The Dodgers' makeshift "Big Two" (Jack Flaherty and Yoshinobu Yamamoto) did well enough in tandem...and bolstered by continuing home run heroics, those Boys in Blue leave Dodger Stadium up 2-0 as the 2024 World Series--the first pitting baseball's two most storied franchises since 1981--moves to the Bronx tonight.
And that puts the Yankees into a sizable hole. The question that needs asking/answering is: just how sizable is it, and what does past history tell us about teams that go 0-2 on the road at the outset of the Fall Classic? (That's outset, not onset--though the onset of gopheritis certainly put a pox on the left arms of Nestor Cortes and Carlos Rodon...)
This takes us all the way back to 1907, when the Chicago Cubs first throttled their opponents twice at home (those luckless Detroit Tigers, still the only team in baseball history to lose three World Series in a row).
As you'll see, it took the fifteenth time this this happened for a team that went 0-2 on the road to start a World Series (the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers) to actually prevail at the end. Oddly, that occurrence set off a little chain of counterintuitive repetitions: four more consecutive instances of defying the norm (1956 to 1971), followed by a series of stutter-steps into the mid-80s, before finally settling back into a "groove of orthodoxy" in 1987 in which we are still enmeshed.
THAT's sixteen straight times where the team going 2-0 at home goes on to win the Series, with the majority of them (11) resulting in sweeps (aka "the big 4-0") or a five-game romp (4-1).
All in all, teams that take advantage of the home field advantage in the World Series wind up winning those series in more than 80% of the cases.
AND that is what the Yankees find themselves up against as they take the field tonight, with Aaron Judge still reeling in the kryptonite of the post-season, and the unheralded Clarke Schmidt taking the mound for a team that needs Judge (and the bottom part of its batting order) to show something resembling a pulse before it's time for the body bag.
Of course, the Dodgers have blown 2-0 home advantages before (think 1956 and 1978), but they pulled their own Houdini act in this regard in 1981, the last time these teams met. If the Yankees could somehow get things in gear to do so in 2024, that would make three consecutive times that the teams have traded such counterintuitive outcomes between themselves--a record that Jayson Stark (aka baseball's "Mr. Unique) would clasp to his bosom with devilish glee.
A World Series with real drama is what we want, of course--because obviously we are starved for it in real life. (Insert your favorite rude noise here.) But seriously, a seventh game is the only type of Armageddon that we can sit back and enjoy, and we really need that given the specter of doom that has encircled the land of the free (for now...) and the home of the formerly brave (looking at you, Jeff "Bozo" Bezos) at this late date in latter-day tomfoolery.
SO...root for that seventh game already. It may be all we get in this uniquely felonious fall...
