AMERICA NEEDS A DODGERS-YANKEES WORLD SERIES AS BASEBALL DRIVES RATINGS
A sport requiring something, anything, should involve two dynamic teams playing for a championship, with pinstripes and a blue script helping TV numbers that make noise beyond bicoastal supermarkets
The stroll lasts about a dozen minutes from 1271 Avenue of the Americas to 345 Park Avenue. It’s a shorter path if Rob Manfred and Roger Goodell don’t race in the bike lanes and avoid looking at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Abitino’s Pizzeria. How long has it been since the NFL cared about Major League Baseball and broadcast ratings?
This involves more than the likelihood of a Dodgers-Yankees World Series, which finally meshes the largest and most dynamic brands in a sport suffering from a weary cultural demise. This involves either swarming domination, which we’ve seen from the Dodgers as they blow out the Mets, or the insane comeback victory of the Cleveland Guardians. They returned from slaughter when Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton bashed home runs off master closer Emmanuel Clase, only to survive when a slugger named Big Christmas — Jhonkensy Noel — homered with two out in the ninth and extended Game 3 long enough for David Fry to win it.
You don’t have to like Cleveland. You don’t need to know what the Guardians are protecting in that city. The scene was definitive Thursday. “That’s exactly who we are,” manager Stephen Vogt said. “We never quit. We get punched in the teeth pretty hard there in the eighth, and our guys stepped up huge for the guy that carried us all year long. That was really fun to see.”
“At that point I blacked out,” Fry said. “No clue. I remember being like halfway down the first baseline looking back at the dugout and looking and saying, ‘All right, I just have to make sure I touch all four bases and get home and celebrate.’ ’’
They require us to watch. Consider it new territory when few saw the Texas Rangers beat the Arizona Diamondbacks last fall, giving us the lowest Series ratings ever with an average viewership of 9.1 million and a rating of 4.7. Caitlin Clark could laugh at those numbers. Chances are, baseball will fall into uglier depths when another collective bargaining agreement expires in two years. For now, enjoy.
We haven’t seen the Dodgers and Yankees battle since 1981, when baseball ruled America before a series of crises — labor, gambling, steroids, electronic sign-stealing — allowed football and basketball to take over our consciousness. The bicoastal rivalry still applies when pinstripes and a blue-and-white script are trotted out, when you play games in mighty stadiums with an iconic past and a current soul, when Judge and Shohei Ohtani brandish long-distance swings after slow starts to the playoffs. The Dodgers are closing in on their 25th National League pennant. The Yankees are looking at their 41st American League pennant.
Such a chapter is necessary as a presidential election nears. Donald Trump is a Yankees fan. Kamala Harris will become a Dodgers fan. The series won’t save baseball, but the attention and eyeballs matter. Consider what we’re seeing from the Dodgers, who have shut down the Mets and their “OMG” signs by at least eight runs in three games of the NLCS. I attended the third game in Los Angeles, which seemed out of whack with a blown bullpen setup by the Dodgers. Now you wonder if Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Max Muncy — that was Muncy, reaching base in a record 12 consecutive plate appearances — will join a historic pitching staff supercharged by Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Walker Buehler, Jack Flaherty and the reliever they choose.
“I love the way that our guys haven’t let off the gas,” manager Dave Roberts said after a 10-2 victory in Game 4.
“You just ride those emotions,” Betts said. “I’ve tried to stay even-keeled and all those things. At a time like this, that doesn’t really work, so you’ve just got to jump on the rollercoaster and enjoy the ride.”
Said Freddie Freeman, who sat and observed with a high ankle sprain: “When you have plans and you stick to ‘em, most of the time they're going to work out.”
Ratings? They’re shaking, for a change.
Sunday night, the Dodgers-Mets series drew 8.2 million viewers on Fox Sports while the Bengals-Giants game attracted 15.4 million on NBC. This was not the usual rout, which is impressive media news these days. Better, Game 5 of the NLDS was the most-watched postseason contest on record in Japan, averaging 12.9 million viewers. The Division Series bumped 18 percent, the best numbers since 2017. If you add figures this week, let’s assume Nielsen will shoot fireworks for a combination featuring the Dodgers and Yankees along with Ohtani and Judge, who are looking like their MVP selves and will lure the masses.
What we have here, in a season when batting averages dropped to an abysmal .243, are curiosities more than worthy of our time. An eternal Los Angeles-New York rap tune helps, and though we’re supposed to forget baseball when October shifts to football and the NBA, our minds and hearts say no. Does Roberts have the quirky card games to outlast the fluorescent rivals? The Dodgers have won seven World Series. The Yankees have 27, so a rivalry needs appropriate numbers since the old days. Ebbets Field houses apartments in Brooklyn. Yankee Stadium moved next door in the Bronx.
It’s more interesting than anything pro football has produced, including angry owners and vulnerable head coaches. Celebrities are in the seats, with outrageous prices. Both teams have dazzling superstars in the past. “It’s silly to pretend that Dodgers-Yankees isn’t the best-case scenario for viewership,” a Fox Sports executive said.
It’s the only scenario. “The two most storied franchises in Major League Baseball coming together and playing in the World Series, there couldn’t be anything better for baseball,” said Todd Boehly, who has more success as a Dodgers owner than he does with Chelsea in the Premier League.
And, yes, the teams that spend the most money are around in late October. In truth, most teams allow summertime fans to gather and don’t worry about contending. A year ago, people thought baseball was dead with the dull Rangers beating the overachieving Diamondbacks. “The conversation was the exact opposite,” said Tony Clark, executive director of the players’ union, in the Los Angeles Times. “Everyone was concerned about the format, because the teams that had the most wins over the course of the year didn’t find their way late into the postseason. This year, it’s flipped.”
Where else would you expect the Dodgers — with Ohtani at $700 million, Yamamoto at $325 million — than within five victories of a championship? Where else would you expect the Yankees, with ace Gerrit Cole at $324 million and Judge at $360 million and Juan Soto about to make more? They should play every year, when you consider life.
Franchise values hurt the sport, as the Chicago White Sox are about to find out after the Baltimore Orioles were sold for $1.725 billion and the Minnesota Twins might go for less. The middling and lower teams aren’t worth diddly-squat. The Dodgers are worth billions more thanks to Ohtani, whose t-shirts are so coveted in southern California that trips to team stores are overloaded with customers, many Japanese. Manfred will talk about progress with a pitch clock and shorter games.
He means there is more engagement, period. “The increased enthusiasm baseball fans of all ages have shown is evident in all of the ways we track fan engagement,” he said in a release. “Building off last year’s momentum, the 2024 season was memorable with historic performances and emerging young stars.”
We still have a World Series to play. Cleveland can root for the Guardians. The rest of us await an LA cap and a NY cap on the nation’s scalps.
At last, the headwear isn’t about fashion.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.