In Case You Need a Reason To Watch the World Series
You are allowed to be sad. You do not have to be psyched about watching two gigantic legacy franchises smash everything in their paths and then start smashing each other in the Godzilla vs. King Kong World Series. You can be bummed that both of the obvious favorites made the World Series even though you also would have been bummed if some undeserving Wild Card team had sneaked in. Anyone who expects you to be rational in your rooting interests is being completely unreasonable. This a matchup designed specifically for fans of hegemony. You do not have to be good. You are allowed to cheer for Team Asteroid.
That said, there’s still a lot to be excited about in this matchup. The World Series offers itself to your imagination. I doubt that there’s one person reading this who doesn’t enjoy watching Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Juan Soto, or Freddie Freeman play baseball, who doesn’t thrill at the thought of seeing them on the biggest stage the game has to offer. It’s just inconceivable that a baseball fan could be so hopelessly lost.
Judge hit 58 home runs this season. He led baseball with a 218 wRC+. That’s the seventh-best qualified offensive season since 1900. The only players who have topped it: Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams. Judge is blasting his way onto Mount Rushmore in front of our eyes. Ohtani’s 181 wRC+ ranked second. While rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, he put up the first 50-50 season in history. When you combine his offense and baserunning, Ohtani was worth 80.7 runs this season, the 35th-highest total ever. Over 11 postseason games, he has a .434 on-base percentage with 10 RBI and 12 runs scored, and somehow his offensive line is worse than it was during the regular season. Soto was right behind Ohtani at 180. In seven big-league seasons, he’s never once been as low as 40% better than average at the plate, and he is still getting better.
In case you hadn’t noticed, those are the top-three qualified hitters in baseball this season, and they’ll all be in the World Series. I wondered whether that had ever happened before, so I pulled the numbers. I’ll tell you what I found, but first we need to acknowledge Kyle Tucker, who put up a 175 wRC+, broke his leg, then came back and hit even better. Tucker was more than 60 plate appearances short of qualifying, but he did edge Soto by 0.35 points of wRC+, so he deserves some acknowledgement.
Okay, we have acknowledged Tucker. Has any previous World Series included all three of the best hitters in baseball? I pulled the data for every qualified player since 1903, ranked them all based on wRC+, then created a whole clusterbiff of vlookups and if/and/or formulas to see whether the top-ranked hitters played for the teams in the World Series. For any Excel sickos out there, here’s what that looked like.
Did the 1903 World Series between the Pirates and the Boston Americans feature all three of that season’s qualified hitters? The answer’s as simple as IF(AND(OR),(OR),(OR))). Also, the answer is no. This has never happened before. Never have the three best hitters in baseball all made it to the World Series in the same season. This is something new! In your face, Ecclesiastes.
Over the 119 World Series that have been played so far, just 16 featured two of the top-three hitters. The table below lists them all, along with the hitters and their ranks. The rows highlighted in yellow show seasons in which both of the top-two hitters in baseball made it to the World Series.
| Year | Teams | Player 1 | Player 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1909 | DET-PIT | Ty Cobb (1) | Honus Wagner (2) |
| 1927 | NYY-PIT | Babe Ruth (1) | Lou Gehrig (3) |
| 1928 | NYY-STL | Babe Ruth (1) | Lou Gehrig (3) |
| 1929 | PHA-CHC | Rogers Hornsby (1) | Jimmie Foxx (2) |
| 1932 | NYY-CHC | Babe Ruth (2) | Lou Gehrig (3) |
| 1936 | NYY-NYG | Mel Ott (1) | Lou Gehrig (2) |
| 1941 | NYY-BRO | Joe DiMaggio (2) | Pete Reiser (3) |
| 1943 | NYY-STL | Stan Musial (1) | Charlie Keller (2) |
| 1946 | BOS-STL | Ted Williams (1) | Stan Musial (2) |
| 1956 | NYY-BRO | Mickey Mantle (1) | Duke Snider (3) |
| 1975 | BOS-CIN | Joe Morgan (1) | Fred Lynn (3) |
| 1980 | KCR-PHI | George Brett (1) | Mike Schmidt (2) |
| 1989 | OAK-SFG | Kevin Mitchell (1) | Will Clark (2) |
| 2004 | BOS-STL | Albert Pujols (2) | Jim Edmonds (3) |
| 2012 | DET-SFG | Miguel Cabrera (2) | Buster Posey (3) |
| 2018 | BOS-LAD | Mookie Betts (2) | J.D. Martinez (3) |
There’s a whole lot of Yankees on there, Ruth and Gehrig specifically. There are also two Yankees-Dodgers matchups, in 1941 and 1956. Take a look at the last row. In 2024, Betts wouldn’t have ranked as a top-three batter even if he’d made enough PAs to qualify, but he ranked second in 2018, when he was playing against the Dodgers.
Here’s how rare this season’s top-three feat is: Only four World Series have ever featured three of the top-five hitters in the game, and all of them happened at least 80 years ago. Two of them featured the Murder’s Row Yankees, in 1927 and 1928. In 1931, Ruth and Gehrig were the two best hitters in the game yet again, but the Yankees didn’t make the World Series; even so, the next three spots belonged to Al Simmons of the AL pennant-winning A’s, Chick Hafey of the World Series-champion Cardinals, and Mickey Cochrane also of the A’s. But 1941 is the most interesting for our purposes, both because it featured the Yankees and the Dodgers and because it featured four of the top-five hitters in baseball, both by wRC+ and by WAR.
| Name | Team | HR | AVG | OBP | SLG | wRC+ | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ted Williams | BOS | 37 | .406 | .553 | .735 | 217 | 11.0 |
| Joe DiMaggio | NYY | 30 | .357 | .440 | .643 | 179 | 9.7 |
| Pete Reiser | BRO | 14 | .343 | .406 | .558 | 164 | 7.5 |
| Dolph Camilli | BRO | 34 | .285 | .407 | .556 | 163 | 6.9 |
| Charlie Keller | NYY | 33 | .298 | .416 | .580 | 159 | 7.3 |
Nobody was going to catch Williams, who was putting up the last .400 season in AL/NL history, but that DiMaggio guy was pretty good too. So how did things go in the 1941 World Series, the only World Series that featured the top-five hitters in baseball, along with two of the game’s top-three offenses? Nobody could buy a hit, of course. The two teams combined to bat .215 with three home runs. They grounded into nine double plays in five games. Their .298 slugging percentage, 10.7% strikeout rate, and 28 total runs all rank in the bottom 15 in World Series history. There weren’t any shutouts, but Game 4 was the only game in which either team scored more than three runs.
Keller was the only member of the big four who had a good Series, batting .389 with two doubles. DiMaggio went 5-for-21 with no extra-base hits. Camilli, who ran a 163 wRC+ during the regular season, ran a nice, juicy 17 during the World Series. Reiser batted .343 during the regular season and .200 during the Series. Both Camilli and Reiser struck out six times each. All four players grounded into a double play.
This season, both the Yankees and the Dodgers slugged their way into the World Series. They had the best batting lines in baseball during the regular season. The Yankees scored at least five runs in every Championship Series game, while the Dodgers’ 46 runs were the second most in CS history. Maybe these two kaiju will keep smashing in runs in the World Series, or maybe it will be 1941 all over again.
Davy Andrews is a Brooklyn-based musician and a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @davyandrewsdavy.bsky.social.
The opening of this article was aimed squarely at me. This is the most dull matchup I could imagine.
Well the good news is…nobody goes back to back champs anymore?!?! Next year will be different!
Leaves me cold as well. I don’t actually know if I’m going to bother to watch.
Almost all the compelling teams got eliminated in the wild card round. The Padres put up a good fight but by the LCS it was pretty dull.
As a neutral (Cardinals fan), I enjoyed the ALCS. Games 3, 4, and 5 were all exciting games. And I adopted a rooting interest, cheering for the Guardians against the Yankees.
NLCS was less interesting simply because none of the games were all that close. I could muster some interest in rooting for Mets over Dodgers.
I’ll watch the WS, but I can’t summon a lot of interest in supporting either team.
I also have a nagging feeling that this WS is going to end up being very lopsided one way or the other. Maybe even similar to the NLCS, with a lopsided win or two for the loser, but no close games.
This is a wildly stupid opinion to have.
I generally don’t like the Yankees to do well because their fans can be so insufferable, and I also tend to root for potentially weaker opponents for the Dodgers, but I have come around a bit on this series: it is an iconic historical matchup that more or less entirely existed before my lifetime (I was 7 months old during the 81 series). The Brooklyn-era matchups are basically the same as the Jackie Robinson era. The 1960s matchups were the Koufax era. The 1970s matchups were the source of the Reggie Jackson legend. 1981 was the completion of Fernandomania. The only series these two teams have played that isn’t a really important part of baseball history is 1941.
I think it is actually pretty cool that it is happening again – and that two of the best and most visible players in MLB are playing when it does.
Judge and Stanton are likeable enough that I would have listed them pretty high on my list of guys I’d like to see get rings if the Dodgers didn’t win. And Ohtani getting there in his first season in LA is a hell of a story.
So, yes, its the historical juggernauts and perennial contenders. But it’s probably the best version of that we could have had in the last 10 or so years where both teams have been competitive. In 2024, with Ohtani and Betts, adding Soto to Judge, with Kershaw still present, etc, is about as good as this matchup can get – a throwback to Dodgers/Yankees with a bunch of obvious hall of famers on both sides.
I think it’s worth appreciating for what it is, even if a lot of fans will be insufferable about it.
Yankees v. Dodgers is the only time I root for LA… less than thrilled by the teams but I’d prefer it if there were pitchers of the same quality as the hitters in this matchup.
If peak Kershaw was part of the equation; if Ohtani or Mariano Rivera were penciled in as closers…
Hard to get excited about matchups when the “starting pitcher” is some reliever who’s all but anonymous.
Fernando & Luis… we miss you guys!
aren’t half your comments on this website about how much you are in awe of judge?
I too, would have preferred to see david fry in a tense duel with jose quintana with the world series on the line… somehow, ill have to settle for this boring, ordinary series
This is the 4th time in recent history that I’ve had a direct personal interest in the World Series (as a Dodger fan), but in general in the years that they haven’t made it, while I certainly pay less attention, I also generally just end up having a preference on the basis of which player(s) I’d most like to see get a ring. Heck, that once got me to the point of feeling good about the Astros winning because of Dusty Baker.
I have also made that decision on the basis of a bunch of players I liked a lot less than Aaron Judge. I would say he’s probably comfortably in my top 5 or 10 non-Dodger players I’d like to see get to win a title, and Giancarlo Stanton isn’t too far behind. (some other names in my list include Jose Ramirez, Lindor, Yu Darvish, Mike Trout, etc)
At this point you just have to find something, anything in which you can be a little invested because it’s quite unlikely that your natural rooting interests are going to be in play.
Living up to your moniker! 🙂
I wonder if the problem isn’t that it’s LA v NY (which hasn’t happened in over 40 years, cmon people), but rather that “big market” teams get hyped even when they’re *bad*, and so folks aren’t as excited when they’re actually great…but as Davy said quite well, there’s a LOT to look forward to in this series even if you’re not a Dodger or Yankee fan.
And fwiw, I’d much rather see franchises actively trying to win as many games as possible and investing as many resources as possible get to the WS rather than clubs trying to make the playoffs with the fewest wins/dollars possible and luck into a streak (looking at you Seattle and the AL Central). Why should I root for a billionaire who cheaps on his club instead of the billionaire who makes it fun for me to root for the team?
The systemic advantage owned by the huge, rich legacy clubs mean they don’t have to choose between profits and trying to win.
Small market teams don’t need to make that choice either… But a lot of profit is always better than some profit I guess
There’s no reason Guardians’ ownership couldn’t have kept Lindor; the Pirates could be rolling out Cole/Skenes. The ownership groups have the money; they just refuse to spend it. I feel badly for their fans, but it’s hardly the “fault” of clubs like the Mets, Yankees, Dodgers, etc.
Not defending the cheapness of the Pirates and co, but if they maxed out their spending, the wealthier teams could simply increase their spending as well. So the choice the smaller revenue teams have is between trying to be smart on a low budget with pretty safe profits or going in all in, risking little or no profit, and hoping other teams above them don’t also increase their spending.
Small market teams absolutely cannot spend at the level of the Dodgers or Yankees, or anywhere near it, and still be profitable.
I’m not saying this to excuse the small market owners who spend nothing and pocket all the revenue sharing money – there are definitely bad actors there.
They can’t spend at that level, but the majority of them could easily spend another 20-30% of what they currently are every year in salaries.
The real value in spending more money is not in players but the development of players and most of the bottom half of the league is more than happy just getting by and taking their league paychecks to the bank. I wouldn’t be shocked if some of the top teams are spending more on the back end financing every year than some bottom of the league teams pay their most expensive player.
I mean, you only have to look at the Rays to see that you can invest heavily in player development without spending a ton of money.
Yes, the Dodgers and Yankees and Mets could spend more than other teams. But the tax thresholds and things really make it so that those teams spend what other teams could, but don’t want to. What LAD/NYY etc could do that other teams couldn’t is push out to 500-600m per year if they really wanted to (absent the gigantic penalties for doing so).
If those penalties weren’t in place, only a handful of teams could not afford a $200-250m payroll. And those teams mostly have comprehensible explanations for that, even if those things are sometimes self-inflicted (see: Oakland)
Your ‘average’ mid-market/lower payroll team is spending like 40-50% of what they could. They could very easily keep up if they wanted, and especially so with the most important, obvious targets (Ohtani, etc).
This entire take from Mike is wholly at odds with estimates of team revenue and costs from sources like Forbes and Bloomberg.
Maybe those aren’t perfect, but Mike is apparently stating that those are wildly low across the board. Or is he expecting that every team will operate at a loss with ownership groups writing checks every year to cover those losses?
Its frequently (and demonstrably) the case that teams are intentionally structured to place portions of their revenue stream into separate organizations controlled by their ownership but separate from the ‘team’ and therefore not part of the team’s bottom line, or included in the analyses you mention.
For instance, a lot of teams with their own RSNs use such a structure where the network itself (like YES) is partially or wholly owned by the ownership group (like the Steinbrenners), but not owned by the team.
They do this because it’s advantageous to them to reduce the on-paper revenue of the teams themselves, for example, for collective bargaining.
Thanks for the reply.
That sounds plausible, perhaps even likely, for some teams, such as the Yankees with YES.
That points to, however, an even larger gap between teams like the Yankees and smaller market teams (or at least a meaningful subset of them).
What we’ve seen from the Diamond Sports bankruptcy is that there’s not value over and above the amounts that teams are receiving on many RSN deals. With the chance to keep or reject contracts in Chapter 11, Diamond announced plans to reject 8 of its long-term RSN contracts and keep only 1 (the Braves). Three of the deals also expired without renewals.
It’s a fluid situation, and it seems that some of the deals may be renewed at significantly lower rights fees on a short-term basis. Either way, though, it points to co-ownership of RSN’s not being a boon for many teams. https://www.sportico.com/business/media/2024/diamond-may-salvage-mlb-contracts-bankruptcy-exit-1234800307/
Don’t get overly focused on specifically the media rights, which I used because they’re a good example, but they’re far from the only one. This stuff happens constantly, because owners have powerful incentives to keep the revenue lines for teams low (remember, they’re often trying to offer MLBPA a cap + fixed % of revenue deal like the NBPA has). They do this shit with everything from parking to concessions to media. The list if things they *can’t* do it to is easier to list than the ones they can.
Yes, clearly the big teams have larger revenue streams. They could spend a lot more money than the other teams – and a lot more than they do spend.
That’s a separate concern from the ability of the teams that currently spend 50-150m per year to spend considerably more than that. And these are the teams who argue its impossible for them to ever pay a star player, etc.
Yes, the big teams have more potential money to spend. They have extra edges in being able to miss on an investment or take on a dead contract. All that stuff is true!
It’s also all playing out at what is effectively a minaturized scale, while a lot of owners pocket a lot of revenue from their teams while keeping it off the team books and out of the union’s hands if they can ever break them to the cap + fixed % plan.
“because owners have powerful incentives to keep the revenue lines for teams low”
With the formula for sharing of local revenue between teams, the owners have even more powerful incentives to police each other’s attempts to do that.
48% of local revenues from all teams go into an equally distributed pool. That results in calculation of net payees and net recipients (subject to the limitation that some teams can’t be net recipients because their markets are deemed too big). The revenue sharing plan is readily available to read, because it’s an attachment to the CBA. The CBA is available at the MLBPA’s website.
So, if any team understates its team revenues by $1, it’s taking 48 cents from the other clubs. That’s a very strong incentive for collective pressure to make sure that each individual team puts team-related revenue on the books of the club.
You’ve wandered into the realm of wild speculation.
If MLB ever has a salary cap system tied to team revenue, then it will include highly detailed agreements of what counts as revenue for purposes of the cap calculation, including how to treat revenue that team ownership gets through related party entities. With all of that subject to ongoing auditing, in any realistic agreement.
And this process would hardly be starting from zero for the MLBPA. The NFL, NBA, and NHL each has its own salary cap that requires a definition of revenue. So there are surely knowledgeable professionals (lawyers, accountants, etc.), accustomed to working with players’ unions and familiar with sports team finances, who would be *very* involved in advising the union about negotiations of any cap.
And a salary cap ever happening is a big *if*, because the MLBPA’s frequently stated position is that it won’t agree to a salary cap.
So you’re assuming that other owners will accept the Yankees (for example) channeling a large amount of team-related revenue into other entities – depriving the other owners collectively of 48% of that money, year-after-year – just because the owners think that some day the MLBPA will be amateurish idiots when it comes to the definitions used in a hypothetical salary cap system. That fails the plausibility test.
I’m not as convinced as some others that the small market teams could spend significantly more than they do.
The bigger issue though is that they have limited payroll flexibility. The Yankees can trade for Stanton, and if he doesn’t work out, spend more money to cover for the mistake. The smaller market teams don’t have that luxury. If they give out or trade for a big contract and it doesn’t work out, they’re basically screwed.
I don’t see why they couldn’t individually spend more, but the players, in aggregate, wouldn’t be better if they were more expensive. It’s not clear that there’s a benefit money wise to spending more.
Let’s say the Pirates didn’t trade Cole for Musgrove and signed him for what the Yankees did. They might have won an extra 4 games annually and not be any better of a draw. Wins and losses are a zero sum game.
Exactly. It’s not that there’s a pool of unsigned players sitting around that the teams with smaller payrolls could sign and significantly improve their rosters. “Wins” is a zero sum game. And this isn’t international soccer where there are significant players available worldwide outside where MLB gets its players (Japan being a unique and restricted counterexample). A team like Seattle that (a) clearly banks money instead of spending it; and (b) seems to finish just a game or two out of playoff contention each year, is one where these criticisms apply. But if you applied it to every team, you still end up with only a limited number of playoff teams, and the Dodgers and Yankees would still outspend them.
Yeah, the Yankees have a lot of underperformance relative to contracts on their 2024 payroll. Not just 0.8 WAR Stanton. (And Stanton’s boom or bust 116 wRC+ as a DH, not healthy enough to play 162 games, is at least playable.)
Rizzo and LeMahieu were paid a combined total of $32 million for negative WAR.
Hicks was paid $9 million in 2024, after being released during 2023.
Stroman was paid $18.5 million for 1 WAR and hasn’t pitched in the playoffs.
Cole and Rodon have been useful in 2024 – including being part of the playoff rotation – but combined they made $64 million for 3.5 WAR in the regular season.
It all worked out because Judge and Stanton had amazing seasons. Paying $71 million to two players works out wonderfully for a team when those guys combine for 19 WAR.
And, to the Yankees credit, they’ve also had solid contributions from lower-paid players, some of them homegrown or savvy reclamation projects.
Overall, though, a complete look at the Yankees roster shows how a $200 million payroll can easily result in a quite bad team.
Yep, that’s it exactly. Most teams in the Yankees’ situation would have been hamstrung heading into last year’s offseason. Not the Yankees though. They went out and acquired Soto and Stroman (and some lesser pieces).
And while Stroman didn’t work out, Soto certainly did. I mean, would the Yankees have even made the playoffs this year without Soto?
Maybe, but it would have been tight.
Yankees were a 91 win team by BaseRuns. Their actual record beat that, with 94 wins.
Putting it all together:
So I’d say no Soto trade nets to ~5 WAR reduction for Yankees in 2024. 86 win team by BaseRuns plausibly loses AL East to Orioles (91 actual wins) and is tight for Wild Card (86 actual wins for both Detroit and KC).
Or they could have made a different trade for a useful player with a much lower salary than Soto’s final arb year $31 million.
Judge and Soto? I don’t think Stanton’s mom would even call his season “amazing”
Thanks, yes. That was a screw-up on my part. I of course meant Soto.
But if the small market teams decided to spend more, the big market teams could then decide to outspend them. I’m not saying that I like teams cheaping out but I also think it’s more complicated than just saying they should spend more.
I agree with all of this, but especially the first part. How is it that this is “tired” or “here we go again” when the Yankees haven’t been in the World Series since 2009 and the Dodgers have only been twice* since 1988? And the biggest star in baseball and one of the biggest stars in all of sports, is playing, along with four of the next, what 12ish biggest stars in baseball?
And these guys are all fairly likable. I’m programmed to hate the Dodgers since childhood when my Braves were in the same division, but Ohtani, Betts, and Freeman are all very likable dudes.
*depending on how you view 2020
This series could have happened basically any season since 2017 or so, but its happening at what is basically the best time in that span: when the Dodgers have Ohtani along with Betts/Freeman, when the Yankees have Soto, etc.
It will really be a series that in 30-40 years looks like a throwback to the old Yankee/Dodger World Series where both teams have a bunch of HoF players, including some who are inner-circle, best of the best types. Even people who are out (Kershaw) are both likeable and really signficant names.
This is the best version of this matchup that we could ask for.
Except for the myriad injuries to the Dodger staff – Kershaw, Ohtani, Yamamoto, Buehler all have all-star quality but none is anything close to peak form. For that matter neither is Cole.
That isnt infrequently the case in these matchups historically, too: see Mantle missing portions of the series with the hip abcess as Jay described in his article today.
In 30-40 years the fact that these people were all in the same place for the World Series at all will be memorable.
Very open to question if Buehler or Yamamoto will be well-known at all in 30-40 years, depending on future performance / health.
I commented elsewhere that this brings me back to the Yankee Dynasty versus The Boys of Summer. The hold that baseball had over the entire country during those years is impossible to exaggerate. The fact that the Yankees and Dodgers met six times in ten years built the emotion to a level never seen before or since. The best were playing the best, no 84-78 teams showed up, and the World Series was the culmination and it was intense. I hope this series is remembered in the same way that those epic contests are to this day.
Except last year, when the Yankees entirely missed the playoffs.
I’d hold the horses on assuming future legacy of a World Series until we see how the games play out.
2004 Red Sox-Cardinals World Series had up to 8 HoF’ers, depending on future prospects of Molina, Schilling, and Manny. (Pedro, Ortiz, Rolen, and Walker are in. Pujols is a lock.)
Molina was a rookie back-up catcher who played very little in that WS, but all of those other HoF’ers performed at a high level in 2004.
On paper it looked like a really interesting match-up. Red Sox had a better rotation, Ortiz, and Manny. Cardinals had 4 hitters with 150 wRC+ or higher that season (Pujols, Rolen, Walker, and Jim Edmonds). Both teams had solid players outside of their stars.
That series is now remembered only for the Red Sox breaking the curse, because it was a 4-0 sweep with the Red Sox outscoring the Cardinals 24-12.
Despite it being incredibly boring from a 4-0 sweep with noncompetitive games perspective, 2004 is one of the more important WS in recent history.
I think you might have misunderstood my statement to reflect an anticipated series full of close games or that goes 7 games. I don’t necessarily think that’s the case, or required for the series to be historically notable down the road.
I think we’re talking past each other.
I of course agree that the 2004 WS is notable and remembered.
But most baseball fans, imo, don’t think of it as having so many HoF players. Because that WS wasn’t competitive. They remember the Red Sox, and Pujols is remembered as part of Cardinals teams of that era.
It may end up as a good trivia question – with an answer that surprises most people – if things settle long-term with 8 players from that WS in the HOF, split evenly between the two teams. (Or, if PED’s keep Manny out, with 7 HoF’ers, and more of them are Cardinals.)
A lot of those players are barely retired (Molina, etc) and not even all elligible, much less do we know which ones will be elected.
How do you think it’s going to look in another 10-15 years when all that is done?
I think 7 of them will be in HoF. Everyone except Manny. He’ll only get into the HoF if there’s ever a wholesale re-evaluation of admitting players from the PED era.
Pujols is elected on 1st ballot (of course).
Molina may not be first ballot, but will be elected fairly easily. I think fWAR is there for it, and reputation as best defensive catcher of his era (9 Gold Gloves) will help. As a peak of a couple 7+ WAR seasons when he hit well, with a Silver Slugger one of those years.
Schilling will get in via committee.
2020 was actually a World Series and was preceded by not two but three rounds of playoffs and was played under extremely unusual and uncomfortable conditions. It’s time to stop asterisking it because it fits your personal biases.
In your face, Ecclesiastes.
This is why I subscribe.
I couldn’t believe that wasn’t a Baumann line
I’m sure it’ll be a very good World Series but I detest the Yankees and especially their arrogant and obnoxious fans, and while I’ll root for the Dodgers I’ll watch very little of this series given that I think the Yankees will win it plays a role in that as well as I’ve seen them win enough in my lifetime. I’m very much looking to what should be a fun and active offseason.
I’m in a baseball group text with my 3 60-something uncles, and they were all lamenting this matchup, and I was making a very similar argument as to why the matchup isn’t as bad as it looks. I feel like baseball, much moreso than the other major sports, rarely has it’s best individual players in the championship series, this is a rare time where we get to see the very best players competing on the sport’s biggest stage, and that’s pretty exciting!
2004…
This series is less compelling to me despite all the great hitters because there aren’t any great pitchers. Judge, Soto, Ohtani and Betts will all be facing pitchers they’re much better than. I guess Cole is a real pitcher but he isn’t at his peak now.
It would be different if Ohtani could pitch to Judge and Soto but having Tim Hill face Ohtani and Alex Vesia face Soto isn’t that exciting to me.
There is definitely no Allie Reynolds on either team.
The pitching of these two teams really is shockingly bad (relative to what you’d expect to see in championship teams). Giving the benefit of the doubt, you could argue that Cole and Yamamato are elite. After that, Buehler and Rodon were supposed to be but haven’t been for a couple years.
It’s a long way from the 90s Braves and Yankees.
I could not be less interested; here’s hoping they find a way to tie.
A tie would tie Manfred in knots so that would be fun.
I do hope I never reach the point where, when the two best teams are playing each other for the championship, I am not interested. It’s no guarantee the Series will be “great” but to say that it is not compelling or worthy of attention seems unfathomable to me. What part about the best taking on the best is undesirable?
I just don’t find this match up interesting. They’re the two teams that have a reputation for throwing around money the most, the obvious preseason picks from both sides, and somehow it is also true that both teams have weird glaring flaws (the back half of the Yankees lineup, the Dodgers rotation being in tatters).
One of the nice things about the regular season (and the first couple of rounds of the playoffs) is that there are so many games that I can always find something to tune into that catches my interest. But by the time we get to the LCS, it can be really hit or miss.
I suspect that if you really look into it, every year the WS teams have some kind of glaring flaw on the scale of “Well, the back half of their lineup isn’t that good.” Maybe some years it doesn’t feel that way, because certain players that should be part of the soft underbelly of the team go on a heater, like Evan Carter. So the teams feel more complete than they really are. But these two teams won 94 and 98 games, which is totally normal, outside of a couple times in the past few years when two out of a bumper crop of super teams managed to successfully navigate the postseason. Good winning percentage is an indication of good team construction.
I hope you all enjoy your umbrage. I’m gonna watch me some baseball.
Umbrage for some, miniature American flags for others!
Don’t blame me, I voted for Blue Jays
The whole narrative of folks having a backlash to this series is indicative of what a bubble social media can be.
It is almost certain that this series is going to be well-watched and gain a ton of traffic on various websites. The people complaining are louder than the mostly silent majority that will watch and enjoy the show.
The people being loudest are unimportant and irrelevant and I find it a bit of a bummer to see so a lot of the media focus articles catering to a demographic that doesn’t matter.
As a Reds fan, looking forward to a historic series with record ratings.
Something that I have frequently observed is that the Extremely Online Baseball fan (Knowers and otherwise) are absolutely entranced by novelty. Nothing is better to the person who consumes tons of baseball than something new: a new player who is good, a team that recently sucked being good, a player succeeding in an unconventional way. Baseball writers aren’t immune to this, and in fact they’re often the most extreme examples of the type.
This is not something that exists for people who spend less than 2-4 hours per day on baseball in-season.
This is a really interesting point, and something I’ll need to think about. On a separate note, high school must have been so hard for you, Mike.
lol
Unfortunately true (not entirely for the implied reasons, though!)
I don’t know that I think you are particularly an example of this, but as someone who used to spend a lot of time listening to Effectively Wild, and in it’s Facebook group (heck, I was on the show once b/c of how much I supported the show on Patreon), I feel like I’ve watched this cycle play out a lot, both in player form and in team form. It makes total sense, because novelty’s a really powerful force and when someone consumes tons of baseball, things that are different from your assumptions can be a lot more naturally entertaining and interesting.
It also really shows up this time of year, when people get actively sick of seeing ‘the same teams’ and ‘the same players’, even though in the regular season(s) where those guys are doing amazing things relative to their peers they’re fascinating and interesting and cool as hell. Judge and Ohtani were among this season’s more interesting players even to the jaded, heavily invested baseball fan. Judge somehow kept getting even better. Ohtani couldn’t pitch and just incidentally became a top 2 or 3 offensive player in MLB instead. Now they’re boring?
They’ve got to finish those stories. And one will end in the best way possible.
I am back to my childhood. It is 1952-53-55-56 all over again. These were the years that baseball was the only sport and I was developing my love for the game. However, these are also the teams that rank at the bottom of my list and the gap up to what is now #28 is exponentially larger than the square of the distance between the two cities. But, as I have noted numerous times, I am a baseball fan first and watching the best teams and players transcends mere fandom and I will be glued to the 60″ screen. Let the games begin.
It’s the WS. It’s baseball. Two great teams. Watch or dont, it doesn’t matter to those who enjoy baseball at it’s best.
I’d never be able to root for the Yankees, but if they win one small consolation will be watching my Yankee fan friends try to deal with it. All year all I’ve heard is: how awful the team is even while they were in first place; how stupid Cashman is; how they’re all a bunch of chumps who poop in their pants.
I think that constantly having a very good team that makes the playoffs then doesn’t happen to win it all has driven them to the brink. They remind me of Red Sox fans before 2004, but without the 80+ years of frustration as an excuse.
It’s funny how so often the hardest thing to deal with in life is getting what you think you want.
I won’t lie I remember how I felt about the Dodgers and the playoffs circa 2019-2020. It often started to feel like they were wasting their best chance(s) to win that I’d see with those players, and I really didn’t want them to never do it, have it all fall apart and have some of those reputations follow players I liked and felt like didn’t deserve them into their retirements.
I think it was evident afterwards that some of those players felt that way too – that several of them (like Kershaw and Kenley Jansen) described their primary emotion as relief is pretty telling, and it’s how I felt too, at the time. I suspect a lot of Nationals fans had similar experiences in 2019, too.
It makes me kind of optimistic for this one – if they can beat the Yankees, I think it will be quite a bit of a different experience than 2020 was, and in a good way.
All true. Did you spend the season saying how much the team stunk, though? Did you complain that they weren’t a team that could win the World Series?
I think part of it is wrapped up in the Yankee fans having spent so many years buying into the ‘count da ringz’ mentality. The Yankees were the best because they won the most championships. Other teams, no matter how great, weren’t as good if they didn’t win championships. Once the Yankees started fielding good teams that just happened to get knocked out in the playoffs, they didn’t know how to handle it. They assumed there must be some flaw. So they booed Judge after his 63 HR season and they called for Cashman’s head.
“You are allowed to be sad.”
Nah, you’re not. They haven’t played in the World Series in 41 years. You’re just being reactionary and weird.
About time the two best teams played each other for a title. I still would prefer going back to the original wild card era of playoffs. Div winners then the best non-div winner in each league and straight into the DS. Yes once and a while a very good team will be left out but that would be better than letting in 84 win teams perennially like we do now and rewarding mediocrity.
I’m interested in the (sorta) counterpoint: how often have 2 of the top 3 hitters been on the same team where they haven’t made the world series (and where did they finish)?
Did a quick look back to 1990…
The only other time 2 of the top 3 hitters by wRC+ were on the same team was the 2004 Cardinals.
From what I observed, people were generally happy for the Dodgers finally getting a fair shot at a championship and grabbing it. I’m hoping that the Yankees are able to see it through to the end, as well.
I’m just rooting for one game to be a big enough blow out for Rizzo to pitch to Freddie again