NEW YORK — Never before has a World Series mattered to so many people. As ribbons of gold shimmered down upon the champion Los Angeles Dodgers, the joy of it all reverberated far, far beyond the makeshift stage hastily assembled in the Yankee Stadium outfield. In the audience below the celebratory platform, tears spilled free and easy down the proud faces of loved ones decked out in blue.
In the stands behind the visiting dugout, scores of traveling fans like the ones who followed this team on the road all season serenaded the strangers whom they do not know yet care about so deeply. Back in Los Angeles: , an illuminated blue D in the Hollywood sign, a symphony of car horns and more flowers laid outside Chavez Ravine in honor of Fernando Valenzuela. Friday, , will feature .
And across the Pacific, at a lunchtime watch party at Shohei Ohtani’s high school, students stood and cheered, banging together thunder sticks in honor of their most famous alumni. The scale and scope of this title, which the Dodgers secured with a preposterous , cannot be overstated. This organization is a behemoth, a monstrosity, imposing in both size and strength.
The Dodgers boast resources few other teams can match, as evidenced by their outrageous spending spree last winter, when they committed more than $1.15 billion to Ohtani plus a pair of right-handed hurlers, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow. Yet for most of the past decade, the Dodgers have dominated during the summers and disappointed .
