Greetings from the sports desk located somewhere below decks of the Good Pirate Ship RedState. Sammy the Shark and Karl the Kraken are getting into the Fall Classic swing of things…
At least they’re not getting fish cracker crumbs all over the place.
Anyway, the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees are set to meet in the 2024 World Series. This will be the 12th time the franchises have battled it out for the title, albeit the first such occurrence since 1981. In the interim, every major league team except the Seattle Mariners and Pittsburgh Pirates has played in the World Series. Every participant save the Cleveland Indians Guardians, Tampa Bay Devil Rays, San Diego Padres, and Milwaukee Brewers have won at least one championship. Maybe next year.
On paper, where to date no baseball game has ever been played, Los Angeles and New York match up evenly. Both can tear the cover off the ball.
The Yankees’ leaders are the modern-day Bash Brothers Aaron Judge and Juan Soto, with Giancarlo Stanton in reserve. The Dodgers counter with Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts, complemented by Teoscar Hernández and Freddie Freeman. The Dodgers are better running the bases, especially Ohtani, who swiped 59 bases to go with his 54 regular-season home runs.
Although New York has three Gold Glove nominees this year and the Dodgers two, neither team is elite defensively. Pitching-wise, both teams can go from ordinary to extraordinary and back again in a heartbeat. The Dodgers gave up the second most home runs in the National League this year, which has to be a concern when the Yankees can roll out Judge and Soto. New York is less prone to throwing the gopher ball but overall is at best marginally better than Los Angeles. In the for what it’s worth department, the Dodgers have the home-field advantage.
It is a 15-mile drive between Yankee Stadium and the location of Ebbets Field, where the Brooklyn Dodgers plied their trade for decades before moving to Los Angeles in 1958. Few, and sadly growing fewer every year, remember when October was the realm of the beastly Bronx Bombers versus the beloved Brooklyn Bums, the two teams meeting seven times before the Dodgers came to California. The Yankees won six of the seven Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, with Brooklyn bucking the trend only once, that being in 1955. Following the Dodgers changing their house band from one backing Lena Horne to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the two teams have had four more meetings before this year’s, each winning twice.
And now we have the 2024 edition. Two teams with massive hitting and mystery pitching. Tickets are going for four figures; should the series go seven games one can only imagine the demand to be there in person. This is baseball at its most storied. My hunch is the series will go seven games, with two of them blowouts and the others tightly contested back-and-forth exhibitions of an event that, at a time when most everyone and everything seems fiercely determined to drive Americans apart, can bring us together. It’s baseball time, and it’s the Dodgers and Yankees. The first pitch on October 25 can’t come soon enough.
