L-R Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, Garett Cole, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani
As most of you know, this Editor is a Yuge baseball fan. His love of the game dates back to the 1970’s and his love of the New York Yankees dates to the 1978 season. That season marked the Yankees 22nd World Series Chamionship. They beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 4 games to 2.
This year’s series is a rematch of that 1978 series. It kicks off tonight at Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles a few minutes after 8 pm EDT tonight. This will be the 12th time the two teams have met in the Fall Classic, with the Yankees leading the Dodgers 8-3.
Tonight’s starters are Gerritt Cole for New York and Jack Flaherty for Los Angeles. Cole, who spent the early part of the season on the IL, has a 3.31 ERA in 16.1 innings over three starts this post season. Flaherty has struggled this post season after putting up decent numbers during the regular season. He’s notched a 7.04 ERA in 15 innings over three starts.
This series has the chance to see 5 former MVPs play. Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton have all won League MVP honors in thier careers and all 5 are likely to play this in series. The previous mark is 4. That happened 9 times before, most recently in the 1971 series between Baltimore and Pittsburg with Boog Powell, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson and Roberto Clemente.
This series also features the top three sluggers in Judge, Ohtani and Soto. The three led MLB in OPS, Judge at 1.159, Ohtani at 1.036 and Soto at .998.
I try not to make predictions, especially when it comes to sports. So instead, I’ll give my keys to the series.
For the Yankees, their pitching has to stay hot. The NY staff has a team ERA of 3.65 for the post season, and they need to keep that up. They also need their bats to get hot. Offensively, Soto and Stanton have done most of the heavy lifting for the Yanks.
The Dodgers need to find a way to get to the Yankees pitching staff in a way nobody else has this post season. Jack Flaherty needs to look like Jack Flaherty, not whatever it was in his appearance vs the Mets.
All in all, I expect an exciting series, but it has the potential to be one for the ages. Only time will tell at this point.