NEW YORK — At 11:43 p.m., Walker Buehler walked through the bullpen gates and into immortality. Few things captured the 2024 Los Angeles Dodgers better than his presence in the ninth inning of the World Series. Nothing had gone as designed to bring Buehler and the Dodgers to this point on Wednesday night. Nothing felt more fitting than Buehler’s cleats hitting the dirt of the outfield warning track as he emerged from the bullpen.
Just two days ago, Buehler, 30, returned to the game’s highest stage. His right elbow is not the same. He no longer bullies opponents into submission with triple-digit velocity. His regular season fell so far off the rails that he left the club to go to a private facility and search for anything that could bring him back to this.
Nothing could bring him back, Buehler acknowledged, until he was under the lights.
“There’s no other way to say it,” Buehler said. “The lights. The big lights. The big thing. It’s hard to explain what that does to you.”
Buehler, on one day of rest, took the mound for his first relief appearance since he was 23 years old. Eight minutes after he walked through those gates, Buehler threw a curveball that Alex Verdugo waved over for strike three. He looked over to his dugout and raised his arms with cocksure satisfaction.
The Dodgers are World Series champions again. The eighth championship in franchise history fulfilled the expectations set in motion by a billion-dollar winter. The next chapter in what this organization’s architects had mapped out as the “golden era” of a franchise has its trophy.
A 7-6 conquest of the New York Yankees nearly broke the Dodgers. But they did not relent. The twists were preposterous. A Game 5 pitching plan centered around their star trade deadline acquisition was torn into shreds by the second inning. Another makeshift bullpen game ran out of bodies. A five-run deficit against the reigning Cy Young winner appeared destined to send this series back to Los Angeles and put this group in danger of making the wrong sort of history. After taking the first three games of this World Series, no team in baseball history had allowed an opponent to force a sixth game.
Instead, the Dodgers celebrated a coronation. It was a triumph for this group, which has now claimed a second world championship in five years and washed away all doubt. It was a triumph for a collection of stars that each sacrificed to allow this club to coalesce.
And it was a triumph for Buehler, the onetime budding ace of the franchise who joked he thought he might get released this summer. The man who nailed down the final out of the World Series endured a second Tommy John surgery and faces an uncertain future, but has guaranteed himself one thing.
“He went through a lot, but now he’s etched in Dodger glory and royalty forever,” Clayton Kershaw said.
Buehler first broached the idea on the team bus. The Dodgers had lined up in punt formation the night before, in Game 4, cautiously clutching what appeared to be an insurmountable 3-0 advantage over a prolific Yankees collection of stars. The Dodgers wanted to preserve as many of their top arms as possible for Wednesday night. Jack Flaherty had the baseball in Game 5, hoping to hold down a Yankees lineup that had roared to life to prevent a sweep. So general manager Brandon Gomes laughed off the suggestion when Buehler let it be known he would be available in relief.
It was Buehler who steered himself toward the home bullpen a week prior, looming just in case as the Dodgers sought to clinch the pennant during the NLCS against the Mets. Dodgers officials marveled and chuckled at Buehler’s gusto when he offered himself for duty as the Dodgers counted down the arms in a bullpen game clincher.
With Flaherty going on Wednesday, it seemed unthinkable that the Dodgers would require Buehler’s services in Game 5. He offered anyway.
Then Flaherty recorded just four outs. Aaron Judge, the presumptive American League MVP, drilled the first pitch he saw in the first inning into the seats. Jazz Chisholm Jr. pummeled a fastball of his own for another homer. A disaster brewed in the Bronx as the Dodgers scrambled to figure out how they would record 27 outs. The Yankees’ defensive ineptitude offered them a lifeline anyway, allowing the Dodgers to come back from down 5-0.
With the game tied 5-5 in the sixth inning and the Dodgers onto their sixth arm of the night, Buehler retreated to the visiting clubhouse and encountered president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman. The previous half-hour had been spent mapping out the Dodgers’ contingencies, including how they would get starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto home for a potential Game 6. When the Dodgers rallied to tie it with a five-run fifth inning, Friedman’s planning instead shifted to the amount of outs remaining. Buehler made his offer again.
“Is this wonky?” Buehler asked.
“It’s the definition of wonky,” Friedman responded.
Buehler threw on his cleats. As he jogged from the dugout to the visiting bullpen, Kershaw stopped and told Buehler he loved him. Few understand that walk like Kershaw, who twice has emerged on short rest in relief and clinched an October celebration for these Dodgers.
“He saw what was happening,” Kershaw said. “He knew we were going to need him. It takes big balls. There’s no way to say it. Just do it.”
Buehler sat inside the visiting bullpen and watched the Dodgers avoid peril. Three arms remained to record the game’s final 12 outs. So Buehler emerged in the eighth inning, as the Dodgers rallied again to take a 7-6 lead, and fired three pitches to bullpen catcher Hamlet Marte. That was enough until the ninth.
A month ago, with the team at its lowest, manager Dave Roberts gathered his team. They had sustained their latest blow: Tyler Glasnow’s season was over. So Roberts held a team meeting, a rarity in his tenure that has twice resulted in championships. The timing was as specific as the message.
“After we lost Tyler,” Roberts recalled recently, “Walker was going to have to be a bigger figure.”
So the manager challenged him directly. Buehler finished the season with a 5.38 ERA. Then he found himself in the postseason and pitched the best he had all year.
“I don’t want to say that I’ve earned that, but I think I’ve earned that in some of the games that I’ve thrown,” Buehler said. “And even when I was very young. But in feeling that way, there’s expectation. You walk out there in July and August and all that, and I’ve struggled. And there’s a thing that, like, ‘No, I’m supposed to be me right now.’ And it worked out better.”
Wednesday, the group that vouched for Buehler throughout the worst summer of his career did not know he was available until he jogged to the mound.
“I loved it,” Smith said. “F— it.”
“Oh hell yeah,” Max Muncy said.
“Here we f—ing go,” reliever Alex Vesia said from the clubhouse after his outing.
Smith did not say a word to Buehler as he took the mound. Sixteen pitches later, they were champions.
“Those are the things they build statues for,” bullpen coach Josh Bard said.
Six years had elapsed since the last time Blake Treinen was asked to record more than six outs. Before this October, it had been 36 months since he’d even been asked to complete two innings. His shoulder has been reconstructed and his career revitalized a year after he openly wondered if his velocity would come back. He returned to the Dodgers last winter on a $1 million option only to return to his sharpest form.
Wednesday, he was the last top option the Dodgers had left. So he entered in the sixth inning, with his team trailing by a run and nothing behind him. His pitch count sat at 37 in the eighth inning when Roberts went to the mound. He did not want to take Treinen out but wanted to know what Treinen had with one out and two runners on ahead of Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton. This would be Treinen’s last hitter.
When Treinen got Stanton to fly out on a first-pitch fastball, he returned to the mound and did not look to the dugout, where Roberts stood on the top step. He wouldn’t move from there as Anthony Rizzo stepped in to face Treinen a second time.
Treinen spotted a sweeper on the inner half before getting Rizzo to swing through a fastball at the top of the zone. The radar gun flashed at 96.9 mph, a mark he had topped just once all summer.
He fired another: 98 mph, on his 41st pitch of the night.
“It’s just God,” Treinen said, “Emptying the tank.”
Rizzo took it for a ball. It set up the sweeper that followed, the kind that dove toward Rizzo’s heels. The swinging strike three allowed the Dodgers to carry a one-run lead heading into the ninth inning.
“(He’s) a unicorn,” Bard said of Treinen.
Gerrit Cole, who the Dodgers pursued in free agency five years ago, bullied the Dodgers lineup for the first four innings with fastballs and ruthless efficiency. No Dodger recorded a hit until Kiké Hernández led off the fifth inning by lining a single.
Given the opportunity, the Dodgers did not relent. Tommy Edman laced a changeup to center field and right into Judge’s glove — until it squirted out for an error. When Smith grounded a ball toward Anthony Volpe, the shortstop aggressively tried to get the lead runner at third base and bounced the throw to load the bases. Cole recorded two quick outs to temporarily avoid damage until Mookie Betts dribbled a groundball off the end of the bat to Rizzo at first base. Rizzo fielded the ball but did not move toward the bag. Nor did Cole, who was supposed to cover. Betts beat them all.
“They just left the door open, and we jumped through it,” hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc said.
Freddie Freeman, the runaway World Series MVP, followed with a two-run single. Teoscar Hernández roped a double over Judge’s head to bring home two more and tie the game 5-5. Four innings of no momentum exploded in for a five-run fifth. All of the runs were unearned.
“We’re grinders,” Betts said. “We never thought we were out of it.”
“When you’re given extra outs, you’ve got to capitalize,” Freeman said.
That, the Dodgers did. They have built this lineup around stars. They have thrived around not allowing their opponents to come up for air. It’s a group that, despite its series lead, had struggled against the Yankees before coming to life not once, but twice to overcome deficits.
“That’s who we are,” Smith said. “We’re a bunch of fighters. We never feel like we’re out of it. We were down 5-0. So what? We know we can put pressure on them. They’ll crack. We’ll win it.”
It was only these Dodgers who could tackle their demons. They endured 12 different pitchers on the injured list and managed to make a 98-win season feel like a disappointment. This team won fewer games than any Dodgers squad had in any full season in half a decade and finished with the best record in baseball. That run of unparalleled regular-season success now brings another World Series title.
And at long last, a parade.
(Top photo of Walker Buehler and catcher Will Smith: Al Bello / Getty Images)
