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Almost as soon as the Dodgers eliminated themselves from the NLCS the other night, the Great Reminder was sent up into the social media ether. With L.A. removed from the picture, we were again assured of no repeat World Series champion.
The cool thing is that, no matter how often this happens, and it happens a lot, it is still treated as news. Maybe it falls within the same general realm as the Miami Dolphins’ perfect season of 1972, which no NFL team has ever matched and which gets referenced almost any time a team gets off to a scorching start. In fact, it really might be a similar sort of reckoning, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment; but either way, it feels like something that needs acknowledging.
So is the era of repeat champs in MLB really over?
Listen, you’d first have to establish that it ever existed.
Oh: the Yankees. You know all about them. They won and won and won and won. They won four World Series titles in a row and six of eight overall between 1936 and 1943. They won five straight between ‘49 and ‘53, and they just generally dunked on everybody’s head (wrong sport, I know) for what seemed forever.
Those days make for baseball memories and baseball history, and they also have the distinction of holding virtually nothing in common with the game in the 2000s, with the possible exception of bad umpires still never being replaced when they should be. Fittingly, the last World Series repeat champions were the Yankees (Jeter edition), who won in 1998 and ‘99 and again in 2000. They’d have made it four straight but for the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001: seven games, Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson, Luis Gonzalez over Mariano Rivera for the win. They were good, those Yankees teams, and they were rich, and that’s what you got back then when you were good and rich — but you still didn’t win everything all the time.
Since then, bupkis. These days, it’s difficult to construct a strong argument in favor of dynasties. There are always franchises going well and franchises in the dumpster, but in terms of sustained championship mettle, repeating at the top is very unusual — highly unusual, even. It should be celebrated rather than expected or anticipated. George Steinbrenner owned the Yankees for 38 years and achieved seven World Series titles, but the franchise also endured a stretch of 13 straight seasons without so much as a playoff appearance — and Steinbrenner outspent everybody.
This all is not to say that teams no longer dominate the landscape. They do, and that’ll never change. Since 2000, it’s true that no one has won two Series in a row, but it is also true that three teams account for nine of the 20 championships during that span. The Red Sox, whose fans made a religion of their suffering over failed attempts at glory, have won FOUR times in the 2000s. The Giants won in 2010, 2012 and 2014. The Cardinals won it all twice. Now, Houston has a chance to win twice while making its third World Series appearance in five seasons. (I know: It was a cheat-fest, it never should’ve counted, every wretched one of them should be ashamed, etc.)
Heck, the Dodgers have invented multiple ways to break their fans’ hearts lately, but not only did they hoist the hardware in the pandemic-shortened run of 2020, they also made the World Series three times in four years. I don’t care how much you spend, that’s hard to do. It is not exactly dominance, because they don’t have the rings that their records suggest they should. But it is sustained excellence of an elite order.
Back to the Miami Dolphins for a moment. Yes, the Dolphins did absolutely have a perfect campaign in the 1972 season, and they had Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick and Paul Warfield and Nick Buoniconti and Jake Scott and all those guys. Here’s what is different about that time versus now: everything. The NFL wasn’t striving for parity back then. Salary caps did not exist. The Dolphins played 14 regular-season games, not 16 or 17. We could go on. The point isn’t to diminish what Miami did, which is incredible, but to note how inherently difficult it is now to mimic that sort of run.
So all hail anyone, in any sport, who can get it done even twice in a row. It’s rare. Before New York controlled the baseball world in ‘98, ‘99 and ‘00, there were the Toronto Blue Jays, who won the World Series in 1992 and again in ‘93. Beyond Toronto, you have to go back to the 1970s to find repeat Series champions. Nothing bad happened the other night in Atlanta; the Dodgers simply took their place in history. They got up the mountain once. Once sounds about right.
Wildly entertaining perspective…and, spot on, mate!