My introduction to baseball history came early, sometime around the last time the New York Yankees faced the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series, a matchup that took place when I was almost two years old.
There was a record my father would play for me on his wood-paneled KLH turntable and speakers that had on it recordings of famous baseball broadcasts, among them Babe Ruth‘s farewell speech at Yankee Stadium, Russ Hodges’ call of Bobby Thomson hitting the homer that won the Giants the pennant, and Red Barber’s call of Al Gionfriddo’s unbelievable catch of Joe Dimaggio’s flyball in the 1947 World Series.
“So, the Dodgers are ahead, 8-5, And the crowd well knows that with one swing of his bat, this fellow’s capable of making it a brand new game again. The outfield deep, around toward left, the infield over shifted,” Barber intoned on the Mutual Radio Network. “Here’s the pitch, swung on, belted! It’s a long one deep into left center, back goes Gionfriddo! Back, back, back, back, back, back… he… makes a one-handed catch against the bullpen! Ohhhhhhh, Doctor!”
I don’t remember how old I was when he first played that call for me, but that he played it for me on vinyl says enough.
That series was the second of 11 in which the Yankees and the Dodgers have faced off for Major League Baseball‘s ultimate prize; so far, the Yankees have taken eight of those, the Dodgers won three, and fans got some great memories from each.
The first time the teams met, the United States and Japan were less than two months away from war. The Yankees took the 1941 World Series in five games, but the series turned in the Yankees’ favor in top of the ninth inning of game four. With two out and the Dodgers leading 4-3, Tommy Henrich swung and missed at strike three, but the ball eluded Brooklyn catcher Mickey Owen, and Henrich reached first. Joe Dimaggio singled, and then Charlie Keller doubled to score Hendricks and Dimaggio, giving the Yankees the lead.
Six years later, World War II over, Jackie Robinson became the first Black man to play in the World Series, but the Yankees would win the series four games to three, with 71,548 filling the original Yankee Stadium for Game 7. Then Casey Stengel got the Yankees back to the World Series in 1949, and after a split of the first two games, both by the score of 1-0, the Yankees took the final three games of the series, the first of five they’d win in a row.
Billy Martin, who’d later manage the Yankees to a World Series title over the Dodgers (more on that later), saved Game 7 of the 1952 series for the Pinstripes with a catch of a bases-loaded pop-up hit by Jackie Robinson that ended the bottom of the seventh inning, and the Yankees held on to again beat the Dodgers 4-2 and win the series.
The next year, it was more of the same, as downtrodden Dodger fans again cried in their Schaefer beer, with the Yankees winning the World Series in six games, and Billy Martin, who saved the Yankees a year before, taking World Series MVP honors after batting .500 in the six-game series and winning Game Six in the bottom of the ninth for the Yankees, ripping Clem Labine’s sinker up the middle to score Hank Bauer and end the series.
Finally, in 1955, the Dodger fans didn’t have to wait ’til next year, as Johnny Podres pitched complete game shutouts in Game 3 and Game 7, giving Brooklyn a winning team. It was the Dodgers’ first World Series title, and the only one they’d win in Brooklyn. A year later, what amounted to the order of the last 15 years was restored. Despite the Dodgers battling through a season-long pennant race that journalist and author Michael Shapiro termed, “the last good season,” it wasn’t a great ending for the Dodgers, who suffered the indignity of Don Larsen throwing a perfect game in Game 5 and getting shutout 9-0 in Game 7.
With Walter O’Malley unable to acquire land sufficient to build his own stadium in New York, the Dodgers and their National League rival, the New York Giants, moved west, heading to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively, leaving the Yankees as the only team in New York until 1962.
By the time the Yankees and Dodgers met again in the fall classic in 1963, the Dodgers had won their second title, beating the Chicago White Sox in 1959 in the best-attended World Series ever, thanks largely (very, very largely) to the Dodgers calling the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum home for two seasons while Dodger Stadium was built.
Despite going 104-57 in 1963, the Yankees were an aging team, and the Dodgers swept the World Series, with Brooklyn native Sandy Koufax throwing complete game wins in Games 2 and 4 as Los Angeles claimed the first championship ever played between teams from New York and Los Angeles.
In 1977, Billy Martin stuck it to the Dodgers once again as manager of the Yankees, who won their first title under owner George Steinbrenner in a series that provided three singular moments in a single game. Earning the nickname “Mr. October” on his way to World Series MVP honors, Reggie Jackson memorably clubbed three homers off three different Dodgers pitchers in the Yanks Game 6 win, needing only three pitches to accomplish the feat. Jackson homered five times in that World Series, setting a record that stood until Chase Utley hit five in the Philadelphia Phillies 2009 World Series loss to the Yankees, and George Springer hit five for the Houston Astros in 2017.
1978 might have been the greatest year of Bucky Dent’s life, as he homered to give the Yankees a win over the Boston Red Sox in an American League East tiebreaker, then won the World Series MVP after going 10-for-24 with seven RBIs in the fall classic, which the Yankees won four games to two.
Tommy Lasorda and the Dodgers finally exacted revenge on the Yankees in 1981, erasing a two-games-to-none deficit to win four straight and take the series four games to two. The 20-year-old NL Rookie of the Year from Puebla, Mexico, Fernando Valenzuela, threw a complete game for the Dodgers in Game 3, outdueling AL Rookie of the Year Dave Righetti, who lasted just two innings.
And now, after 43 years, the Yankees and Dodgers will meet once again in the World Series.
From Dimaggio to Mantle to Jackson and Robinson to Koufax to Garvey, now Aaron Judge and Juan Soto and Carlos Rodon will square off against Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Mookie Betts.
I’m 44 now, with a son of my own. That record is probably somewhere in my parents’ house, but I don’t need it. Before Game 1, I’ll show him some clips on YouTube, hoping that a seven-year-old can grasp the magnitude of this matchup.
Perhaps one day, years down the road, he’ll be talking about it with his son, how one of baseball’s greatest postseason rivalries drew him into fandom for life.
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WBN MLB: https://worldbaseball.com/league/mlb/
Photo Credit: Baseball World Series 1947. Bronx, New York, New York: Crowd scenes at Yankee Stadium during first game of the World Series between the NY Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers.
