'Fight For Glory' on Apple TV+ amps up World Series highlight films for a new era

The 1943 World Series between the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals was the first to have an accompanying highlight film. It was made available to troops fighting overseas in World War II who couldn't listen to the series at home — the first televised World Series was still four years away — and might not have read accounts of the Yankees' five-game victory over the Cardinals.

Eighty-two years later, the legacy of that first World Series highlight film lived on in the form of fan-friendly highlights packages. From VHS to Blu-Ray to DVD, MLB's official account of the World Series on video was an annual must-watch for fans of the winning team.

Recently, however, the traditional highlights film had become an antiquated artifact of an earlier distribution era. MLB isn't the only sports-media outlet reckoning with the best way to repurpose highlights for the modern audience, but the World Series highlights DVD was among the most high-profile test cases.

"That was on my mind the last few years," said Nick Trotta, Major League Baseball's Vice President, Global Media Programming and Licensing. "How do we move past the home video era, and get where the audiences are?"

The result is Fight for Glory 2024 World Series, a three-part docuseries available Friday on Apple TV+. The behind-the-scenes glimpses away from Dodger Stadium and Yankee Stadium bring Fight For Glory more in line with a modern sports documentary than a classic highlights package. Still, the in-game footage and postgame interviews are of the caliber one would expect from the official video documentary of the World Series.

At a small-group screening of the first of the three-part series Saturday in Los Angeles, director R.J. Cutler talked about how much of the access they needed to produce the finished product was already in place. In Game 2 of the World Series, for example, when Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani slid into second base and separated his shoulder, "there was a mic in second base so we got to hear the conversation between Ohtani and the trainer," Cutler said.

The production is a partnership between Cutler, Imagine Entertainment (founded by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard), MLB and Apple. Trotta said Howard's vision for the final product was "equal part concert movie, political convention movie ... and part nature documentary."

Mission accomplished.

I covered Game 1 of the World Series in person, yet still found myself leaning forward to see the outcome of the pivotal at-bats in the 10th inning. Although the first of the three parts focuses exclusively on the series' first game — and features more Dodger-specific clips and interviews — Fight for Glory is more balanced in its coverage of the two teams than the traditional World Series highlight DVD.

"It was produced more into the winning club’s story previously," Trotta said.

That's an important distinction. Fox's ratings for its World Series broadcasts marked a seven-year high. Now, five months later, Apple is offering something both Dodgers and Yankees fans can enjoy again, even though diehard and casual fans of both teams know exactly how the series ended.

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Review: 'Fight For Glory' on Apple TV+ amps up the World Series highlight film for the digital age

By J.P. Hoornstra | Mar 25, 2025