When the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees last met in the World Series in 1981, there was no question which city was top dog. The Yankees had beaten the Dodgers in humiliating fashion in 1977 and 1978 and jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the 1981 Fall Classic . Beyond baseball, New York still held cultural domination.
Despite going broke and struggling with crime, the Big Apple strode atop the world as the city, an electric place where anything could happen. And some New Yorkers loved to mock Los Angeles, from the New Yorker Magazine cover showing L.A.
as a dot from the view of 9th Avenue to Woody Allen dismissing L.A. as a city whose “only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light” (which is, to be fair, a large cultural advantage).
Los Angeles had recently passed Chicago to become America’s second city, but it still felt far behind with its puny skyline, suburban sprawl and relative lack of cultural sophistication. “We were in this very 1970s mindset. Everything car-oriented, smog everywhere,” said Paul Haddad, a Dodgers historian.
Haddad remembers going to Dodgers games, and even if he didn’t bring a radio, he could hear the voice of Vin Scully as he walked through the crowd because so many other fans had their transistors turned on. In a sign of things to come for both cities, however, the Dodgers rebounded from the 2-0 deficit to win the ’81 championship. The two teams are again meeting at Dodger Stadium for the World Series.