Will Leitch, writing for New York Magazine, has an interesting take on this year’s World Series matchup.

For all the story lines surrounding the Yankees-Dodgers World Series that begins on Friday night — the fact that the former NYC rivals are playing in their 11th World Series against each other, more than any other pairing; the fact that they have two of the largest payrolls in baseball and are home to the largest media markets; the fact that fans across America love to hate both teams — I wonder if the most important one for baseball is the concentration of boldface superstars the series contains. Chances are that if you asked someone who doesn’t pay close attention to baseball to name all the active players they know, every name they’d list is playing in this series. You want charismatic breakout stars? The World Series has just about all of them.

It starts, of course, with the two men who are going to win the MVP in their respective leagues this year. Ohtani signed his massive — and still, I’d argue, kinda risky? — $700 million contract with the Dodgers in the offseason despite being unable to pitch this year, and he responded with the best offensive season of his career, becoming the first person to put together a 50-50 season with 54 home runs and 59 stolen bases. He is by far the most popular athlete in baseball and, increasingly, one of the most popular in the world: He’s the 13th-highest-paid athlete on the planet, one of only two baseball players in the top 50, with the vast majority of that income coming from global endorsements. (There are estimates that the Dodgers could end up earning $1 billion from Ohtani’s presence.)

And Ohtani didn’t even have the best season among players in this series. You can make a very strong argument that the Yankees’ Aaron Judge just had the best one for a right-handed hitter in MLB history, smashing 58 homers and driving in a career-high 144 RBIs despite the dearth of other good sluggers in the Yankees’ lineup beyond Juan Soto. Both Ohtani and Judge are titans of the sport, the sort of larger-than-life characters baseball hasn’t had since, really, Griffey. Ohtani is so skilled he almost seems supernatural, and Judge, at six-foot-seven, is one of the tallest players in MLB history and certainly the best tall player. They both tower over every other player in the sport, literally and figuratively, and they are both going for their first-ever World Series title. That they are doing so for the two most well-known franchises only further expands their reach. They’d be famous anywhere. But in New York and Los Angeles, they span to the infinite.

And they’re hardly the only stars in this series. In fact, of the players with the sport’s top-selling jerseys this season, four of the top seven are in this World Series: Ohtani (No. 1), Judge (No. 3), Mookie Betts (No. 4), and Soto (No. 7). (Two other Dodgers, Freddie Freeman at No. 18 and Clayton Kershaw at No. 19, made the top 20.) That is unprecedented and a stark contrast with recent history: Last year’s buzzkill of a Fall Classic featured zero players among the top-ten jersey sellers; there was just one in 2022 and one in 2021. You couldn’t get more stars here if you tried.

I kinda hate that he’s right.