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Dodgers-Yankees Is the Superstar Extravaganza Baseball Needs

Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

It is certainly understandable why no one would want to celebrate this particular anniversary, but 2024 marks 30 years since the 1994 strike canceled the World Series, still the worst thing that has happened to baseball — and maybe sports — in my lifetime. Over those 30 years, baseball has steadily lost market share to the NFL and other competitors. Before the strike, you could argue that baseball was at least in the ballpark of being the national pastime it has long proclaimed itself to be; now, the NFL runs everything, to the extent that other leagues are afraid to schedule anything important near its games (note that there is no World Series game on a Sunday this year). Major League Baseball has also experienced a variety of scandals since the ’90s, most famously its steroid era. But if there has been one persistent criticism of baseball over the past three decades, it’s that the league has failed to understand something the NFL and the NBA always did: You have to promote your stars.

Promoting its most exciting players has never been baseball’s strength for a variety of reasons, many of which are less about institutional failure and more about limitations inherent to the game itself. In the NFL, a quarterback touches the ball on every play; in the NBA and WNBA, there are only five people on the court at a time. But in baseball, star pitchers take the mound only every fifth day, and your star hitters bat only four or five times. That makes it much more difficult for one person to stand out. If you go to a Lakers game, you know you’re going to see LeBron James do something interesting. But at a Dodgers game, it’s possible you saved up all your money to check out Shohei Ohtani and he ends up grounding out four unmemorable times. Baseball has also long had a culture that frowns on calling attention to yourself — it’s a sport in which you literally see players cover their face with their hats or gloves so you don’t witness them showing emotion. Such traditions can discourage young players from displaying their natural charisma lest they end up with some grizzled veteran pegging them in the back with a fastball to put them in their place. The last true crossover star, the sort of MLB player who was cool in the larger cultural world outside of baseball, was probably … Ken Griffey Jr.? It should probably be noted that Ken Griffey Jr. turns 55 next month.

For all the story lines surrounding the Yankees-Dodgers World Series that begins on Friday night — the fact that the former NYC rivals are playing in their 11th World Series against each other, more than any other pairing; the fact that they have two of the largest payrolls in baseball and are home to the largest media markets; the fact that fans across America love to hate both teams — I wonder if the most important one for baseball is the concentration of boldface superstars the series contains. Chances are that if you asked someone who doesn’t pay close attention to baseball to name all the active players they know, every name they’d list is playing in this series. You want charismatic breakout stars? The World Series has just about all of them.

It starts, of course, with the two men who are going to win the MVP in their respective leagues this year. Ohtani signed his massive — and still, I’d argue, kinda risky? — $700 million contract with the Dodgers in the offseason despite being unable to pitch this year, and he responded with the best offensive season of his career, becoming the first person to put together a 50-50 season with 54 home runs and 59 stolen bases. He is by far the most popular athlete in baseball and, increasingly, one of the most popular in the world: He’s the 13th-highest-paid athlete on the planet, one of only two baseball players in the top 50, with the vast majority of that income coming from global endorsements. (There are estimates that the Dodgers could end up earning $1 billion from Ohtani’s presence.)

And Ohtani didn’t even have the best season among players in this series. You can make a very strong argument that the Yankees’ Aaron Judge just had the best one for a right-handed hitter in MLB history, smashing 58 homers and driving in a career-high 144 RBIs despite the dearth of other good sluggers in the Yankees’ lineup beyond Juan Soto. Both Ohtani and Judge are titans of the sport, the sort of larger-than-life characters baseball hasn’t had since, really, Griffey. Ohtani is so skilled he almost seems supernatural, and Judge, at six-foot-seven, is one of the tallest players in MLB history and certainly the best tall player. They both tower over every other player in the sport, literally and figuratively, and they are both going for their first-ever World Series title. That they are doing so for the two most well-known franchises only further expands their reach. They’d be famous anywhere. But in New York and Los Angeles, they span to the infinite.

And they’re hardly the only stars in this series. In fact, of the players with the sport’s top-selling jerseys this season, four of the top seven are in this World Series: Ohtani (No. 1), Judge (No. 3), Mookie Betts (No. 4), and Soto (No. 7). (Two other Dodgers, Freddie Freeman at No. 18 and Clayton Kershaw at No. 19, made the top 20.) That is unprecedented and a stark contrast with recent history: Last year’s buzzkill of a Fall Classic featured zero players among the top-ten jersey sellers; there was just one in 2022 and one in 2021. You couldn’t get more stars here if you tried.

It’s the Platonic-ideal series for a sport that has begun, slowly, to transition out of some of its more stick-in-the-mud habits. The joyous celebrations in the World Baseball Classic have chipped away at baseball’s resistance to showing emotion. One indicator of that trend: Bat flips after homers, once considered the bane of Old-Man Baseball’s existence, are now commonplace, even encouraged. Ohtani had an incredible one against the Padres in the NLDS, and the exuberance he showed after hitting that homer has become a centerpiece of MLB’s postseason marketing.

In many ways, this series marks a turn away from the age of Mike Trout, a truly wonderful baseball player who has been the top name in the sport for a decade despite never winning a postseason game (which is hardly his fault) and, frankly, being deathly boring (which kind of is). Trout is the sort of player baseball has internally always revered: quiet, humble, dull as a box of rocks. The stars now are doing things we haven’t seen in baseball in decades, and they’re doing it with panache and style. And to the good fortune of baseball, and the rest of us, this year they get to do it in the World Series.


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