A few days ago—after a brutal Mets loss to the Dodgers—I snarked on Mastodon:

A Dodgers/Yankees matchup would be my worst nightmare.

Zero rooting interest. Turn off the television.

Welp, here we are.

Growing up a New York Mets fan, I’m vehemently anti-Yankees. As a San Francisco resident and Giants fan for the last quarter century, I unconditionally detest the Dodgers.

As storied as Yankees/Dodgers World Series matchups have been historically—11 of them going back to 1941, including Don Larsen’s perfect game in 1956 (still the only one pitched), Sandy Koufax’s 15-strikeout complete game in 1963, and Reggie Jackson’s 3-home runs on three consecutive pitches from three different pitchers in 1977—the idea of supporting either team makes me violently ill.

My rooting rules are uncomplicated ^[1] :

• Mets and Giants over anyone
• Eastern/Western Divisions over the others
• National League over American League
• Anyone over Yankees/Dodgers

Yes, that sometimes meant rooting for a Central Division or American League team if they were up against the Yankees or Dodgers, but it was always worth it. Nothing was more important than those two teams losing.

But facing each other? Sometimes the rules, much like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, result in an untenable situation which, if left unresolved, may end with a catastrophic core meltdown.

So my solution is easy: Don’t watch the games.

I’m probably not the only one.

Sure, some won’t watch because this is a “coastal elites” match up of Evil New York against Hollywood Los Angeles, both with their big money, big name players—the middle of the country naturally roots against both as easily as I do—there’s a bigger reason this Series is likely to be ignored by the masses.

Keith Olbermann explains on his mosty-politics-but-somtimes-sports Countdown podcast:

The famous Yankees and Dodgers are actually two of the most disastrously underperforming franchises in sports. If you consider the year 2000 as the last year of the 20th century, the Yankees have won one World Series in this century. Even if you don’t, they’ve won one World Series since 2000. The Dodgers have won one World Series in a full season since 1965.

Nobody cares about these teams because they’ve basically sucked for a generation. On top of that, baseball itself has changed—for the worse—since the turn of the century^[2].

Olbermann again:

The long regular season and the quick playoffs were designed to establish which team was best that year. You played and you played and you played from Spring to Summer into Fall and you beat everybody in your league. And then you faced the team that had played and beaten everybody in their league.

And the result was a Series that was always novel and fresh and exciting and faced pitchers against hitters they’d never seen before.

Today, with Interleague play, “balanced” schedules, the extended Wild Card playoffs, and the National League adoption of the Designated Hitter rule (barf), the regular season is boring, the playoffs are boring, and—because the World Series teams already faced each other during the regular season, as the Yankees and Dodgers did in June—the World Series matchups end up being... boring.

Olbermann, once again:

It is believed about 60 million people watched game 7 of the 1986 World Series^[3] on television.

If 60 million people watch the entirety of this World Series on television, if that’s the total audience for seven games, they will hold two parades afterward: One for the winning team and one for all the TV and advertising executives.

And by the away, if they get sixty million total audience on TV, the ad executives and the TV executives will get drunker than the winning players do.

And his coup de grâce:

We’re just amazed that the two best teams on paper are actually in the World Series, and how did they get there? They beat the wildcard teams.

Winning against the fourth place team. Congrats?