Yankees vs. Dodgers: Previewing the 2024 World Series

Why does it affront so many fans when big-market teams succeed? That question is rhetorical, but not sneering, because once you think about it a bit, the reason is both obvious and reasonable: it makes us all feel small. Every baseball fan holds equal worth, and no team's worth and value depends solely on the size of their fan base, let alone some special merit that stretches past numbers.

That's the truth, and it's fair and it's just, but the sharp-edged threat and snarl of it is this: there are more Yankees fans than there are Twins fans. There are more Dodgers fans than there are Twins fans. They aren't smarter, or more passionate, or more special, and neither the league nor its broadcast partners nor mainstream media intends to treat those fans as more valuable than Twins, Brewers, Cubs, or any other kinds of fans. But there are way, way more of them, and that raises the stakes of the whole affair when something like this World Series matchup happens.

The league has a greater opportunity, and has a fiduciary duty—as much to Twins and Brewers and Cubs fans as to Yankees and Dodgers fans—to seize it. Their broadcast partners have a larger audience and the ability to justify more resources allocated toward serving it. The commentary media has a chance, especially in our polarized and friction-fueled social media world, to stir up some pride and some bile. They're all going to act accordingly, and it's hard to blame them—er, actually, it's very easy, fun, and wildly popular to blame them. But it's probably also wrong.

Coverage of a series like Yankees-Dodgers tends to savor of triumphalism, which our Midwestern eyes tend to code as coastal elitism. In truth, though, it's just writers and marketers and TV producers working with what they have. We might fairly argue for a system that works harder to evenly distribute revenue throughout the league, but even if such a system went into effect today, it wou;dn't erase the last 125 years. Over that century and change, Yankee and Dodger triumphs pepper the landscape, and Yankees and Dodgers legends people the pages. Why is this Series exciting? Because these two teams are meeting in this context for the 12th time, more than anyone else has done it. When the Twins made the World Series, there were plenty of paeans to the value of Minnesotan baseball and its specific virtues. It's just been so long since the team made it that we tend to misremember those blandishments as smaller than the compliments paid to these teams. Certainly, when the Cubs were in the Series in 2016, a huge deal was made of it. Now, it's the Yankees' and Dodgers' turn.

Have I convinced you to care about this fight between two evil corporate supervillains? If so, I hope you'll read on, especially if you're not yet a Caretaker. You can become one for just $6 on our monthly plan, which will get you my coverage throughout the Series and our Offseason Handbook right after it. After that, you can decide whether to stick around and continue enjoying the benefits of our premium content, along with extra perks. If not, hey, sign up anyway! Maybe I can sell you on it before the games run out.