World Series 2024: Why Ohtani vs. Judge is a dream matchup

WHATEVER FINALLY BROUGHT Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge together, be it fate or kismet or financial might or a lucky draw or some combination therein, understands the power of delayed gratification. For the past seven years, Ohtani and Judge have existed in the same baseball universe, dominating their peers wholly and incontrovertibly — trains moving faster than everyone, only set on parallel tracks. Never, for anything meaningful, did their paths converge. Neither had reached the biggest stage, together or individually. They were monoliths. Their greatness lived in realms of their own.

What if, though? It was always the optimistic question. What if, at some point in this game that so often makes no sense, everything aligned with purpose? What if Ohtani joined a team worthy of his excellence, and what if Judge’s failures of Octobers past receded, and what if these two men who have bent a sport to their will finally met for something more meaningful than awards or records?

Each owns plenty of hardware. Judge has won one MVP award, is about to win another, made six All-Star teams, collected three Silver Sluggers and was Rookie of the Year. Ohtani’s résumé is nearly a carbon copy: two MVPs with a third on the way, four All-Star Games, two Silver Sluggers and a Rookie of the Year plaque. Ohtani and Judge have coexisted in the same way as light and darkness, silence and noise, truth and lies: They are here, undeniable, grand forces of nature, but never together.

Now they are united at last, a blessing of synchronicity. It feels almost miraculous to find a moment like this, when the two men who, more than any, have evolved the sport to a new place face off with one another for the only prize that matters.

We have no idea what kind of baseball is in store in the World Series that begins Friday between the Dodgers and Yankees, between Los Angeles and New York, between Ohtani and Judge. In no way should that diminish the excitement. The matchup takes something already special — the first time in 41 years that the Dodgers and Yankees, the two most famous franchises in the sport, battle for a championship — and infuses it with jet fuel. As much of a turn-off as the pairing of two financial behemoths that regularly carry payrolls in the $300 million range might be to all of the fans whose organizations refuse to spend half that, now is not the time to lament baseball’s inequity. This is a rare gift of two historically unique talents.

Until Judge arrived, no man who stood at least 6-foot-7 and weighed more than 280 pounds had taken a single major league at-bat. Until Ohtani came from Japan, no MLB player since Babe Ruth nearly a century earlier had attempted to pitch and hit full time simultaneously, let alone done so with aplomb. These are imaginary beings manifested as men.

Because the ulnar collateral ligament in Ohtani’s right elbow failed for a second time, he will not stand 60 feet, 6 inches from Judge, ball in hand, specimen against specimen. But Ohtani and Judge will share the same field, breathe the same air, play in the same games, strive for the same goal, and for now, that is plenty.

This World Series will mark the first time ever that opposing players coming off 50-home run regular seasons face one another. The first time home run champions from the American and National League clashed since Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider in 1956. The first time players with at least nine wins above replacement squared off in a World Series since Ted Williams and Stan Musial in 1946.

Opportunities like this come along only every so often for baseball. The how and the why can be left to the cosmic, the unknowable. All that matters, really, is that they are here.

OHTANI’S PATH BEGAN more than 5,000 miles away from Dodger Stadium. For years, he was Japan’s secret, its treasure. Maybe the best pitcher in the world — and he could hit. As Ohtani prepared to leave Nippon Professional Baseball after the 2017 season and join MLB, big league scouts weren’t convinced he could do both. They were wrong. From the right arm whirling around his 6-4, 230-pound frame, Ohtani thrust balls with uncommon speed and spin. And not only could he hit, he did so like few others. The ball soared off his bat as if propelled by gunpowder. Before his arrival in MLB, only two players could generate batted balls like Ohtani. One was named Giancarlo Stanton, and he won the NL MVP award in 2017. The other was the AL Rookie of the Year that season: Aaron Judge.

When Ohtani signed with the Los Angeles Angels, the baseball industry cocked a collective eyebrow. The Angels were backbenchers in Southern California, terminally misrun. The skepticism was proved well-founded: Ohtani spent six seasons in Orange County and played for teams that went a combined 401-469, finished in fourth place in the AL West five times and never made the postseason. For a team to pair Ohtani with Mike Trout for more than half a decade and never muster a winning record takes festering institutional rot.

Relevance awaited 30 miles north. When Ohtani reached free agency last winter, the Dodgers pulled out every stop to convince him to abscond Anaheim for L.A., including a video the late Kobe Bryant had recorded when the Dodgers tried to sign Ohtani in December 2017.

The Dodgers, admired by players for their generous payrolls, made a pitch to Ohtani that went beyond money (though they were fully amenable to his request: 10 years, $700 million, with $680 million of it deferred, 65% more guaranteed dollars than baseball’s previous record deal, the $426.5 million extension Trout signed in 2019). The organization shares Ohtani’s obsessiveness with the game. The Dodgers promised he would be surrounded by like-minded people on the hitting and pitching sides, ones who spend as much time thinking about baseball as Ohtani does.

They welcomed his curiosity and whetted his appetite for knowledge. He could take batting practice off the Trajekt pitching machine that can replicate every major league pitch thrown this season. He could hone his swing with HitTrax, another piece of tech that measures batted-ball profiles. He could work with a medical staff that mapped out a plan for him to rehabilitate his elbow while chasing history.

Beyond that, the Dodgers planned to tap into something the Angels never fully could: the power of Ohtani in Japan. He is baseball’s biggest star in at least a generation, maybe longer. His reach extends across oceans. If in his time with the Angels he managed to establish himself as inimitable in the same way as Ronaldo and Messi, LeBron and Steph, Brady and Mahomes, continuing with the Dodgers would exponentially increase the size of his stage.

More than that, they were winners, something Ohtani had been starved for in Anaheim. The Dodgers had captured the NL West title 10 of the past 11 years. Their success is a foundational element of the franchise, which will make its 22nd World Series appearance this week.

Ohtani chose the Dodgers on Dec. 9, spent spring training weathering all of the attention that came with the marriage of iconic player and organization and navigated the delicate dance of integrating into a clubhouse full of set-in-their-ways veterans while bringing with him the eyeballs of a country of 125 million people.

“You would never guess he’s Japanese Justin Bieber,” Dodgers pitcher Tyler Glasnow said. “He’s got a very young soul. He seems very innocent.”

Following Ohtani’s first game as a Dodger, everything changed. After inquiries from an ESPN reporter about a multimillion-dollar gambling debt, Ohtani’s interpreter and closest friend, Ippei Mizuhara, stood in front of the team and said he had an addiction. Based on information provided by Mizuhara, Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman told the team Ohtani had helped cover the losses.

The story didn’t add up to Ohtani, who speaks and understands English but not fluently. Hours later, the Dodgers fired Mizuhara, who later would admit in court to stealing nearly $17 million from a bank account of Ohtani’s to which he had access. Questions about Ohtani’s involvement — which were answered in a federal complaint that point-by-point laid out the case against Mizuhara — nonetheless hung over the Dodgers. Mizuhara’s guilty plea to bank fraud and tax fraud in June, carrying a sentence of up to 33 years, did little to satisfy the conspiracy theorists convinced he was protecting Ohtani.

All the while, Ohtani kept hitting. He entered June with 14 home runs and an OPS of nearly 1.000, and he proceeded to hit a dozen home runs that month. He added 12 stolen bases in July, then followed by homering another 12 times and swiping 15 more bags in August. When September arrived, the specter of Ohtani becoming the first player to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases in a season looked possible. He reached both marks Sept. 18 in arguably the greatest individual game in baseball history: 6-for-6 with three home runs, 10 RBIs and two stolen bases. The 50^th home run ball sold at auction for $4.392 million on Wednesday.

Ohtani didn’t stop at 50/50. A day later, he hit his 51st homer, and two days after that, out went No. 52, a colossal shot on a 92-mph fastball from Colorado starter Kyle Freeland that was above the strike zone and on the inner third of the plate — a seemingly impossible pitch to hit where he did (slightly to the left of center field) and how hard he did (110 mph).

“Going backside in Dodger Stadium is not easy,” Dodgers Game 1 starter Jack Flaherty said. “Left-center off a lefty? Really not easy. Do it on that pitch, up and in, and hit it as far as he did on a pitch that’s a ball? Damn.”

Ohtani ended his age-30 season with 54 home runs and 59 stolen bases for the team with the best record in baseball — the essential validation for his free agency decision. What the Dodgers sold him on — that they would help make Ohtani the best version of himself — came true.

“What was so surprising for me is no matter how he’s doing, good or bad, he’s the same,” Glasnow said. “Every single person I’ve played with has ups and downs. You can tell when things are going well. It helped that he was having a dominant season, but he never seems too overwhelmed.

“People who get too consumed with it — it adds more stress. He doesn’t seem to carry it with him. It doesn’t seem like he’s overly stressed out ever.”

October offered the potential for that. And just like in April, when Ohtani answered questions about his ability to withstand scrutiny, he displayed rare imperviousness. Ohtani homered in his second playoff at-bat. He reached base 17 times in the NLCS, a Dodgers postseason-series record. He continued a laughable jag dating back to the regular season in which he hit safely in 18 of his last 23 at-bats with runners on base.

And somehow none of it seemed altogether absurd. Because this is who Ohtani is. Impossible is a goal, inconceivable an aspiration. It is the rarest quality in sports. And there’s only one other player in baseball right now who can come close to matching it.

JUDGE’S PATH BEGAN nearly 3,000 miles from Yankee Stadium. He was the 32nd pick in the first round of the 2013 draft, a Fresno State outfielder whose size and the lack of comparable players concerned most teams. New York considered this a feature, not a bug. No franchise understands the value of a star like the Yankees, and they gladly went big, appreciating the boom-or-bust nature of prospects with tools like Judge’s.

He arrived in the Bronx on Aug. 13, 2016, batting eighth for a Yankees team barely over .500. On the fourth major league pitch he saw, Judge hit a towering home run to center field, one of two hits that day. He homered the next day, followed that with two more hits and added another pair in his fifth game. For the previous 2½ seasons, Judge had tantalized the Yankees with his raw talent. What they saw in the first five games of his major league career went a long way to justifying their excitement.

That he followed the early slice of substantiation with the worst slump of his career — in Judge’s final 22 games that year, he hit .121/.213/.227 with 36 strikeouts in 66 at-bats — did not disillusion the Yankees. They believed in the person, the work, as much as they did the player.

Even so, what Judge did in his first full season — .284/.422/.627 with 52 home runs, 114 RBIs and a league-leading 128 runs, 127 walks and 208 strikeouts — dwarfed expectations. Greatness in baseball scarcely reveals itself so quickly. When it does, its trappings can ensnare even the most careful. Never did Judge find himself caught. He was big and moved in gorgeous fashion, his swing honed over thousands of hours, his twitchiness typically seen in men 6 inches shorter and 80 pounds lighter. When he played, he thrived. And though injuries ate at chunks of his next three seasons, Judge always produced when healthy, settling into a position held by few: a true, undeniable New York sports star.

“Judgy’s just such a consistent person,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “You can’t hide that or fake that. That’s what’s so impressive about him. You can’t tell if he is flying high, which he normally is, or if he’s 2-for-14, striking out for a few days.”

Judge understood the duties of serving as the heir to Derek Jeter, the longtime Yankees captain who retired in 2014: accountability above all. To the team. To the fans. To himself. Baseball is a cannibal of a sport, capable of eating at the psyches of even the most gifted players. Judge could not succumb to its vagaries, and he didn’t, and over time Boone’s awe morphed into admiration. He trusted Judge, still green by baseball standards, for wisdom and input.

“Over the years, I’ve brought him in more,” Boone said. “I’ll ask his opinion on something I’m thinking about with the team. But I love it when he stops by my office after a game. He’ll just pop in late, an hour after a game, and just check in. Maybe it was a big win or something. And he’ll say, ‘Good stuff, skip. Hey, how’s everyone doing? How are we looking?'”

When something goes wrong, on the field or otherwise, Judge will give Boone a knowing glance, ball up his fist and tap himself on the chest, as if to say: That’s on me. And as much as Judge understands his apologies won’t be accepted — “More often than not,” Boone said, “I’m just like: ‘Stop it’ ” — he still takes it upon himself to offer them. If things are really going sideways, Judge will forgo the sign language for verbal affirmation.

On July 24, 2022, about two months before he would hit his 62nd home run and break the single-season AL home run record Roger Maris had held for more than six decades, Judge struck out in his first at-bat against Baltimore right-hander Dean Kremer on a curveball that nearly hit the ground. He returned to the dugout, looked at Boone and said: “I got you.” In his next at-bat, Judge hit a Kremer curve 456 feet. As he rounded third, he extended his index finger and pointed at Boone in the dugout.

For all of Judge’s brilliance that season, he went 1-for-16 as the Houston Astros swept the Yankees in the ALCS. They had lost the previous year in the wild-card game to Boston. And in the 2020 division series to Tampa. And the season prior to the Astros in the ALCS. And before that to the Red Sox in the division series. And in his first postseason, his rookie year, when three home runs and seven RBIs weren’t enough to oust an Astros team later punished for sign-stealing that extended into October. As much credit as Judge is due for his regular-season radiance, the lack of a World Series appearance until now was an indelible dark spot.

“It eats at me every time we don’t finish the job,” Judge said. “I take a lot of responsibility for that, being on the team, and if we don’t win it all, I feel like it’s my fault.”

The Yankees re-signed Judge to a nine-year, $360 million contract in December 2022, thwarting the San Francisco Giants’ attempt to lure him back to California. New York proceeded to miss the postseason in Judge’s first year of the deal, and the organization, keenly aware of the need to surround him with better players, acquired star right fielder Juan Soto in a trade. Fourteen consecutive seasons without a World Series appearance conferred a particular sense of urgency on the Yankees, as did the acknowledgement that at 32 years old, Judge’s best years might be behind him.

April stoked such fears. Batting just .179 with two home runs 21 games into the season, Judge was booed at Yankee Stadium. Judge didn’t begrudge them. With his contract came the Yankees’ captaincy and its responsibilities. Even the most productive hitter in the world can slump, and New York offers no mercy.

“There’s been a lot of legends that played here that have been booed,” Judge said. “It’s just part of it. You can’t focus on that. You’ve got to go out there. They want to see you win. They want to see you do well. You’ve just got to focus on what you can control. What I can control is what I do in the box and what I do on the field.”

When Judge talks about his process or taking things one at-bat at a time or creating a plan and needing to execute on it or controlling what he can control, the words are neither idle nor trite. He homered 14 times in May. He hit .409 and drove in 37 runs in June. He added another dozen home runs in August. He fell off slightly in September and still managed an OPS over 1.000 for the month. Though Judge’s 58 home runs fell short of his record, his best all-around season yet helped the Yankees improve by a dozen games over 2023. New York captured the top seed in the AL, toppled Kansas City in the division series, bounced Cleveland in the ALCS and booked the ticket to its 41st World Series and Judge’s first.

All of it came with Judge still not performing like himself in the postseason. He finished the division series 2-for-13 and the ALCS 3-for-18, far from the sort of production expected of Judge by his team and himself. But as when his cold spring gave way to a blistering summer, Judge heats up fast. And if the Yankees can make it to the World Series without him hitting, imagine what they’ll look like if he does.

NOW THEY MEET, the superstars who weren’t supposed to be what they are because how could anybody be that, at the intersection of unspeakable talent and fanatical work? If Ohtani and Judge were on expansion teams, it would be a championship bout compelling enough to watch. Add in the backdrop — the 11 previous World Series between the franchises, the two biggest cities in America, the two best records in MLB — and it’s challenging to envision a World Series that appeals more to the masses.

MLB’s expanded postseason has reduced even further the likelihood that the best team in each league would play in the World Series, which is why this feels so special. These aren’t wild cards that got hot at the right time. They’re very good baseball teams with truly great players. The parade of stars beyond Ohtani and Judge — Juan Soto, Mookie Betts, Giancarlo Stanton, Freddie Freeman, Gerrit Cole — bolsters the argument in favor of this being a World Series for the most casual of fans.

If you love baseball — hell, if you just like it — this series is a privilege in the same way it was the last time we saw Ohtani playing meaningful baseball. That was March 2023, when the Japanese national team he captained opposed Team USA in the finals of the World Baseball Classic. (Judge declined joining Team USA to focus on his goals in New York.) With Japan leading by one run, Ohtani came on to pitch the ninth. He secured two outs, and up stepped Trout, the only other person who understood on his level what it meant to play for the Angels. To be that best version of himself, Ohtani needed these sorts of moments, challenges, stakes. On a 3-2 pitch, he threw a vicious sweeper that crossed all 18 inches of the plate and more. Trout swung through it. Ohtani exulted.

No one in the United States had seen that side of him. At 21, he won the Japan Series with the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, and it left him hungry. By the end of last season, Ohtani was famished. If baseball is a game he’s trying to solve bit-by-bit, a championship run in the world’s best league might as well be the final boss. And it’s the one area in which Ohtani allows himself leeway for the moment to penetrate his rhinoceros skin. This, to Ohtani, isn’t simply important. It’s everything.

“Playing a regular-season game and playing a playoff game is different,” Ohtani said. “And I think a lot of players end up showing their emotions. So I feel like I’m part of that.”

Judge is not, though he sees the stakes as no less do-or-die than Ohtani does. Stoicism is Judge’s superpower, and to change that now, because he is four wins from his first ring, would be a betrayal of self. Discipline got Judge here, and he refuses to cave to the notion that October contrasts with September or August or July in any meaningful way.

“All I’m doing is trying to treat it just like the regular season,” Judge said, “go out there and whatever the situation calls for, go out there and do it and help the team win a game.”

At the end of this series, one of baseball’s two titans is going to win four games and his first championship, gilding his legacy. The other will skulk away, heartbroken, wondering where it went wrong, lamenting what he could have done. It doesn’t matter that their pitching staffs are both stretched thin, that the grind of a 162-game season is compounded by an October where every pitch matters. The way Ohtani and Judge’s minds work, they could bat 1.000, and if they lose, they still won’t have done enough.

And that’s what makes this all so damn good. At 8:08 p.m. ET on Friday, inside a packed Dodger Stadium, seven years in the making arrives. The delay ends. The gratification beckons. Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge, each one of one yet still in so many ways the same, ushering in something only they can. An epic for a new epoch.