A Yankees-Dodgers World Series will be like old times again

Baseball gets the Yankees vs. the Dodgers back on Friday night in Los Angeles — 43 years after those two teams last met in a World Series and nearly 70 years after the last Subway Series between the Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers in 1956. Don Larsen pitched a perfect game in that ’56 Series and Jackie Robinson played his last game. Yogi Berra hit two home runs for the Yankees in Game 7 as the Yankees won it all — a year after the Dodgers had finally done the same against them.

In another time in baseball, when World Series baseball seemed to have taken up permanent residence in New York City, ’56 was the sixth time the two teams had met in the Series in the last 10 years and the seventh time in the ’40s and ’50s going back to 1941. In a sport where the past matters as much as it does, the Yankees and the Dodgers always mattered.

We got the rivalry back in 1963 after the Dodgers were in L.A., with the Dodgers sweeping that one when Sandy Koufax struck out 15 batters in Game 1 and then eight more in Game 4. Then there were the three Yankees-Dodgers Series between 1977 and ’81 before we lost this October rivalry for far too long. Now we do get it back and that matters, because it always mattered as much as it did when people really were taking the subway to get from the Bronx to Brooklyn or going the other way.

I was sitting with Yogi Berra once at his home in New Jersey, and he wanted to talk about the famous picture of him jumping into Larsen’s arms after the last out of the only perfect game ever pitched in the Series, one of the most iconic baseball images of them all.

But before we got there, and more than 30 years after those last October games between his team and the Boys of Summer Dodgers, Yogi said this, out of nowhere.

“You know Jackie was out the year before,” he said.

He was talking about another iconic Series moment, Robinson hooking a slide and being called safe on a steal of home in Game 1 of the ’55 Series, causing the usually mild-mannered No. 8 of the Yankees to promptly lose his mind. The Dodgers actually lost that game, 6-5, but eventually won in seven. It meant that a team affectionately nicknamed Dem Bums by its fans no longer were. That game produced a memorable front page for my paper, The New York Daily News, because of a cartoon from the legendary Willard Mullin accompanied by this headline:

The other day Aaron Boone said this about the Yankees and Dodgers being back in the Series:

“In some ways, I’ve always had that sense being here, there’s an underlying craving for that. Even going back the seven years now that I’ve been here, there’s always been that occasional talk about Yankees and Dodgers. I think it’s great.”

It was always great. And it provides such wonderful context to what is going to happen over the next week and a half. The series has all sorts of both — both home run power and star power — because of the names involved. Two biggest cities. Two best records. All that October history between the two teams when they didn’t have to fly cross-country to play each other, just travel from the Bronx to Brooklyn and back.

And when they did, they gave baseball games and moments to remember. There was DiMaggio, who never showed any emotion on a ballfield, kicking the dirt after Al Gionfriddo robbed him of an extra-base hit in left field in 1947. There was Johnny Podres shutting out the Yankees in Game 7 in ’55, on the day when the Brooklyn Dodgers no longer had to wait ‘till next year. There was Mantle’s first World Series homer, the first of 18 for him, in ‘52.

There was the Dodgers’ Sandy Amoros running a mile to catch Yogi’s shot to left in Game 7 in 1955, or maybe the Brooklyn Dodgers never would have gotten a World Series off the Yankees. You want more history? Joe Torre, a child of Brooklyn who would later manage both the Yankees and Dodgers, was in the stands as a teenager the day Larsen pitched his perfect game.

“That was a time, wasn’t it?” he told me once.

This time is about those times in the ’40s and ’50s. The World Series gets the Yankees and the Dodgers back, at long last. About time.