The World Series that opens on Friday night at Chavez Ravine will be the 12th in which the Yankees have faced the Dodgers. Seven of those were played between 1941 and 1956, when the Dodgers were located 20 miles from Yankee Stadium in Brooklyn. This will be the fifth since the Dodgers increased that distance to 2,795 miles by moving to Los Angeles in 1958.
There is complaining that all we get are the huge-spending teams in the no-salary-cap world of baseball, yet this is the first time since 1981 that Yankees vs. Dodgers will be deciding the MLB champion.
I ran across an online site attempting to rate the 11 previous Yankees-Dodgers World Series by drama, and they placed that previous one — the 1981 six-gamer won by L.A. — a meager No. 7 on the list.
This must be vehemently disputed. I could put it below the Yankees’ seven-game win in 1956, since that included Don Larsen’s perfect game for the Yanks. And it definitely goes below the Dodgers’ first title in 1955, when Johnny Podres, just turned 23, beat the Yankees on their home turf, 2-0, in Game 7.
Yet, a personal embrace is required for the 1981 World Series. It was the first one I was assigned to cover as a reporter, among what would become 25 as a representative of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and then what, way back when, was called the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
That series came after perhaps baseball’s zaniest season. The players association went on strike June 12, didn’t settle until the end of July and play resumed after an All-Star Game was held in Cleveland on Aug. 9. The season was split between pre-strike and post-strike, with separate division winners that would advance to MLB’s first-ever eight-team postseason.
The extra postseason series caused the latest start to a World Series in history: Oct. 20, in the second version of Yankee Stadium.
The Dodgers lost the first two in Yankee Stadium, then won the next four. Three L.A. hitters — Ron Cey, Steve Yeager and Pedro Guerrero — shared the Series MVP award. Yet, for the sportswriters covering this coast-to-coast event, the unanimous MVP of the competition was Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.
