Two of Major League Baseball's most storied franchises will meet with a World Series berth at stake when the St. Louis Cardinals and Los Angeles Dodgers open the best-of-seven National League Championship Series on Friday.

The Cardinals, whose 11 World Series crowns is the most for any National League team, and the Dodgers, winners of six and losers in a dozen other Fall Classics, remodeled their teams in distinctly different ways to get within one last hurdle of contesting MLB's pinnacle prize.

The NLCS might well come down to which club did the best job of retooling.