6 takeaways from Yankees-Dodgers, which might have been the World Series preview

The battle between the teams with the two best records in baseball lived up to the hype throughout an electric weekend in Los Angeles. We’ll have to wait and see how the Yankees and Dodgers play in October to know if this was an actual World Series preview, but the series still showcased a lot of fun moments between two clearly excellent teams.

Both offenses have been hell on opposing pitchers all season. The Yankees and Dodgers lead their respective leagues in scoring. This series was a little like looking into the mirror for both teams.

“They got a lot of good people in that lineup, just like we do,” said Justin Turner, who homered on Saturday for Los Angeles.

That home run accounted for 40 percent of the Dodgers’ offense in the series, in which they were outscored by 16-5.

Both teams grind opposing pitching staffs to the nub with patience, then pounce on the opportunities they get in the strike zone. This weekend was no different. The Yankees tagged Hyun-jin Ryu and Clayton Kershaw with three home runs each, season highs for both.

“It’s really fun to watch a team approach, with really good players. I really like guys from the offensive side of things hunting pitches and having a plan. If you don’t execute, you can get hurt,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “That’s why teams like them, teams like us, get to pens, get starters’ pitch counts up consistently.”

It’s the year of the home run in baseball, and this series was a monument to the feat. The Yankees mashed five home runs in Friday’s series-opening salvo, and home runs accounted for the only scoring in Saturday’s low-scoring thriller.

We went nearly two full games without a run scoring without the benefit of a home run, from the eighth inning Friday to the eighth inning Sunday.

The Yankees are second in the majors with 241 home runs, and the Dodgers are third at 227. Both are on pace to pass the major league record for home runs in a season (267) set by the Yankees in 2018.

August has been particularly powerful for the Yankees, whose 61 home runs are a major league record for a single month ... with five games still remaining.

Aaron Judge, who started his August in a 10-for-55 slump, homered in all three games over the weekend and is hitting .364 (12-for-33) with seven extra-base hits in his last eight games.

Entering the weekend, the Yankees had a putrid 6.44 ERA from their starting rotation since the All-Star break, 29th out of 30 MLB teams. But New York’s starters got the job done against the Dodgers, allowing four total runs in 16⅔ innings over the weekend. That included Domingo German winning his 17th game with six strong innings Sunday night, and James Paxton pitching into the seventh with 11 strikeouts in the opener.

“I feel like [Paxton] has been on the verge of having this outing for a while,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “He really set the tone for us in a big way.”

Hyun-jin Ryu had his worst start of the season in the series opener, allowing seven runs and three home runs while failing to finish the fifth inning. Those earned runs and home runs matched Ryu’s totals for his first 11 starts at Dodger Stadium in 2019, covering 77⅔ innings.

That performance ballooned Ryu’s ERA all the way to 2.00, still the best in baseball.

The very idea that Ryu lost the National League Cy Young Award with his Friday clunker is preposterous, first because it presumes the award was already his to begin with. Yes, he was the favorite with a minuscule 1.45 ERA as late as Aug. 11, but there are a number of good candidates besides Ryu. Max Scherzer (2.41 ERA) and Jacob deGrom (2.56 ERA) are tied for first in the NL in fWAR (5.6), and are first and second in FIP. DeGrom leads in bWAR (5.5) narrowly over Scherzer (5.4), with Ryu trailing at 4.6. Not that the Cy Young should simply be determined by sorting a WAR leaderboard, but there are other non-Ryu candidates.

Plus there is still a month of the season remaining, and though recency bias likes to trick us, Ryu allowing five total home runs in back-to-back losses to the playoff-bound Braves and Yankees doesn’t invalidate a season’s worth of excellent pitching.

Tony Gonsolin started for the Dodgers on Saturday, just his fifth major league game, opposite retiring Yankees star CC Sabathia, who was making his 557th career start. Gonsolin played shortstop, just like his idol Derek Jeter, growing up in Vacaville in northern California, just a short drive from Vallejo, where Sabathia grew up 14 years earlier.

“I was a Yankees fan growing up, so it’s pretty great to throw against all those guys,” Gonsolin said. “It feels even better going up against CC, from the hometown, 15 minutes down the road. I met him when I was in high school. He probably doesn’t remember me, but I do.”

Gonsolin got the better of Sabathia on Saturday, allowing one run in his five innings while Sabathia allowed two runs in his four innings of work. Sabathia also smoked a ball to right field, a 97-mph liner caught by Cody Bellinger in what will likely be the final regular season at-bat of Sabathia’s career.

If we do see Sabathia swing the lumber one more time, it will likely mean the Yankees made the World Series.

The Yankees and Dodgers have two of the most iconic uniforms in the sport, but they were replaced this weekend by what looked like a battle between the all-black pajamas and the ice cream men in all-white.

“With Dodgers-Yankees this isn’t the best weekend, but to have them in their uniform and ours in ours, I think that would be cool,” Boone said.

At least some of the shoes were cool, like these Doug and Hey Arnold kicks worn by Cameron Maybin:

The Yankees won two of three games, and while it doesn’t guarantee anything for the postseason, it sure would be nice to see a seven-game series between the Dodgers and Yankees (with apologies to the Astros, who are in lock step with New York and LA with a 100-plus-win pace).

“There’s a lot of talent all over the field,” Roberts said. “Two great, iconic franchises. You could feel the energy from both dugouts as well as the stadium.”