Here’s a little World Series secret: Neither the 98-win Los Angeles Dodgers nor the 94-win New York Yankees is a truly great team. Both rosters, which will square off when the Fall Classic starts on Friday, have holes bigger than the one in the webbing that led to the Dodgers’ first win of the season. And both franchises have fielded stronger units in recent years. The 2024 Yankees won five fewer games during the regular season than the 2022 model, which lost to the eventual champion Astros in the AL championship series, and this year’s team has a run differential nearly 100 runs worse. This edition of the Dodgers, diminished by more than the usual complement of pitching injuries, is probably the weakest incarnation since 2018.
Yet in October baseball, it’s better to be lucky than great—and luck is largely about timing. In this MLB season sans superteams, the Dodgers and Yankees are as great as it gets: the winningest clubs in their respective leagues, both in practice and, per Pythagorean record, on paper. As befits the best teams, they also boast the best players, sporting a constellation of stars the likes of which haven’t shined on the World Series stage in decades. All of which reinforces a lesson last imparted almost half a century ago: There’s no World Series as star-studded as a Dodgers-Yankees World Series.
“This is exciting for baseball,” said the Dodgers’ manager about the meeting between the Bombers and Bums. “Here we have the two great teams which over the years have been synonymous with major league baseball.” By “the Dodgers’ manager,” I mean Tommy Lasorda, in 1977. Yes, these two teams have history, and yes, you might be sick of hearing about it. (If you’re not now, you surely will be by the end of the series.) In the 41 seasons from 1941 to 1981, the Dodgers and Yankees faced off in the Series 11 times, resulting in eight Yankees victories. But this week’s showdown should feel fresh to most spectators because the coastal titans then went 41 World Series without tangling, before this month’s action spelled the end of the streak.
That Yankees-Dodgers drought doesn’t reflect any slumping on the part of the storied rivals; the Yankees and Dodgers rank first and second, respectively, in wins since 1982, just as they did from ’41 to ’81. The lack of recent rematches stems more from how hard it’s gotten for the cream to rise to the top of the baseball bracket crop. This is the 30th season of the wild-card era and only the fifth in which the two teams that led the AL and NL in wins have gone to the Fall Classic. Two of the previous four came amid shortened campaigns—thanks to the strike in 1995 and the pandemic in 2020—and only one, 2013, also featured two opponents who finished with unmatched expected records in their leagues. As the playoff field inflates and the number of rounds expands along with it, the prospect of matchups between the best teams grows more remote.
The Dodgers and Yankees have powered through the sport’s postseason randomness with assistance from several of baseball’s biggest names. Six of the regular season’s 20 best-selling jerseys bear the names and/or numbers of Dodgers or Yankees—30 percent of the most popular players, from just two of 30 teams. That’s partly a product of the markets those two teams hail from—more inhabitants mean more fans, which in turn means more potential jersey buyers—but it’s also a testament to those players’ performance. Leading the list of fashion influencers, of course, are this season’s presumptive MVPs. Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge were the NL and AL leaders in jersey sales—and also in numerous metrics more relevant to their teams’ immediate fortunes on the field.
This season’s top teams were pretty so-so, but this season’s top players were extraordinary. Ohtani has won a Japan Series and a World Baseball Classic, but this month marks his first trip to the MLB playoffs. It took seven seasons for the two-way marvel turned 50-50 DH to get to the dance; it took seven full seasons for Judge to miss it (which happened for the first time last year). But Judge, too, is still looking for his first World Series title, and he’s also trying to improve a pedestrian postseason stat line.
Judge, who had the best offensive regular season by a qualified right-handed hitter in AL and NL history, hit homers in ALCS Games 2 and 3—the second of which, off of Cleveland closer Emmanuel Clase, erased a two-run eighth-inning deficit (though the Guardians went on to win in extras). But his overall line of .161/.317/.387 this month translates to a 94 wRC+, repeating a pattern of underperformance in the playoffs compared with the regular season. Of the 103 hitters in AL and NL history who’ve made at least 200 postseason plate appearances, Judge has suffered the greatest decline between his regular-season rate stats (superb) and his postseason production (barely above average). (The Dodgers’ Kiké Hernández, by contrast, has enjoyed the second-greatest gain.)
Biggest Differences Between Regular-Season and Postseason wRC+ (Min. 200 PA)
Judge’s career postseason wRC+ is lower than his regular-season wRC+ in any span of the same number of games since his rookie year, which heaps extra pressure on the Yankees captain to produce in this high-stakes best-of-seven. Judge has historically struggled in the playoffs, by his superlative regular-season standards, but he’s also historically destroyed the Dodgers. Something’s gotta give.
Questions of clutchness aside, though, it’s rare—and in at least one respect, unprecedented—for two sluggers of this sort to tangle in the playoffs’ final round. Ohtani and Judge are the sixth pair of home run kings to go head-to-head in the World Series, and the first to do so since (Yankee) Mickey Mantle and (Dodger) Duke Snider in 1956. They’re also the first 50-homer hitters ever to face off in the World Series.
Barring BBWAA-ballot malpractice, Ohtani and Judge will also be the seventh duo in the divisional era (since 1969) to go head-to-head in the World Series following MVP campaigns—which was a more common occurrence when there were fewer teams and the best two went straight to the series.
They’re also the eighth set of series opponents, and the first since 1989, to lead their leagues in FanGraphs WAR:
FanGraphs WAR League Leaders in the World Series
Essentially, this series is a double boss fight: To win, one side will have to defeat the final(s) form of the other league’s best player. As Ohtani’s original L.A. club repeatedly proved, though, one or two stars aren’t enough to send a team to October. And as Judge has shown thus far, raking during the regular season is no guarantee of playoff offense. Fortunately for both teams, Ohtani and Judge have help. Gaze around the rest of the Dodgers and Yankees rosters—skipping past some of the weak points—and you’ll echo Dave Bowman: My god, it’s full of stars.
The Yankees haven’t needed Judge to be at his best because he isn’t alone in their lineup. He has a hell of a sidekick in Juan Soto, who’d be the leading man in any batting order other than the two in this series. (That a bat-first player who’s probably about to make $600 million or more in free agency can credibly be described as a “sidekick” on the Yankees speaks to Judge’s exploits this season.) Judge, Ohtani, and Soto were the three best hitters in baseball this season by wRC+. Never before has a season’s top trio of hitters all appeared in the World Series. Another first for the Fall Classic: Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman will make five former MVPs on the field, surpassing the previous high of four. (Soto, the NL MVP runner-up in 2021 and likely the AL’s third-place finisher this year, turns 26 on Friday, so he has time to join the MVP party someday.)
That count doesn’t include Clayton Kershaw, the 2014 NL MVP and three-time Cy Young winner, who’ll be sidelined for this series due to a bad big toe. (It also excludes Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who won three Pacific League MVPs in Japan, in addition to three Eiji Sawamura awards, the NPB equivalent of the Cy Young.) But there will be one Cy Young winner in action: the reigning AL honoree, Gerrit Cole, who’ll start Game 1 for New York.
Judge, Ohtani, Soto, Stanton, Betts, Freeman, Cole: That’s a lot of luminaries. All seven of those players, plus Anthony Rizzo, are in their age-34 season or younger and have amassed more than 35 career FanGraphs WAR. If we compare this year’s Under-35, Over-35 Club to those of past series, we find that 2024’s membership is tied for the third largest of all time. The record of nine qualifiers is jointly held by the Dodgers-Yankees clashes of 1977 and 1978, which—in the words of one ’78 columnist—featured “such affluent superstars as [Reggie] Jackson, Thurman Munson, and Graig Nettles.” (The table below excludes players who made World Series rosters but didn’t get into games, such as Ken Holtzman in ’77 and Dwight Gooden in 2000.)
Most Under-35, Over-35 Players in a World Series
I spy some classic series. Granted, this is closer to a career accomplishment award than a gauge of present production: Stanton and Rizzo are well past their primes—though Stanton, the ALCS MVP, leads the Yankees with five homers this month—and Freeman’s sprained ankle has hobbled him thus far. Plus, stardom hasn’t always required or necessarily flowed from robust WAR tallies, particularly before WAR was invented. In 1977 and 1978, the leading Dodgers star was Steve Garvey—arguably even more of a “Mr. October” than the Yankees’ Reggie Jackson, but a player whose heavily batting-average-based overall value looks less impressive in retrospect. Nor does one need to have played for several seasons to steal the show. See, for instance, Fernando Valenzuela—a rookie the last time the Dodgers and Yankees crossed paths in October, but as bright a star as the sport has seen. (Valenzuela, who died on Tuesday, will be honored during the Series, much as Jim Gilliam—the only other Dodger to have his number retired by the team even though he wasn’t enshrined in Cooperstown—was mourned and celebrated following his death just before the ’78 Series.)
Naturally, none of this ensures that the stars in this Series will be the stars of the Series. To confirm that, we need look no further than the Yankees’ 1978 win, in which the top two players by championship win probability added—and by general acclaim—were, of all people, Bucky Dent and Brian Doyle. (Or, for that matter, this year’s NLCS: Who had Tommy Edman in the MVP pool?) Maybe Judge-Ohtani will be as big a flop as Mays-Mantle, when Willie and Mickey met up in the 1962 World Series, near the peak of their powers, and combined to bat .189 in the seven-game duel, with one RBI between them. But the talent on display makes this series as “exciting for baseball” as Lasorda said 1977’s was. Even more than in most years, this feels like sweeps week for the sport. (Don’t predict a series sweep, though.)
After last year’s Rangers-Diamondbacks matchup produced the least-viewed World Series ever, MLB and Fox must be happy to have a rematch of 1978 and 1981, which produced the highest and third-highest average viewership figures, respectively, in World Series history. Fans are less motivated to root, root, root for the ratings, and the Yankees’ quest for a (relatively) long-awaited 28th championship isn’t exactly the stuff of underdog dreams. Neutral rooters may have a hard time investing in the outcome of a battle between haves and have-even-mores. (The Yankees have won the most World Series; the Dodgers have lost the most. Maybe that makes them marginally more sympathetic?)
For some, the sight of all this concentrated star power sparks accusations of unfairness and fulminations about MLB being a rigged game. Of course, the sport’s playing field has never been entirely level; it was certainly slanted in earlier eras, when the Yankees and Dodgers refused to stop meeting like this. This is the highest-payroll-percentile World Series since the strike, and deep pockets have undoubtedly aided the two teams in their pursuit of pennants.
However, one matchup doesn’t mean that the league has a glaring parity problem. Pinstripes vs. Boys of Summer Fall may be chalk, but in baseball, it’s a long shot that even the chalkiest combination of potential opponents will take place. If anything, this tête-à-tête between no. 1 seeds feels refreshing after the past two Octobers, when the fans of the favorites were so upset about upsets. Cast your mind back to the distant time of 2023, when the Yankees and Mets missed the playoffs and the Dodgers were swept in the NLDS by the 84-win wild-card Diamondbacks. Money helps buy entry to the tournament, but it hardly guarantees a ring. Some smaller-market teams that want to up their odds could do so by acting more Yankees-like. What stopped the Guardians from trading for Soto?
As of Thursday morning, FanGraphs’ ZiPS projections pegged the series as a perfect toss-up, with a 50.0 percent probability that each team would win. If you’re a dual Dodgers-Yankees hater, there’s a 100 percent probability of experiencing resentment. But if you’re interested in seeing the sport’s main characters strut their stuff when the world is watching, it’s time to put on your Judge-Ohtani cap and settle in to savor what could be—should be—the highest-caliber baseball of 2024.
Thanks to Ryan Nelson for research assistance.
In an earlier version of this story, Anthony Rizzo was omitted from the table listing the most under-35 and over-35 players on a team; Rizzo qualifies as a member of that club on this year’s Yankees.
