Dodgers usurp Yankees as baseball’s vogue behemoth

Put to bed all that talk of illegitimate titles. Retire those narratives of autumnal impotence. Draw a line under the accusations of October frailty.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are the paragon franchise of Major League Baseball – world champions in name, standard bearers in nature, unparalleled monolith in contemporary mystique.

Finally, they have the full-season World Series title to validate a decade of caveated dominance. Finally, they showed the guts and resilience to match their obvious talent. Finally, they are on top of the baseball world, a theoretical powerhouse brought to life.

For the best part of a century, the Dodgers defined themselves in relation to the New York Yankees. From Dem Bums of Brooklyn, cast eternally in the pinstriped shadow of mighty Manhattan, to the lords of Los Angeles, nascent pretenders to the Goliath crown – there was always an inferiority complex, always a gnawing sense of jealous inadequacy.

Not anymore.

Five times in 12 years, between 1941 and 1953, the underdog Dodgers lost to the impervious Yankees in the World Series. Brooklyn had its day in 1955, only for the Bombers to win three of their next five October jousts with the Dodgers, who traded Flatbush for Hollywood. All told, entering the 2024 contest, those damned Yankees had an 8-3 record against the Dodgers in Fall Classic play – a 72% win rate that felt much larger.

Yet even beneath those ominous numbers, there was a persistent sense of envy from the Dodgers towards the Yankees. With the huge stadium, massive fanbase and star-studded roster, Los Angeles always had the potential to challenge New York as the definitive juggernaut of MLB, but it never quite materialised. Something always got in the way, be it Rupert Murdoch, Frank McCourt or ignominious bankruptcy. The Dodgers’ latent potential never came to pass. It always remained a figment of romantic imagination.

Mark Walter and friends yearned to change that, under the auspices of Guggenheim Baseball Management. They purchased the team for $2.15 billion in 2012, and resolved to realise that signature Dodgers potential by investing heavily in world class talent – on the field and in the front office. The Yankees loomed as a template and a target, their money-printing brand destined to be surpassed.

A monstrous $8.35 billion television deal fuelled that Dodger vision, and the arrival of Andrew Friedman as president of baseball operations gave direction to the moonshot project. Yet still, the Dodgers struggled to break through. Still, they remained a heavyweight bully with an Achilles heel. Still, they won, but never when it mattered most. Theirs was a peculiar blend of dominance and deficiency.

Entering 2024, indeed, their 11 straight playoff appearances had yielded three pennants and one dubious short-season, mask-smothered World Series. Nobody thought that title was real, and 36 years without a full-season championship remained a millstone around the Dodgers’ neck. Then, they quit playing around. Then, they went all-in. Then, they went intergalactic, and redrew the boundaries of modern baseball ambition.

In came Shohei Ohtani, for $700 million. In came Yoshinobu Yamamoto, for $325 million. Together came a core, orbiting Hall of Famers named Betts, Freeman and Kershaw. Expectations became demands, and those demands became vociferous. The 2024 Dodgers then won 98 games, despite abundant injuries, before weaving through the playoffs to hoist another pennant. Their prize? A World Series date with the Yankees – the ultimate chance to verify their ascendance.

A thousand hyperbolic previews were written ahead of the classic joust. Judge vs Ohtani. New York vs Los Angeles. East vs west. In practice, the Dodgers were favourites, but historically, they still had that complex to overcome. They still had to prove they were better than the Yankees – purveyors of their own incongruous 15-year title drought. They still had to realise that long promised potential.

Boy, did they ever.

In the end, it was a mismatch. Even with Ohtani hurt, and even with a frayed pitching staff stretched to the max, the Dodgers won in five games. Some of those games were close, and the Yankees showed a fatal penchant for self-capitulation, but Los Angeles was better in every facet of the game – attention to detail and sharp fundamentals underpinning its supremacy.

And when Walker Buehler threw a 78-mph knuckle-curve past a flailing Alex Verdugo, at 11:50pm ET on Wednesday 30 October 2024, the Dodgers clinched their crowning glory. But more than winning a mere game, a single series or a solitary title, they finally fulfilled that vexing potential. They finally overtook the Yankees as baseball’s vogue behemoth. They finally scaled the mountain, leaving all other teams in their wake.

“All ballplayers want to wind up their careers with the Cubs, Giants or Yankees,” Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean once said. “They just can’t help it.” Well, add the Dodgers to that list, Dizzy – right at the very top. There is no greater destination for a ballplayer right now, nor for the foreseeable future. The Dodgers are a magnet for the biggest and the best. Yankee hegemony is dead.

We saw it with Ohtani, Yamamoto and Freeman. We saw it with Betts, Glasnow and Friedman. We even saw it with Pujols and Machado, Darvish and Scherzer – all generational superstars, all fleeting Dodgers. Chavez Ravine is the place to be. The Guggenheim dollar is worth more than the Steinbrenner equivalent. Only the Dodgers are genuinely committed to perennial dominance; the Yankees just use that notion as a vacuous marketing ploy.

Yes, the pinstripers finally won a pennant and returned to the World Series for the first time since 2009. Sure, in Aaron Judge, they once again have The Face of Baseball. But the Yankees ultimately lost that Fall Classic, in humiliating fashion, to the team that coveted their unsurpassed aura. They ultimately surrendered their perch as the cultural colossus of MLB.

The last time the Yankees lost to the Dodgers in the World Series, in 1981, George Steinbrenner, the immortal team owner, issued a written apology to the people of New York. That is how much the Yankees once demanded success. This time? Excuses, excuses, excuses – from the top on down, trying to sugar-coat a disingenuous run through October that finally highlighted the Yankees’ many flaws.

But those recriminations are for another day, another team, another postmortem. This is the Dodgers’ time to shine, for they no longer rule in lyrical absentia, nor in poetic promise – a burgeoning dynamo waiting for the stars to align. The stars have aligned, and right now, in baseball, there is no greater team, no greater town, no greater target. The Dodgers are it, and they will be for a long time. The inferiority complex lurks elsewhere.