In one respect, the 2024 World Series will be like a wedding. There’ll be something old, something new, something borrowed and two shades of blue.
Something old in Dodgers vs. Yankees World Series matchup
If you’re a baseball fan of a certain vintage, you ought to be used to Dodgers versus Yanks. It is far and away the most frequently played matchup in World Series history.
When the two teams square up Friday evening at Dodger Stadium, it will be the 12th time the two teams have met for the championship. That’s nearly twice as many times as any other World Series pairing.
If the Dodgers and Yankees don’t seem like long-time rivals, that’s because their championship history has some vintage on it. In fact it will be the first New York-LA World Series in more than four decades. The Dodgers won the last one, in 1981, in six games.
But there was a time when Dodger-Yankee series were run-of-the-mill. Between 1941 – the first Dodger-Yankee series – and 1978, those teams contested more than one-quarter of all the Series played.
The Yankees hold an 8-3 edge in those previous 11 meetings, although Dodger blue has prevailed in three of the most recent six. Since the Dodgers shifted to Los Angeles, it’s 2-2 - the Yankees having won in 1977 and 1978, the Dodgers in 1963 and 1981.
Something new
The Dodgers had the National League’s best record at 98-64. The Yankees had the AL’s best record at 94-68.
If you think the World Series is regularly populated by baseball’s two winningest teams, let me disabuse you of that notion. In fact, setting aside the COVID-shortened 2020 season, this will be the first World Series featuring the two winningest teams in more than a decade, and only the second in this century.
Granted, the Dodgers and Tampa Bay Rays took their truncated superior records to the spectator-less 2020 World Series.
But not since 2013, when the 97-65 Boston Red Sox beat the 97-65 St. Louis Cardinals in six games, have the two leagues’ winningest teams over a full season played on the game’s biggest stage. And before that, you had to go back to the 1999 Series with the Yankees and Atlanta Braves.
Why has the World Series proven to be such an elusive target for the majors’ elite teams? The obvious answer is the expansion of the postseason, which since 1995 has required teams to survive a gauntlet of preliminary rounds.
Since the creation of the Wild Card in 1995, only three World Series have pitted the game’s two top full-season teams against each other. Beyond 2013 and 1999, the only other one was in 1995, when the Braves beat the Cleveland Indians.
Something borrowed
Or, in this case, some borrowed but seemingly safe speculation regarding the Most Valuable Player award winners.
Those awards won’t actually be announced for another couple weeks, but it is the world’s worst-kept secret that New York’s Aaron Judge and Los Angeles’ Shohei Ohtani will be picking up the hardware.
Which leads to a question: When was the last time both leagues’ MVPs met in the World Series?
Again, the counter-intuitive answer is that it doesn’t happen nearly as often as you probably would think. In fact, it hasn’t happened in more than a decade.
To find the last time MVPs-to-be faced one another in the Fall Classic, you have to roll back to the 2012 World Series, when NL MVP-to-be Buster Posey led his Giants to a four-game sweep of soon-to-be AL MVP Miguel Cabrera’s Detroit Tigers.
Since then, only three of the two dozen soon-to-be MVPs – Kris Bryant in 2016, Jose Altuve in 2017 and Mookie Betts in 2018 -- made it as far as the World Series, all of their teams winning.
The Posey-Cabrera matchup of 2012 is actually the only World Series pairing of prospective MVPs in decades, the last one before it occurring in 1988, when Kirk Gibson’s Dodgers defeated Jose Canseco’s Oakland A’s.
It used to be that MVP-vs.-MVP Series were common. Between the creation of the current MVP award in 1931 and the start of divisional play in 1969, there were 38 World Series played, and 18 of them -- that’s one short of half – pitted MVPs against one another. Several of those pairings are legendary – Greenberg vs. Dean in 1934, Gehrig vs. Hubbell in 1936, Mantle vs. Newcombe in 1956, and McLain vs. Gibson in 1968.
Like a lot of modern World Series-related rarities, you can blame the onset of divisional play. Since the division format was instituted in 1969, there have been only ix Series featuring both leagues’ MVPs, and just the 1988 and 2012 contests across the past four decades.
Some shade of blue
No uniform visits the World Series more than those Navy pinstripes. This will be the 120th Fall Classic since the practice was instituted in 1903, and the Bronx Bombers have played in fully one-third of them.
They are historically a tough out, going 27-12 against the National League’s best. Since the Wild Card format was instituted in 1995, they’re 5-2, having won in 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2009, and having lost in 2001 and 2003.
The Dodgers lack the Yankees’ dominant World Series pedigree, but they do very well compared with the rest of the baseball world. Between their experiences in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, this will be the 22nd Fall Classic adorned with Dodger blue.
That also means that nearly half of the 120 World Series’ played – 50 of them to be exact – have featured at least one of this year’s two competitors.
That pales in comparison to the Yankees’ Series showings, but it is second all time. Here’s the all-time top 10 for World Series showings
1. New York Yankees 41
2. Brooklyn/LA Dodgers 22
3. St. Louis Cardinals 19
4. New York/SF Giants 18
5. Philadelphia/Oakland A’s 14
6. Boston Red Sox 13
T-7Chicago Cubs 11
T-7 Detroit Tigers 11
9. Bos/Mil/Atl Braves 10
10. Cincinnati Reds 9
This will be the Dodgers’ 13th World Series trip since moving to Los Angeles, and they are a dead-even 6-6 in the previous dozen. Most recently, that includes their six-game 2020 victory over the Tampa Bay Rays, and their 2017 and 2018 losses at the hands of Houston and Boston respectively.
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