Lots of fans can claim to be “long-suffering” as a labeling fetish, even if they aren’t. New York Liberty fans, for instance, were long-suffering—until Sunday night, when they cashed in their 28 years without a championship and transitioned into “deliriously smug, smugly delirious, and not even pissed at Sabrina Ionescu any more.” It happens that fast. The previous almost-three decades notwithstanding, they got their money’s worth, and then some.
And then there’s this World Series, which is the dead opposite, and more’s the pity. Nothing will leaden eyelids quite like listening to Yankee fans and Dodger fans grind on the rest of us civilians about their respective places on the double-decker throne, let alone their shared hearkening back to their joint heritage as the keepers of the sport back when baseball had not yet cracked the Pacific Time Zone. A nation already hopelessly fractured and ready to go even more Serb and Croat two Tuesdays from now can safely unite as one, however briefly, in our hatred of both teams. The prognosis wasn’t good regardless, but expect the next fortnight to be hell with a Bob Costas voiceover. Fox has the games, but it’s not his voice that offends, you see; rather the subject matter.
The foremost thing it has to recommend it is that America will loathe this World Series, even though in many ways it is properly symmetrical in so many ways. Ohtani vs. Judge … Betts vs. Soto … Edman vs. Volpe … Treinen vs. Weaver; it doesn’t want for characters, and it doesn’t want for counterpoints. Both teams were among the very best teams in the sport all year. The on-field pixie dust should take care of itself. Two teams with the best records, the best players, two of the thickest wallets, even two managers in Dave Roberts and Aaron Boone who have been fired repeatedly by their fans without ever being fired by their bosses. All this, and whatever gummies are powering John Sterling’s neural network these days. Who wouldn’t want 63 innings of that, unless we get even more for being good children?
But here’s a tip. Bask in all this with the mute button at the ready, because the invocations of history going back to 1941 will fill entirely too many hours between now. Indeed, Shohei Ohtani and Babe Ruth are about to become the oddest combination of bedfellows baseball has ever produced; it was one thing when the former became the definitionally implausible and most obviously accurate scouting comp for the latter, but now that ghost and this deity are really going to have it out. Nobody wants the good old days. These are the good old days, right in front of your red-veined, beer-blurred, cataract-shrouded eyes. Enjoy it, you ingrates.
In finishing the New York Mets Sunday night, 10-5, the Dodgers finished the most lopsided series in years, winning their four games over the weirdly game Mets in ritual stompings—their four wins came by nine, eight, eight, and five runs. The Yankees survived the weirdly weird Guardians in five games, and the games were pretty much you-had-to-be-there inkblot test extravaganzas. Last winter’s most obvious possible World Series prediction has become this fall’s reality, and from a strictly baseball-oriented perspective it should be pretty good.
But also you’re going to get boatloads of history jabbed into your temples because baseball plays to the 1981 Crowd, which was the last time the Dodgers and Yankees played for jewelry. Back then, fans worried about Ronald Reagan as president and didn’t realize that he was just the gateway drug to You Know Who. The answer to the question “Were we ever so young?” for most people reading this will be a cold yet factual “No.” We were ancient coots when we were in utero.
Truthfully, with all due deference to the producers and content farmers who think we need explanations of Joe DiMaggio and Dolph Camilli, we actually need none of it. This ancient rivalry is seven decades in the rearview mirror, and the most compelling history the next generation of baseball fans want to know is how long it would take for Ohtani to kick Babe Ruth’s ass. (Frankly, historians know Lou Gehrig could kick Ruth’s ass, and was just too polite to do it.)
This series, while we’re being frank, is the next generation’s buy-in to a sport attached preternaturally to their grandparents. It exceeds the analytic fixation that made bathroom-bullying targets of math majors across the nation, because of how big and loud these two teams are. There are acronyms and decimal points and all that, and then there are these cartoon figures who hit the ball to Europe, Bugs Bunny–conga line around the bases, and make heroes of pitchers who haven’t faced eight batters in a week, let alone a game.
It’s a TV show, as a man once said, and this World Series is sweeps week. This is baseball for the short-attention-span generation, and that covers anyone from ages 8 to 62. If you remember the Yankees before 1981, let alone the Dodgers in Brooklyn, you’re not the target audience this time. This is the reinvention of baseball at its outermost edges, which given our broader societal decomposition is the only thing we have any interest in any longer. This is baseball for this moment, and for all its historic precedent it probably won’t be repeated any time soon.
But it’s all worth it, for so many reasons. Shohei Ohtani’s $700 million contract, 98 percent of which will be paid after he stops playing, is already a bargain for the sport, if not necessarily for the next two sets of Dodgers owners. Aaron Judge has maimed enough fans reaching for his home runs to convince them all to pony up for better seats down the foul lines. The maleficent shitheads who said that baseball was too long and too boring just gave us 20 games featuring the Yankees and Dodgers, 16 of which lasted over three hours in duration and lasted an instant; the average time of game was 3:12 and nobody said the games were dragging even though Roberts and Boone made 83 pitching changes between them. Their teams won 14 of those games.
In sum, as you prepare for this World Series, do yourselves a favor: Skip the good old days. In this case anyway. They can’t blow a kiss to the here and now. Babe Ruth and Tommy Lasorda were fun, just to name two guys who waddled like crank-addled ducks and were shaped like eggplants, but they’ve got nothing for you now.
