The New York Yankees did what?
One of baseball's glamour franchises had to lose the World Series, but no one expected it to go down in quite that way
Baseball players practise a lot. For weeks on end during spring training, and most days of a long regular season, they take grounders, catch fly balls, make throws, apply fake tags, that kind of thing.
It’s part of making the difficult become routine. A sharp ground ball up the middle can look like a simple play for a shortstop, but it’s a series of precise movements. The initial read and break toward the ball, the catch or scoop, the pivot and throw.
More than that, though, baseball players work on plays. If a throw comes in from the outfield to third base, who is backing up the infielder in case the throw is wild? If the second baseman has to chase a ball to his left, who is covering the bag? If the first baseman has to charge the ball, who is taking his place to receive the ball?
But not every scenario can be practised. In the fifth inning of Game 5 of the World Series on Wednesday night, the Los Angeles Dodgers had loaded the bases on a single and two errors. Mookie Betts hit a ground ball up the first base line that had a weird spin on it. Anthony Rizzo, the first baseman, stayed on his heels to field it; the bounce and spin made it difficult to charge. Pitcher Gerrit Cole, who had come sharply off the mound to try to field the ball, was unable to get there in time and was no longer moving in the direction of first base. Instead of covering the bag to take the throw from Rizzo, he stood there in the infield, looking kind of sheepish. A run scored, making it 5-1 for the Yankees, still with two outs.
It was there that the unravelling began. Two more hits followed, scoring four runs, and a raucous Yankee Stadium, which had watched the slumping Aaron Judge and Jazz Chisolm blast home runs that powered New York to an early lead, went dead quiet.
The Yankees regained the lead later before falling 7-6, but after that fifth inning it always felt like New York was not just playing the Dodgers but fighting generations of baseball history: you can’t give up five unearned runs while leading by five in an elimination game and expect to win. The baseball gods simply won’t allow it.
The crazy thing is that the Yankees, had they not managed to spectacularly barf up that big lead, were actually giving hope to fans that had considered them dead and buried when they lost the first three games of the series, the last two of them rather meekly. Judge had awoken from his slumber, Juan Soto kept getting on base, Giancarlo Stanton, a regular-season anchor for most of his time in New York, was still smashing playoff homers. More importantly, by chasing Dodgers starting pitcher Jack Flaherty in the second inning, the Yankees had forced manager Dave Roberts to start rifling through his bullpen looking for arms that weren’t overworked. New York was in a position to completely wear out the Dodgers bullpen and leave the starters in Game 6 (and 7) little room for error.
But the Yankees never did manage the hit that would blow the game open again. It was the Dodgers who won the battle of the gassed bullpens, plating the tying and winning runs on sacrifice flys in the eighth inning.
When weird shit happens that causes a team to lose a crucial game, it often gets chalked up to cruel fate. Had the fifth inning happened to the pre-2004 Boston Red Sox, it would have been the curse of the Babe, and that was that. Had it happened to, say, the present-day Seattle Mariners, we would simply assumed that the baseball gods were still not ready to let Seattle have good things. But the Yankees? The Yankees don’t do this. This is the team with all the history and the pennants and the resulting swagger. The Yankees do this to other teams.
Until now. Now, they have lost a World Series in brutal, heartbreaking, fluky fashion. The ghosts of that fifth inning will be there the next time a postseason lead starts to feel a little uncomfortable. The Dodgers won, yes, but the legacy of the 2024 World Series is that the Yankees lost. And how.
Speaking of the World Series…
If there has been a lesson in these baseball playoffs, it’s that power kills. Game 5 of the World Series was the only one in which the team with more homers didn’t win, for the reasons mentioned above. In my latest for theScore, I argue that this is very much a lesson that Ross Atkins should be taking, despite his recent musings that suggest otherwise.
And, speaking of things written for theScore…
We are into the In Case You Missed It section of the newsletter, catching up on things published elsewhere.
First, on Tom Brady and his many business pursuits:
Rarely is an NFL game played without a few officiating controversies, largely because the league's rules force officials to make subjective calls about things like whether a defensive player made a sufficient attempt to avoid landing with his full weight on a quarterback. Brady cannot provide his honest assessment of a questionable decision when viewers know he's not allowed to say, "Bad call there, Kevin."
The Dallas Cowboys are funny, mostly because Jerry Jones is funny.
It's a state of affairs that would normally cause a cranky owner to fire his general manager, except for the complicating factor that the 82-year-old Jones also holds that position. He might lash out and punt the team's chief executive, but that happens to be his son, Stephen. The head coach, Mike McCarthy, is at least not a direct relation, but Jones has resisted calls to fire him for a couple of years now and appears committed to the bit.
The New York Jets are bad, and the New York Giants might be worse.
The good news for New York Giants fans is that, in some ways, their quarterback, Daniel Jones, compares well to crosstown rival and future Hall of Famer Aaron Rodgers…
The bad news for Giants fans is that these are some of the worst numbers of Rodgers' career.