Top 5 Reasons This World Series is Special | BrandStack Podcast - 003

The transcript below was provided by Substack and cleaned up by ChatGPT.

Hey Gang,

The World Series is about to get started, and I wanted to share an interview I did with a legendary player who wore both the Yankees and Dodgers uniforms and pitched in the last three World Series between the two teams. Does anybody know who that player might be? We'll come back to that in just a few minutes.

But first, I wanted to share why I think this World Series is so special and why there's so much interest in the series between the Yankees and the Dodgers.

Number one, it's got massive star power. The MVPs and best players in each league are in it: Aaron Judge of the Yankees, Shohei Otani of the Dodgers. You've also got other stars like Juan Soto and Garrett Cole on the Yankees' side, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman on the Dodgers' side, although Freeman isn't in top form right now. These are among the biggest names in the game. It's going to be exciting to have all these stars under the bright lights.

Number two, it's the two best teams in baseball. The Dodgers and Yankees both finished with the best record in their league during the regular season. Nothing that happened during the playoffs changed the perception that these are the two best teams, and we've got a matchup of the best of the best.

Number three, it's New York and L.A. You're talking about the two biggest media markets in the U.S., so the hype and the media attention is going to be massive, and the TV audience should be much bigger than usual for a World Series.

Number four, it's a storied rivalry. Great tradition and history, going back to when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn and the two teams would meet in the Subway Series, the World Series, as it was called when two New York teams were playing. You're talking, again, about some of the greatest players in the history of the game: Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax—although Koufax was more so in the 60s after the move to L.A. There's only been one perfect game in the entire World Series, and that was Don Larsen of the Yankees beating the Dodgers in Game 6 of the 1956 World Series. There's also the famous play where Jackie Robinson steals home off Whitey Ford, and Yogi swore till his final day that he got the tag down and got Robinson out, but he argued to no avail, and Jackie Robinson was safe. That was the 1955 series, the one World Series between the Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, in which the Dodgers broke through and won the series. I believe they were 6-1, the Yankees against the Dodgers in the World Series when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn. The Yankees lead 8-3 overall between the two teams.

And number five, this doesn't happen very often. These two teams haven't met in the World Series in 43 years. The last three times they met—'77, '78, and '81—the Yankees won in '77 and '78, and the Dodgers won in '81. If memory serves me correctly, in both '78 and '81, the team that won the first two games ended up losing the series and losing the next four straight games. Of course, the biggest memory, the greatest memory most people have who were around for those series, was Game 6, 1977, when Reggie Jackson hit three home runs off of three different Dodgers pitchers. Again, the Yankees won in '77 and '78. The Dodgers bounced back and won in 1981.

So I want to bring up an interview that I did. I did this back in 2017 in October, just before the World Series back then. It was with a player who...