World Series!

The best of the best

On the morning after the New York Yankees won their first pennant in fifteen years, I was playing softball in Brooklyn’s Dyker Park. Sunday morning softball is, for me, a mostly nonnegotiable ritual that runs from the beginning of April into November, whenever fall playoffs end. The two Sunday games always begin at nine. I play with joy and a fury that, even with age, hasn’t leaked away. I take hitting only a little less seriously than writing, and I draw no money from it, nor any acclaim. I think, sometimes, I began to earnestly pursue writing because I was never going to be a professional baseball player—one dream, by my teenage years, was clearly gone, and another would have to take its place. But all I ever wanted, from the age of six to fifteen or so, was to play for the New York Yankees, to crack long, parabolic home runs into the night. What else was there? It was difficult to know, as hard as I worked—as much as I willed my body to do more and more in the batting cage—there were limits I could never exceed, that I was not in possession of the hand-eye alchemy to hit a fastball traveling at more than ninety miles an hour. I was, on the balance, above average in whatever local and travel leagues I played in, but that, in relation to the Major Leagues, was like the commuting distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri. I didn’t have it. I was not going to be a star.

Softball would have to do. A softball is larger and easier to hit than a baseball. It doesn’t travel as far when you hit it. There are different kinds. In the league I play in, under modified fast pitch rules—no slow arc and no windmill windups—the ball is a “clincher” and doesn’t pop off the bat like it would in slow pitch. The game is faster and grittier, like baseball, and the rules are largely the same. The competition is high, a large number of ex-baseball players, and the games will, at some point, devolve into shouting at the umpires. I’ve done this myself. On Sunday, while hitting, I screamed at an outfielder who was screaming, already, at the umpire for a pitch that was called a ball that, he thought, was actually a strike. I told him to shut the fuck up and then, for reasons not entirely clear to myself, gave the outfielder the middle finger. Why was I doing this? I wasn’t even that angry. Earlier in the game, I had even hit a home run. Now I was into something. The catcher, who had about three inches and fifty pounds on me—I’m not especially short nor especially thin—came right up to me, readying to fight. My teammate Greg, who was strong enough to nearly break my ankle when we still played tackle football, rushed out of the dugout to ensure the much larger catcher didn’t get going on me. I was writing checks, he aptly put it, that he would have to cash with his own fists.

No one ended up punching anyone. We, the Outlaws, lost both games to a team called Carnage, our six-game winning streak dashed. There are two more games next week, then playoffs. For all my high cultural pursuits, I think about this league a remarkable amount. I take pride in the statistics I’ve amassed. This league, Kings County Softball, spread out across the glass and rock-strewn fields of southern Brooklyn, lumps of dog shit in left, the infields sending balls rocketing into your teeth, blasts of morning sun burning up eyeballs. Slide into second and expect a bloody knee. Last year, I collided with my teammate in the outfield, and my left ring finger never bent normally again. Still, I show up. I love smashing the ball and running as hard as I can.

I’ve been to the championship in that league, but never won. I am like these World Series Yankees, in that way. They haven’t won either.

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I was asked recently if baseball was a “solved” game, the sabermetricians having found a consensus strategy for success. The answer, largely, is yes. Today’s baseball is optimized. Every team does Moneyball, every team has large analytics departments, every team employs Ivy League quants. They all, once the game starts, manage the outcomes in roughly the same way. A starting pitcher will not face a lineup three times. The bullpen is always ready to unload one anonymous triple-digit thrower after another, the game changing over, by the sixth inning, to a clash between men who are, often, famous only to their own families. They unleash pitches at velocities and spin rates that would have been unfathomable twenty years ago. They are trained to exert maximum effort for a brief amount of time and then depart. It has never, ever been harder to hit a baseball, and hitting a baseball itself is already the most challenging thing to do in professional sports. Most baseball players can make three-pointers or throw spirals. Basketball and football players can’t step into the box and make contact with a ninety-nine mile per hour cutter on the outside corner.

Yet the best laid plans can go awry; the optimized bullpen still unravels. That is baseball’s beauty, its ultimate unpredictability. In these Major League playoffs, every team has gassed up its bullpen again and again, and for all the success they’ve found, the hitters have figured out how to break through the wall of triple-digit hurlers. The relief pitchers must pitch every night because no starter will ever come close to pitching a complete game. Called upon again and again, they find their wizardry fading.

As a hitter, this does make me smile. This is why I can’t look away from Juan Soto.

Soto, twenty-six on Friday, a genius of hitting the way Brian Wilson was a genius of pop or Basquiat was a genius of painting. There is no way to teach anyone to hit like Soto, to never swing at a bad pitch, to obliterate whatever good is thrown your way, to know exactly what you want from a pitcher and to go out and get it. Soto is a dandy in the batter’s box, known for his shuffle, his head bobs, his insouciant grin. That elegant, taurine swing, how he flexes and floats—how easy it seems. He arrived in the majors fully-formed as a teenager, like a baseball Athena sprung from Zeus’ skull. As great as Aaron Judge remains, Soto is the hitter you want at bat to save your life. He can never be overwhelmed.

In the 10th inning of game five of the American League Championship Series, Juan Soto came to the plate. The score was tied 2-2 and two runners were on base with two outs. The Yankees were one win away from their first World Series appearance in fifteen years. For a team that has won twenty-seven championships, this stretch feels eternal, and it is made even more frustrating because the Yankees have been quite good otherwise. They’ve posted winning records in every one of those seasons. They’ve been close. Judge himself, so otherworldly, has entered his thirties without playing a single game in the World Series. The Mets, until Saturday night, had been to a World Series more recently than the Yankees. So had the Cleveland Guardians, their opponent. The former Indians.

The Yankees were heavily favored, but every game was extraordinarily close and tense. I can’t recall such a draining five games. The Yankees had managed to hit two home runs off the best relief pitcher in baseball, a terrifying right-hander who had yielded all of five earned runs during the season, and later lost after a player nicknamed Big Christmas crushed a game-tying home run in the bottom of the ninth. They managed to win the following game, which put them on the brink of the World Series. I considered how much time had passed between World Series appearances; in 2009, when the Yankees last made it, I had turned twenty less than a week before game one. I was a college student, younger than every player on the Yankees roster. To celebrate the pennant, I had to go with an older friend to buy beer, since I legally couldn’t do it at the local 711. When I was a child, the Yankees won the World Series all the time. They won it 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000. I assumed, wrongly, this was how life was.

Now I’m older than almost every Yankee player. I take some pride in the fact that the men my own age—the 1989’ers—have been catalysts for this team. Giancarlo Stanton, born a little more than two weeks after me, is the ALCS MVP. Anthony Rizzo, born two months before me, is slapping crucial singles and doubles. The frenetic Tommy Kahnle, one of the key relievers, is less than three months older me. If this team is going to win it all, I can at least claim some generational imprint. The millenials chug onward. Soto, though, has a much longer future in the sport. He is a free agent and will be paid, probably by the Yankees, something north of $600 million. Youth and talent are the ultimate currency.

In that 10th inning, Soto faced a pitcher named Hunter Gaddis. The bearded Gaddis is one of those optimized, anonymous relievers who exist to strike out batters. He is one part of what was, in the regular season, the greatest bullpen in baseball. Gaddis’ best pitch is the slider. Batters do not hit it. But Soto wanted a fastball. He decided he was going to get it, one way or the other. Gaddis threw his sliders, his change ups. Soto fouled them off. That last foul ball, with the count 1-2, Soto hit hard—he was nodding his head. “There’s movement in his brain!” I shouted somewhat incoherently to my good friend, as we watched the game on television. I was trying to communicate what Soto was beginning to understand. Despite two strikes against him, he had the advantage. Gaddis, who dominated so many other hitters, was going to lose to Soto.

He was going to lose because Soto was going to force him, through sheer cunning and will, to throw that fastball.

He was going to lose because he was not a genius.

The Gaddis fastball came at ninety-five miles per hour. It was high and outside, the sort of pitch that doesn’t get hit very far. Most hitters would swing through it or smack it, in desperation, foul. It was not a bad pitch at all.

Soto simply wanted it.

He knew he had hit the home run before I knew. I thought, on the television, it was a high fly carrying somewhere, maybe somewhere great. Cleveland’s center fielder, Lane Thomas, dashed sideways, hoping somehow he would have more room on the field. Up against the wall, he understood. The ball was gone, plopping into the outstretched arms of the fans, and the Yankees had the lead they would never surrender.

Juan Soto had brought them to the World Series.

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The New York Yankees will play the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series. This is the marquee matchup MLB has been dreaming of for the last decade, ever since the Dodgers became a juggernaut and began winning National League pennants. The Yankees, foiled by the Houston Astros and the Tampa Bay Rays, could never get there. New York and Los Angeles, obviously, are the two great media markets, and ratings are expected to be high. Aaron Judge of the Yankees and Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers—the Japanese superstar who pitches and hits, but is merely hitting this year due to injury—make it so the clash has international implications, with two continents tuned in. Between the two teams, there are as many as six future Hall of Famers. It has been decades, really, since teams of this caliber—and of this pedigree—met in the World Series.

This is the first time I’ve been alive for a Yankee-Dodger World Series. Between 1941 and 1981, the two franchises met eleven times in the World Series, which is still a record. As the writer Lincoln Mitchell reminds us, the Yankees have played the Dodgers in the World Series during the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. This is little, perhaps, more American than this. Of those eleven meetings, the Yankees have won eight. Seven of them were played when the Dodgers still resided in Brooklyn.

I was, as a baseball-obsessed Brooklyn kid, raised on Dodgers lore. My mother grew up on Ocean Avenue next to Prospect Park, just a short walk from the Dodgers’ legendary ballpark, Ebbets Field. As a small child, she chipped away at the cornerstone left behind after the ballpark was demolished. The story of Brooklyn, in the twentieth century, cannot be told without the Dodgers. They were the borough’s team, indefatigable losers-turned-indefatigable bridesmaids, assembling, by the 1940s and 50s, some of the best teams in history. The Dodgers reached the World Series in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1953. They lost each and every one of them to the Yankees. This was the team Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier with, that, in any given years, could feature a lineup of Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, and Carl Furillo. The Dodgers were forever tormented by the imperial Yankees of the Bronx—the Yankees, in those years, of Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Whitey Ford.

Finally, in 1955, a 23-year-old pitcher from the town of Witherbee, New York named Johnny Podres took the mound in game seven of the World Series against the Yankees and threw a complete game shutout. The borough exploded. It was the first time a Brooklyn team had ever won a World Series. “Wait ‘til next year” had been the melancholic refrain of Dodgerland. Next year came. With a 19-year-old fireballer from Bensonhurst named Sandy Koufax on the active roster, the future for Brooklyn baseball seemed bright. Koufax was young enough that, after the game seven victory, he drove uptown to attend night classes at Columbia, where he was studying architecture.

Brooklyn only had two more years with its world champion. Ebbets Field was considered outmoded because it had too few parking spaces for the growing number of suburbanites who wanted to drive in and watch the games. It was an aging ballpark, and the new rage would be multipurpose stadiums with artificial grass and ample parking. Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers owner, dreamed of a domed stadium in downtown Brooklyn, where the Barclays Center sits today. Robert Moses, the master builder, wanted the Brooklyn Dodgers to be the crown jewel of Flushing Meadows, in Queens. O’Malley was not interested in Queens. Los Angeles had a better offer for him. There would be a gleaming new ballpark in Chavez Ravine once the locals were evicted. After the 1957 season, O’Malley moved his Dodgers west. At the same time, the New York Giants, who had played in Manhattan for more than a half century, decamped for San Francisco.

The Giants were not central to Manhattan’s identity the way the Dodgers were to Brooklyn’s. When Brooklynites were asked what they would do if they were in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and O’Malley, and only had two bullets in their gun, they answered without hesitation: shoot O’Malley twice. Had I lived in Brooklyn at the time, I am sure I would have felt that way. I am also certain, if the Dodgers had never left Brooklyn, I would have been a Dodgers fan. I root for the Nets on the pretense of them being the borough’s team. My local loyalties run deep.

But let me offer a little bit of sacrilege—it was the right thing, for Major League Baseball, for both the Dodgers and Giants to move. For the game to survive and thrive, it had to head west. For more than fifty years, the Major Leagues had never operated west of St. Louis, and this was not sustainable. The game needed California, which was booming, and the teams would only succeed there if they were stocked with recognizable professionals. The Pacific Coast League, an independent California league that served as something of a high-level minor league circuit, was still quite popular, and there was no guarantee an expansion team in San Francisco, for example, could appeal to fans of the PCL’s San Francisco Seals. It was the Giants of Willie Mays and the Dodgers of Sandy Koufax who would make baseball a true national sport.

The Dodgers, to the chagrin of Brooklynites everywhere, found more success in Los Angeles. Led by Koufax and Don Drysdale, a bull of a right-handed pitcher who had been a very young star in Brooklyn, the Dodgers won the World Series in 1959, 1963, and 1965. In 1963, the Los Angeles Dodgers swept the Yankees, something the Brooklyn team could never do, and Koufax set a World Series record by striking out fifteen batters in a game. He did it at Yankee Stadium, where so many Brooklyn dreams had gone to die. The Yankees, in the next decade, would get their revenge. Reggie Jackson slammed three home runs against the Dodgers to bring the World Series back to the city.

All was not lost for National League baseball in New York. Moses got his way, and a professional team did come to Flushing Meadows. They were called the Mets. Their colors would be blue and orange, a merger of the Giant orange and the Dodger blue. The disaffected fans of the two teams, my father included, would be joined together. He was a Giants fan who became a Mets fan. In 1962, the Mets had their inaugural season, and very infamously lost 120 games. Seven years later, though, they’d be champions, the Miracle Mets. These Dodgers, the Shohei Ohtani Dodgers, just defeated the Mets to reach the World Series. I hope they fail to beat the Yankees. They left Brooklyn, after all, and why not make them suffer a little more for that?