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If you’re looking for a romantic sporting story, then this Ohtani is almostWorld Series isn’t for you. There will be no plucky underdog when the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees begin their seven-game series to decide the winner of baseball’s biggest prize on Friday evening.
The mythology of baseball as ‘America’s pastime’ is rooted in feelgood stories played out amid hazy summer days, culminating in a shot at sporting immortality just as the air begins to take on an autumnal crispness. And the World Series has provided plenty of that romanticism over the past decade.
The Kansas City Royals’s ‘comeback kids’ claimed the crown in 2015, sport’s most cursed team the Chicago Cubs ended their 108-year title drought a year later, the 2019 Washington Nationals delivered a first World Series to the nation’s capital 14 years after baseball returned to the city following 41 years away and 2023 saw the Texas Rangers triumph for the first time.
But 2024 will be different. Dodgers vs Yankees is juggernaut vs juggernaut, Hollywood vs Broadway and no matter who wins, it will be an unromantic victory for a financial and sporting behemoth. As a neutral, there is no little guy to root for this time round.
And it is exactly the World Series that baseball needs right now.
However you dress it up, the Dodgers and the Yankees are Major League Baseball’s two biggest teams. This year will be the 120th World Series and the two franchises now have an incredible 65 appearances between them. They are consistently the sport’s biggest spenders when it comes to player salaries, they have rosters full of superstars and, as brands, they have genuine cultural cut-through that extends well beyond baseball. Throw in the fact that Los Angeles and New York are North America’s two biggest media markets and we’re talking about a pair of sporting powerhouses.
This year, they also happen to be the two best teams in baseball. The Yankees were No. 1 seed in the American League after accruing a 94-68 record in the regular season before sweeping aside the Royals and the Cleveland Guardians in the postseason, losing just one game to each.
Meanwhile, the Dodgers went 98-64 to lock up top seeding in the National League and then battled past the San Diego Padres in a Game 5 decider in the Divisional Series before downing the New York Mets 4-2 in the Championship Series.
This will be the first time that the No. 1 seeds have met in a World Series since 2020 and just the fifth such occurrence in the wildcard era of play-offs, which began in 1995. Perhaps more than any other American sport, baseball is susceptible to upsets in the postseason that mean the best teams often don’t square off on the biggest stage. It usually comes down to which team gets hot at the right time. Great for jeopardy but arguably renders an almost interminable 162-game regular season meaningless.
Not this time. For once, it’s best against best and not a moment too soon for MLB. The demise of baseball has been confidently predicted for decades – the gentle pace of play, the proliferation of other entertainment options, the decreasing attention span of the younger generation and a poor TV product are the among the various reasons given for the sport’s death knell to be sounded.
Of course, its downfall has always been overblown but the sport has undoubtedly declined in popularity and long since been surpassed by both the NFL and NBA in terms of interest. The TV viewing figures for the World Series bear this out – the sport’s showpiece hasn’t averaged 12m viewers in the US since 2019 and hasn’t reached 20m since 2016. Last year’s series was the least-viewed of all time, with an average barely over 9m. For context, the most-viewed World Series of all time in 1978 had an average of 44.2m.
That last figure is unobtainable given the media climate in 2024 but the 22.8m average that the Cubs’s historic victory in 2016 earned is plausible and the near 19m achieved a year later when the Dodgers lost to the Houston Astros should be matched, especially if the best-of-seven series goes all the way to Game 7. The signs are already good, with Jared Diamond of The Wall Street Journal reporting a 20 percent increase in viewership from 2023 for the play-offs so far this year.
There are a number of reasons for this, from quicker pace of play to exciting games to plenty of teams in big media markets qualifying for the postseason but surely the biggest is that the sport’s best players have all been on show and thriving. And this will continue in the World Series.
When ESPN ranked their top 100 MLB players at the start of the season, six of the top 10 (and four of the top five) played for the Dodgers or Yankees. Outfielders Aaron Judge and Juan Soto and pitcher Gerrit Cole wear the Yankee pinstripes, while shortstop Mookie Betts, first baseman Freddie Freeman and two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani are the Dodgers representatives in that top 10.
Ohtani is almost certain to be named National League MVP after his historic 50-50 season – becoming the first man in MLB history to hit more than 50 home runs and steal more than 50 bases in a single campaign – while Judge is the favorite to win the American League equivalent following his 58 regular-season home runs. This will be the first time two hitters with 50-plus home runs in the seasons have faced each other in a World Series.
Ohtani is the owner of the richest contract in sports’ history after the Dodgers inked him to a $700m deal over 10 years this winter, his was the top-selling jersey in MLB for a second year running and he is a genuine national icon in his homeland of Japan. He’s also one of five former MVP winners who will be on show (along with Judge, Betts, Freeman and Yankees designated hitter Giancarlo Stanton), plus a former Cy Young award winner (the pitching MVP) in the form of Cole, while LA also have another Japanese star – pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto – to ensure this World Series will be huge in the Land of the Rising Sun.
People tune in to watch a sport’s biggest names and this World Series delivers that in spades. Sport is also built on rivalry and again, the 2024 showpiece provides a conflict for the ages.
The Dodgers and Yankees have squared off in a World Series on 12 occasions, by far the most frequent matchup of any MLB teams. In the days when the Dodgers were still based in Brooklyn (the franchise relocated cross-country to Los Angeles in 1958), they lost to the Yankees in each of their first five appearances in the Fall Classic before finally besting them at the sixth time of asking in 1955. Since then, the record between the teams when they square off on the biggest stage has been much more even, with the Dodgers winning the most recent matchup in 1981.
This is a historic rivalry but the 44-year wait for another World Series battle between the sides has only heightened anticipation, as has the fact that, by their own lofty standards, both franchises are enduring something of a championship drought. The Yankees have a record 27 titles to their name but haven’t even reached a World Series since 2009, while the Dodgers’s only crown since 1988 came in the Covid-shortened 2020 campaign when the regular season was reduced from 162 to just 60 games.
A star-studded, potentially historic World Series between two sporting titans is exactly what MLB so desperately needs. Now it’s time to just sit back and enjoy.
