playoff-suited team of them all.
But let’s cut to the chase. The Dodgers and Yankees are the biggest brands in baseball. Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge are the best players in baseball. They are the presumptive unanimous MVPs. Neither has played in a World Series.
There have been 50 50-home run seasons. Only 13 times have multiple players hit 50 homers in the same year. This is only the third time that two 50-homer hitters are in the same postseason. (Sammy Sosa and Greg Vaughn in 1998; Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle in 1961). It has been 23 years since we’ve seen even one 50-homer slugger in the Fall Classic (Luis Gonzalez in 2001, who capped it famously with a single). An Ohtani-Judge showdown would make for the first World Series with a 50-homer slugger on each side.
Ohtani, 30, has met every other challenge with historic brilliance. In the first meaningful September, Ohtani hit .393 and became the first player ever in the month with 10 homers and 16 stolen bases. He is the first 50-50 player in history.
Judge, 32, has hit 196 home runs in just the past four years with a .300/.418/.639 slash line. He has hit a full deck of homers, 52, three times. He and Babe Ruth are the only players to do so without being connected to PEDs.
Ohtani has the best-selling jersey this year and last. Judge topped jersey sales in 2017, 2018 and 2019.
How big would an Ohtani-Judge meeting be? It would bring back stories of when Willie Mays and the San Francisco Giants met Mickey Mantle and the Yankees in the 1962 World Series, when both superstars were in their prime and near the ages Ohtani and Judge are now.
Mays, 31 then, won his second home run title that season, hitting 49. He was the MVP runner-up. 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. 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 Boog Powell and Johnny Bench in 1970—when soon-to-be-named MVPs matched up in the World Series in the past six decades. But Ohtani-Judge would be bigger, given their undisputed status as the two best players in the game and given the historic rivalry between the Dodgers and Yankees.
A long road filled with unpredictable October nights with twists and turns must be navigated between that dream and actuality. If you’ve watched only a bit of postseason baseball in the expanded playoff format you know that chalk often turns quickly to dust. Five of the past six No. 1 seeds were knocked out in their first series. The one exception, Houston in 2022, won the World Series.
But here we are with the Dodgers and Yankees beginning postseason play Saturday as the No. 1 seeds. And with Ohtani and Judge about to win their third and second MVP awards, respectively, but with their best shot at getting to the World Series for the first time.
On Oct. 28, 1981, Bob Watson flied out to Ken Landreaux off a pitch from Steve Howe for the final out of the 11th time the Dodgers and Yankees met in the World Series, the most frequent Fall Classic matchup. Forty-three years have passed. Now each franchise is seven wins away from remaking baseball’s biggest blockbuster.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Why You Should Root for a Yankees-Dodgers World Series.
