Yankees-Dodgers Clash Draws TV Spotlight, Sky-High Prices

The Yankees and Dodgers will reprise their legendary rivalry this weekend at Dodger Stadium, and just like last year’s World Series, there’s plenty of interest from fans and broadcasters in the high-profile matchup. 

The two teams will have their lone regular-season series Friday through Sunday, marking a high point in a 2025 season that thus far has featured another attendance boost, and plenty of drama surrounding other stars such as the Mets’ Juan Soto and Pirates’ Paul Skenes. The Yankees-Dodgers series will once more bring together arguably MLB’s two greatest talents: Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge. Both players are again off to strong starts and are currently strong betting favorites to win Most Valuable Player awards in 2025. 

Each of the three games will be shown nationally, with Apple TV+ carrying Friday’s opener as part of its streaming package, Fox following on Sunday, and ESPN airing the finale on Sunday Night Baseball. The audience for that last game is likely to challenge, if not surpass, the average of 2.54 million seen on May 18 for the end of a Subway Series between the Mets and Yankees.

Part of that will draw from a strong base of last year’s World Series, won by the Dodgers in five games, that drew the largest average audience for that event since 2017. 

While the Dodgers already enjoy a perennial status as the league’s top attendance draw, currently averaging 50,231 per game, ticket resale pricing for each of the three games has started at nearly $100 per ticket across multiple marketplaces. That figure is about twice the comparable get-in resale prices for seats to games in the Dodgers’ home series next week against the Mets.  

There are plenty of baseball-related subplots to the weekend tilt at Dodger Stadium. Yankees slugger Aaron Judge will again return to the site where he injured a toe running into the outfield wall, ultimately derailing a 2023 season that was setting up to be another strong one for him. Judge will again be manning right field this weekend after primarily playing center field last year while Soto was a Yankee.

Ohtani, meanwhile, is continuing non-game work to build himself back up to return to starting pitching for the Dodgers, something expected sometime after the All-Star break in July.

The series also sees the teams going in somewhat different directions. The Yankees have won 16 of their last 20 games, rising to the second-best record in the American League as the club dramatically reshaped its roster after the departure of Soto and is seeing the fruits of that effort. The Dodgers still are tied for the third-best record in the National League, but they have gone just 13–12 so far in May and have more than $102 million in payroll tied up in currently injured players, a total greater than the overall payrolls of six teams.