By Jayson Stark / The Athletic
They play a World Series every year. But a World Series like this one comes around about as often as Halley’s comet.
It’s Yankees versus Dodgers. It’s New York versus Los Angeles. Yet somehow it is even bigger than a duel between the biggest cities in America.
It’s star power. It’s history. And it will reverberate not merely from East Coast to West Coast but also all the way across the Pacific.
It all starts Friday night at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. And as the manager of the Dodgers, Dave Roberts, tried his best to grasp the grandeur of it this week, the same word kept coming to mind: epic.
“I’m a baseball fan first,” said Roberts, who will manage in his fourth World Series. “And when you’re talking about the two biggest media markets in the world, and you’re talking about the best and brightest stars in baseball on the same field, on the biggest of stages, what baseball fan, what sports fan, wouldn’t want to lock into this Series?
“So for the Dodgers franchise, for the Yankees franchise, for sports fans, I just think it’s what everyone wanted.”
But even if it is what everyone wanted, it does not automatically make it epic. So what transforms it from unofficially cool to officially epic? Let’s look at the many answers to that question — because it’s as fun to contemplate as it will be to watch.
The two best teams
Let’s start here. The Dodgers won the most games in the National League this season (98). The Yankees won the most games in the American League (94). So logically, it should not be a shock that they both will show up in the World Series. But what does logic have to do with postseason baseball?
October is a time for upsets, not coronations. And we’re not here to complain about that. We’re here to celebrate that. Playoffs weren’t created to propel the two best teams to the World Series. They were created for craziness and unpredictability. That’s the whole point. Don’t forget that, OK?
But once this sport started adding rounds, adding teams and adding challenges, the biggest casualty was these sorts of World Series — these battles of the titans.
They used to happen every few years. Now, if you do not count the shortened, 60-game 2020 season, this is only the fourth time in the wild-card era (1995 to present) that the World Series will be a meeting between the teams with the most wins in each league. The others were 2013, when 97-win Boston played 97-win St. Louis; 1999, when the 98-win Yankees met 103-win Atlanta; and 1995, when 100-win Cleveland faced 90-win Atlanta.
Just for the record, in the pre-wild-card version of playoff baseball — from 1969 to 1993, when only two teams from each league advanced to the postseason — that was a much more common occurrence. The teams with the best record in each league played each other in the World Series nine times in 25 seasons under that system — including the Yankees versus the Dodgers in 1978.
But these days, in a postseason tournament that drops land mines in the path of the best teams for more than a month, years like this feel like a special occasion.
“There’s a nostalgia around it,” said the Dodgers’ president for baseball operations, Andrew Friedman. “And honestly, it’s a classic Series that my baseball mind hasn’t fully been able to fathom.”
The kings of October
Think about this. The World Series began in 1903. So this will be the 120th. And if you count this year, the Yankees and the Dodgers will have combined to play in 63 of them.
Does that seem like a lot? Maybe it will if we put it this way: It’s as many as the Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies, Cincinnati Reds, Detroit Tigers, Chicago White Sox and the Cleveland Guardians have played in put together.
And this will be the 12th time the Dodgers and Yankees have played each other in a World Series. To say that’s more than any other two teams does not capture the magnitude of it. Here’s what does: It’s as many as the next two most common matchups — the San Francisco Giants and the Yankees (seven) and the St. Louis Cardinals and the Yankees (five) — combined.
So there’s a history that hovers over this World Series that is unlike any other. It’s a history that began with Joe DiMaggio and Pee Wee Reese, and black-and-white newsreel footage flickering across a screen down at the local movie theater. Now, here these teams are again, streaming on huge flat screens in your living room and mobile devices around the planet.
There was a time, from 1947 to 1956, when the Dodgers and the Yankees met in six World Series in 10 years. The Yankees were gracious enough to let the Dodgers win one of those.
A couple of decades later, they were at it again, matching up three times in five years — in 1977, ’78 and ’81. But in the four decades since, they haven’t met once — until now. So how much fun is it that the 43-year intermission is over?
Star power
The biggest stars in last year’s World Series — a duel of wild-card teams (Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks) — were, well, who exactly? Corey Seager and Corbin Carroll? Adolis García and Zac Gallen? Or should we just applaud the nine outs Max Scherzer got?
With all due respect to everyone who participated in the last World Series, it was perfectly acceptable to describe a few of those men as stars. But this year? We’re talking about megastars.
We’re talking about both likely MVPs — Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani — meeting in the same World Series for the first time since 2012 (Miguel Cabrera and Buster Posey). And they’re not just MVPs. They are towering figures in a sport that’s dying to strap itself to their star power.
But it doesn’t stop there. There’s a parade of stars lining up on the red carpet of this World Series that we would argue is unlike any cavalcade of stars in the history of the Series. You think we’re exaggerating? Nope.
Let’s talk MVPs. We’re about to watch five MVPs play in a World Series: Judge, Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and Giancarlo Stanton. You think that happens every year? Oh, no, it doesn’t. It has never happened before.
Even if only four of this year’s group played, it would still be the most in more than a half-century, when Frank Robinson, Brooks Robinson, Roberto Clemente and Boog Powell played in 1971.
Let’s talk other awards. We also have two former Cy Young Award winners on these teams: injured Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw and the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole. We have two former rookies of the year: Judge and Ohtani. And we have six Gold Glove winners — Betts, Kershaw, Tommy Edman, Kevin Kiermaier, Anthony Rizzo and Anthony Volpe.
It’s Dodgers versus Yankees. It’s Los Angeles versus New York. But really, it’s so much more.
“If you asked me, ‘What’s the most classic World Series you could imagine?’” Friedman said, “I think Dodgers-Yankees would be the answer.”
MLB PLAYOFFS
World Series (Best of 7)
Friday’s Game 1
(All Times Eastern)
New York Yankees at Los Angeles Dodgers, 8:08 p.m. (FOX)
Saturday’s Game 2
Yankees at Dodgers, 8:08 p.m. (FOX)
Monday’s Game 3
Dodgers at Yankees, 8:08 p.m. (FOX)
Tuesday’s Game 4
Dodgers at Yankees, 8:08 p.m. (FOX)
Wednesday’s Game 5 (if needed)
Dodgers at Yankees, 8:08 p.m. (FOX)
Game 6 (if needed)
Friday, Nov. 1
Yankees at Dodgers, 8:08 p.m. (FOX)
Game 7 (if needed)
Saturday, Nov. 2
Yankees at Dodgers, 8:08 p.m. (FOX)
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