Parity be damned
The World Series brings a matchup of two long-time powerhouses who finally managed to have baseball's playoff chaos break their way
For much of the fall and into the start of the baseball playoffs, I had a column idea that I never quite managed to write. It was about Major League Baseball’s expanded playoffs, and the remarkable devaluing of the regular season that they have brought.
This is not exactly a new idea, I will admit, and I’m pretty sure I have written some version of the point in other forums already, but 2024 was shaping up to be an absolute corker of an example. The Detroit Tigers stunk for most of the year, were sellers at the trade deadline, then went on a hilarious heater that allowed them to sneak into the playoffs, win a comically short best-of-three series against Houston, and push the 92-win Cleveland Guardians to the brink of elimination.
Over in the National League, the New York Mets were not as bad for as long as the Tigers, but they started 25-35 and then went 64-38 to snag the final playoff spot. They then beat the 93-win Milwaukee Brewers in a comically short best-of-three series and knocked off the mighty, 95-win Philadelphia Phillies in a 3-1 ALDS. With just five postseason wins, the Mets had eliminated two of the very best NL teams over the punishing grind of the 162-game regular season.
Playoff chaos is fun and all, but I’m not convinced it is good for the sport if teams that build (and spend) their way to consistent regular-season success keep getting turfed by random upstarts every October. The more you send the message that nothing really matters until the high-wire act of a short playoff series, the more likely that casual fans will tune out until that time.
But then the Tigers lost to the Guardians in a series-deciding Game 5. The Mets were summarily dismissed in the NLCS. And now the World Series matchup is the New York Yankees, with the best regular-season record in the American League, against the National League’s best team, the Los Angeles Dodgers.
So much for that idea.
I kid, a little. All that stuff about the vagaries of playoff baseball remains true, it just also happens that sometimes the team with the better regular-season record can also win a postseason series, which is how you end up with Yankees and Dodgers at the end. New York won both its playoff series easily, and while the Dodgers went down 1-2 in the ALDS against the San Diego Padres, they won the next two games by a combined score of 10-0 to avoid the embarrassing early ouster.
And so, the two teams that perhaps best exemplify the curious state of modern baseball, where the deepest teams with the costliest payrolls rarely actually win championships, will face off beginning Friday in a World Series in which one of them has to prevail. And the other will add another year of frustration to the pile.
If there is one Yankees player who is representative of the last 15 years, a period during which they went to the playoffs 10 times but did not make it to the World Series once, it is probably Giancarlo Stanton. He hit 59 home runs at 27 years old in 2017 with the Miami Marlins, and was in the early days of a 13-year, $325-million contract. The Marlins then traded him to the Yankees because the Marlins are a disgrace, but the move to New York coincided with Stanton’s production falling off a Wile E. Coyote-style cliff. In five of the past six seasons he has been barely above replacement level — with a WAR of less than 1.0 — but has remained in the Yankees lineup when healthy because they are paying him all that money, and they can afford to pay him all that money. Plus, every now and then he hits the ever-loving piss out of the ball.
Which is what he is doing in the 2024 playoffs. He has five homers and 11 RBI in nine playoff games, which is unfair when the New York lineup already includes Aaron Judge and Juan Soto. The Yankees have a massive payroll, and a lot of money wasted at key spots on the roster, but they are talented and scary enough to burn you if you give them the chance. Kind of like the team version of Stanton.
If there is one Dodgers player who is representative of the last 15 years, a period during which they went to the playoffs 12 times but won the World Series just once, in the heavily asterisked COVID season, it is probably Clayton Kershaw. A three-time Cy Young winner and one of the best pitchers of his generation, he has kind of sucked in the playoffs, with an ERA of 4.49 that is much higher than his regular-season ERA (2.74) and yet doesn’t quite explain the degree to which he has sometimes been absolutely shelled on baseball’s big stage. No team has consistently gone after baseball’s highest-paid big fish like the Dodgers, not even the New York teams, and yet it has mostly just brought them Kershaw-style playoff heartbreak.
Something, in this World Series matchup, must give. Either the Dodgers will finally win a proper, no=asterisk title with their hilariously loaded team (even if they are currently very short on healthy starting pitchers), or the Yankees will climb back to the top and Judge will take his place among Yankees legends. Stanton, improbably, might even be next to him on that roll call.