Beyond offering the rare clash between number one seeds, this year’s World Series matchup between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees is steeped in baseball history and — as anyone who’s read me over the past two and a half decades knows — is of great personal resonance. The last time the two teams met in the Fall Classic, in 1981, I was an 11-year-old baseball nut hoping his favorite team could avenge its back-to-back World Series losses from ’77 and ’78. I could never have imagined that I’d get to cover their next October matchup.
For most of the country, this pairing’s biggest selling point beyond the top-seed aspect and the involvement of the sport’s two most storied franchises is the presence of the game’s two biggest stars. Both the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani and the Yankees’ Aaron Judge are coming off historic seasons that will likely net them MVP awards, though things haven’t come quite so easily for either of them in the postseason. We won’t officially know until November whether Judge and Ohtani both won the awards, but even working from the assumption that they will, this is hardly the first time that two likely MVPs have squared off in the World Series.
In fact, it’s happened 25 times since 1931, with four such pairings from among the 11 times the Yankees and Dodgers have met. That said, it’s just the second such meeting since the start of the Wild Card era (1995 onward) and the sixth since the start of the Division era (1969 onward). MVP choices may be driven less by team success these days, but even when they are, the expanded playoff field makes getting to the World Series much harder:
This World Series matchup does have the distinction of being the first to feature 50-homer hitters on both sides, with Judge (58) and Ohtani (54) just the 10th and 11th such sluggers to even reach the Series, regardless of opponent:
Only one of the previous nine thumpers who reached 50 homers was shut out in the World Series, and to be fair, he had a note from a doctor, if not a reputable one. All of which is to say that history suggests Judge and Ohtani will find ways to put the ball over the wall at some point.
So far in the postseason, Ohtani has hit .286/.434/.500, with very different flavors of performance in the Division Series against the Padres (.200/.273/.350 with one homer, two walks and 10 strikeouts in 22 PA) and the League Championship Series against the Mets (.364/.548/.636 with two homers, nine walks, and seven strikeouts in 31 PA). Most of the focus on Ohtani thus far has been on the stark contrast between his performance with the bases empty and with men on base.
With nobody on, he went hitless in his first 25 PA of October, a stretch that extended through NLCS Game 3. In that span and that context he was 0-for-22 with three walks and 11 strikeouts, a performance that colleague Michael Baumann suggested may have owed to his taking longer and more frequent cuts in pursuit of homers. He finally got on the nobody-on-board board with a solo homer off Jose Quintana to open up Game 4, and has since added three singles to lift his bases-empty line to a still-meager .138/.265/.241 with five walks and 13 strikeouts in 34 PA.
Meanwhile, he’s been on a rampage with men on base, hitting .615/.737/1.077 in 19 PA, with two homers, six walks, and four strikeouts; in that context, he reached base nine times in 11 PA in the NLCS, while being driven in seven times by his teammates. Out of the seven balls he’s gotten under — made contact at unproductively high launch angles, producing little chance of a base hit.
