Why The 2024 Dodgers-Yankees World Series Is The Most Important 30+ Years

More ink will be spilled describing the match-up between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees than more recent World Series pairings. But for many reasons, the 2024 Fall Classic is the most important since cable and satellite television became the standard that households lived by. Here’s why.

Not since 1981 has Major League Baseball had the two titans in the World Series. And coincidentally, it has no not been since the 1950s that the home run leaders in each league are matching up. This year it’s Aaron Judge of the Yankees and Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers. In ’56, the Yankees and Dodgers met in the Fall Classic and it was Mickey Mante and Duke Snider.

While the number of games that the series winds up with will be a key contributor to the average audience, this year’s World Series will be looked at more closely than any other for decades. It comes at a time when ESPN is considering opting out of its national broadcast contract, and FOX and TBS parse the numbers as they near the end of their deals. Along the way, streamers such as Amazon, Apple, and others mull making plays for parts of MLB’s national and local media rights.

Why this one is different takes on a few different forms. Starting in 2004 with the Boston Red Sox, and then in 2016 with the Chicago Cubs, cornerstone historic brands in Major League Baseball ended their longstanding streaks of not winning the World Series. And while Cleveland is still out there they likely will not resonate nationally in the way the Cubs and Red Sox did.

The 2016 World Series between the Cubs and Indians went to a Game 7 and averaged 23.4 million viewers. The 2004 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals averaged 25.5 million viewers. These highwater marks are outliers given the significance of the winning teams at a time when the number of subscribers to linear television was massively higher than it is today in the age of streaming services.

Again, the landscape has dramatically changed since, but you have to go back to 2001 when the Yankees faced off against the Diamondbacks in what is considered one of the greatest World Series matchups of all time to get an average viewership of over 20 million viewers (24.5 million) where the teams were not part of the interest in breaking decades-long futility streaks.

With the 2024 World Series seeing the two biggest markets, in a bicoastal setting, with two of the league’s most storied teams, the data that will come out of this Fall Classic will be critical for measuring what the likely highwater mark will be in this media landscape. It will be used as a barometer to measure everything after during this inflection point of subscribers moving from traditional television to streaming. It will measure brand exposure for advertisers and show what the current max value on investment will be. It will show how far growth can be in international markets, especially Japan. And it will be a World Series that will finally see some of its biggest stars performing on baseball’s biggest stage.

So, the 2024 World Series isn’t just any other World Series. This year – more than any other in decades – it will be the most-important Fall Classic the league and its partners will witness. Buckle in. Play ball.