Cody Snavely
LOS ANGELES, CA — After a grueling 162-game season and plenty of exciting games this postseason, we’ve finally reached the climax of the 2024 Major League Baseball season with the 120th Fall Classic between the National League Champion Los Angeles Dodgers and the American League Champion New York Yankees.
It is a historic matchup between two storied franchises that have had an immense impact on American culture and the baseball landscape. Two powerhouses finally go at it with a range of previous meetings dating back to the early 1940s, as this World Series between the two clubs will be the twelfth time they’ve faced off, more than any other matchup in the sport.
The hype between these two teams is warranted. For the Los Angeles Dodgers, they’re a team that has been here before recently, with this being their fourth appearance in the World Series in the last eight seasons.
However, it is the first appearance of two-way star Shohei Ohtani, who left the Los Angeles Angels, a team that never reached .500 in his six-year tenure.
Mookie Betts, one of the best players in all of baseball, is finally proving doubters wrong about his postseason woes, leading the Dodgers offense that has averaged over six runs a game this October.
On the other side, you have Juan Soto and Aaron Judge for the Yankees finally breaking the fifteen-year World Series drought running through the American League with a 7-2 record en route to the club’s 41st World Series appearance.
However, despite all that, many on social media will still tell you this is an unwanted World Series or state that it’s bad for baseball and that we’d rather have a team like the Cleveland Guardians get a shot at some attention.
Well, I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. This is a matchup that the league has been dying to see for decades, and it could, in a way, take the sport to new heights it has not seen since the early 2000s.
On the one hand, I can understand not wanting to see the top payroll teams or the top seeds always make it to the final dance. However, to say it is something that happens all the time is a lie.
Excluding the 2020 season, this is the first time since the 2013 season that the World Series features both number-one seeds from their respective leagues.
It is the New York Yankees’ first World Series appearance since 2009, when they won in five games over the Philadelphia Phillies.
For the Dodgers, while they’ve been the cream of the crop in the National League since 2017, winning the National League Pennant four times over the last eight seasons, they’re coming off a two-year stretch where they were bounced by a lower-seeded and lower payroll team in the National League Division Series.
Baseball, unlike all other sports in the United States, is as random as it gets come the postseason, where a wild card-winning San Fransisco Giants can win three championships in a span of five years.
A Phillies team in 2022 can squeak in and take down a one-hundred-win Atlanta Braves team, or a 111-win Dodgers can fall to their “little brother” in San Diego in four games.
That’s the beauty of baseball, and it’s what makes the process of making a run in October that much more meaningful.
However, to vehemently deny this World Series matchup is not good for the sport is just untrue.
While everyone loves an underdog story, not everyone likes to watch it, and that much was proven just last Fall when the eighty-four-win Arizona Diamondbacks and ninety-win Texas Rangers, both sixth seeds, clashed in the World Series.
In terms of ratings, it was an absolute nightmare for Major League Baseball. The 2023 World Series drew in the fewest television screens in televised history, with an average of 9.082 million views per game.
Ratings, in general, have been on a downward spiral since the 2001 season, which averaged 24.258 million watchers during the 2021 matchup between the New York Yankees and Randy Johnson-led Arizona Diamondbacks.
The top five worst viewership ratings for a World Series have occurred in the last four years: 2023 (9.082), 2020 (9.785), 2021 (11.745), and 2022 (11.762).
While it is great that Major League Baseball, unlike other sports, has great parity in terms of their championship game/series, it is not wrong for the league to want a true juggernaut clash between the best team on the West Coast and the best team on the East Coast.
The Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees are the two most popular teams in the sport. They play in the two largest media markets in the country and are the top two teams worth the most money, with LA valued at 5.45 billion and the Yankees leading the charge at 7.1 billion.
Both teams lead in attendance every season, with the Dodgers ranking number one in attendance in twelve straight seasons dating back to 2013.
Both teams have fans across the United States and, most notably, the world, specifically Japan, with both teams having plenty of ties to the country.
In the Dodgers National League Division Series game five matchups with the San Diego Padres, a game where Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto squared off against Japanese veteran Yu Darvish, it did wonders in Japan with 12.9 million viewers, which is ten percent of the Japanese population.
It was the most viewed NLDS game in FS1 (Fox Sports One) history dating back to 2012, and when the Dodgers opened up the 2024 National League Championship Series, it was the most watched game one of a League Championship Series since 2009.
The cherry on top of these teams matching up is that we finally have the matchup of likely Most Valuable Player Award winners in Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, each becoming the first two players to hit more than fifty home runs to face each other in the Fall Classic.
No matter what the trolls on social media say is good or isn’t good for baseball, and there is no doubt in my mind that this will not be only one of the most-watched World Series of all time but one of the most hyped in years as two historic and dominant teams finally face off for the first time since the 1981 season.
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