Dodgers get the breaks they didn't need

Yankees' foibles allowed a superior team to win the World Series in five games.

Mookie Betts

What do you give the team that has everything? If you’re the Yankees, you give the Dodgers six outs in the fifth inning.

The Dodgers somehow found a place for them, in their crowded house. Rather, they redeemed them, like green stamps, for the World Series championship they will bring home Thursday. The parade, the one they couldn’t have when they won the mini-Series in 2020, will happen on Friday, a celebration that has been bottled ever since 2017. Poignantly, that would have been a 64th birthday present to Fernando Valenzuela.

In those eight seasons, the Dodgers are 325 games over .500 in the regular season and, in fact, have been to the playoffs 12 consecutive years. One of those teams was 111-51. Two others were 106-56. But they weren’t able to finish it off with an endless group hug, between the lines, as these Dodgers did in Yankee Stadium Wednesday night. It was a five-game World Series win, the eighth in L.A. Dodger history but the first, for a Covid-free season, since Michael Dukakis was running for President against George H.W. Bush.

Be clear that the Dodgers still had two shots to win this thing at home, if the Yankees hadn’t begun chewing off their own feet. Yoshinobu Yamamoto would have pitched Game 6. And even after the Fifth Inning Follies, it was still a 5-5 game, and the Yankees took a one-run lead after that. At that moment Gerrit Cole was staring down from the mound like a tight-lipped T-Rex, and the Dodgers had gotten one hit, and Dave Roberts was even mulling the possibility of saving some pitching bullets for the weekend.

That’s when Aaron Judge made the freshman high school mistake of checking the whereabouts of Kiké Hernandez — with a 5-0 lead, remember — as Tommy Edman’s fly ball was approaching. He muffed it. And that’s when Anthony Volpe, the Harry Potter of young shortstops, tried to force Hernandez at third base and threw a hand grenade that Jazz Chisholm couldn’t handle. By rights both of them should have drawn an error.

With bases loaded and nobody out, Cole went cowboy on the Dodgers and stuck out Gavin Lux and Shohei Ohtani, then got a nubber to first base off the bat of Mookie Betts. Then Cole did something that no one should ever do in a dead-end game. He assumed. He thought Anthony Rizzo, at first base, would gather it up and trot to the bag, when Rizzo was in no position to do so. He didn’t run over to cover, and Hernandez scored. Freddie Freeman’s single brought home the second and third run. Teoscar Hernandez’s double over Judge’s head brought home the fourth and fifth. The Yankees had let the Dodgers back in. It was the worst idea hatched in The Bronx since they signed Ed Whitson.

When another bases-loaded situation came up, the Dodgers went ahead, 7-6, on two of the most prosaic plate appearances that Lux and Betts have ever produced. Two medium-deep fly balls — “run-scoring fly balls,” as Vin Scully would say, since he knew that no sacrifice was intended — and each scored a run. All the Dodgers needed from there was some emergency relief, and Blake Treinen and Walker Buehler, who was Monday’s starting pitcher, provided it. Treinen remembered this time last year, when he and Buehler were at the Dodgers’ Arizona facility, getting their arms rehabbed. All of that summarized the Series. The Dodgers had more pitchers, more offensive threats and far more command of what they were doing. In their October conquest of both sides of New York, Queens and Bronx alike, they scored 72 runs in 11 games.

With teammates in scoring position, the Dodgers hit .278 in their 16-game postseason with 10 home runs and an OPS of .874. In such situations in 2022, when they lost to San Diego in the Division Series, they hit .147. In the 2021 playoffs, they hit .232. In 2019 they hit .135 in their Division Series loss to Washington. In the 2018 postseason, they hit .192. In the 2017 World Series, regardless of how many trashcans the Astros were beating, the Dodgers hit .200.

Back then the Dodgers were in love with launch angles, which led to long home runs, which sometimes led to 6-run innings and 12-run games. They would carry that philosophy into the fall and find it mysteriously difficult to score one run when they really needed to. That’s what’s required against elite starting pitching. Such a thing doesn’t exist anymore, except for what Cole was doing Wednesday before the house fell down, but the Dodgers have a different approach, primarily because they have different players. Betts and Freeman know it’s sometimes more important to hit the ball hard than high. The 2024 Dodgers still led the N.L. in home runs and put up numbers comparable to recent years. They just were sharper in the fall, inning by inning, than they ever have been.

Maybe the struggles toughened their hide. It seems so long ago, but Betts began the season at shortstop. James Outman was the centerfielder and Jason Heyward was the rightfielder. The April rotation was Tyler Glasnow, Bobby Miller, Yamamoto, Gavin Stone and James Paxton. Ambulances kept coming for their pitchers, and Andrew Friedman and Brandon Gomes knew this wasn’t a world championship roster in midsummer. They acquired Edman to play all over the chessboard, Jack Flaherty for the rotation and Michael Kopech for the bullpen. 

Even then, the Dodgers only had a two-game lead in the National League West on Aug. 17 and although they finished with 26 wins in their last 38 games, they still only beat San Diego by five games and were seen as underdogs when they played the Padres in the Division Series. Down 2-1 in that 5-gamer, they faced the formidable Dylan Cease in Game 4. They were 5-for-9 with runners in scoring position in the 8-0 win. Betts homered in the first inning, but in the second, they got a walk from Lux and singles from K. Hernandez, Ohtani and Betts for two more runs and a 3-0 lead. Then the Dodgers turned to their Octopus Garden, using eight arms to hold San Diego to seven hits.

Friedman, Gomes and manager Dave Roberts have been the targets of Dodger skeptics, and there are serious questions about whether the pitching carnage is systemic, although other teams face the same thing. But there is something inside the Dodger program that seems to work. Kopech had only a nodding acquaintance with the strike zone until he came to L.A. He still walked 3.8 per nine innings, but that’s better than his 4.7 career mark, and he also had a 1.13 ERA. The Dodgers also unlocked something in Anthony Banda and Evan Phillips that no one else had. Alex Vesia had a 18.69 ERA in five major league innings before the Dodgers got him, and he has a 2.89 ERA in his four Dodger years.

Edman snugly fit the Dodger template: A battling hitter who plays competently in shortstop and centerfield alike. If you have enough moveable players like Betts, Edman, K. Hernandez and Chris Taylor, you can carry 12 or 13 pitchers, and Roberts used every one, even calling on Buehler to pitch a perfect ninth on Wednesday. Buehler had texted Roberts earlier in the day to volunteer. In doing so he was following the path of Orel Hershiser, who warmed up in the 1988 NLCS without bothering to inform manager Tommy Lasorda.

The bottom line is that the Dodgers play precise defense. They run the bases without incident. They play with high alertness. And players almost invariably get better when they become Dodgers. They move from role to role without audible complaint. They seem happy. One cannot overestimate Roberts’ role in all this. “It’s nice to be in my position where there’s not a bad option,” he said later, but the crash-landings of all those Octobers would have cracked other managers. His patience and guidance, and his toughness when someone strays, should immunize him from the second-guessers all the way up to, well, next April 1 or so.

Meanwhile, the Yankees finish their 15th consecutive season without a world championship. They weren’t as good as the Dodgers but that won’t matter to fans, and executives, who watched them lose so gracelessly. They, and the Dodgers, might spend more than anyone except the Mets, and they will be at the front of the line for the top free-agents for years to come. But in one way the Yankees are like everyone else. At the beginning of each game, they have a bankroll of 27 outs. On Wednesday, their generosity bred contempt.