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The Dodgers are the World Series champions. And they did it in a Game 5 with enough storylines to last an entire offseason. I’m Levi Weaver, here with Ken Rosenthal. Welcome to The Windup!
About Last Night: Dodgers’ resilience shines through
Dodgers 7, Yankees 6: It’s absurd to suggest sympathy for a team that spent $1.4 billion in free agency last winter. But how about respect? As Andy McCullough illustrates in his gamer about the night that finished the 4-1 series, the Dodgers juggernaut might as well have been driving through Fury Road.
The Ippei Mizuhara gambling scandal. Mookie Betts and Yoshinobu Yamamoto missing significant time. Injury after injury. By the time they hit the postseason, Freddie Freeman could barely walk, and the best rotation — Shohei Ohtani, Tyler Glasnow, Clayton Kershaw, Dustin May, Gavin Stone, Emmet Sheehan, Tony Gonsolin — didn’t throw a pitch in the playoffs.
Evan Phillips was injured in the NLCS and not on the World Series roster. The greatest player in the sport was playing through a partial dislocation of his left shoulder, suffered on a slide in Game 2.
The Dodgers used a bullpen game as a regular part of their rotation. As a result, when Jack Flaherty was bounced early in Game 5 last night, manager Dave Roberts had to turn to his high-leverage relievers just to get through the early innings. After the Dodgers tied it, the question became: Who was going to get the last 12 outs?
Brusdar Graterol got two in the sixth, but gave up a run in the process and left the bases loaded. The last available high-leverage reliever was Blake Treinen.
Treinen put in a heroic effort, slamming the door for seven outs, throwing 42 pitches — his highest total since April 18, 2018.
But the Dodgers still needed three more outs. Roberts turned to Walker Buehler, who missed all of 2022 and 2023 with injury (and two months with a hip injury this year). He was pitching on one day’s rest, having started Game 3. Here’s how it went:
Walker Buehler steps in to pitch the ninth and clinches the World Series title for the Los Angeles Dodgers 🏆
🎥 @MLBONFOXpic.twitter.com/2dbQqMoAAX
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) October 31, 2024
As McCullough said: “The game did not go as the Dodgers designed it. Then again, little did for them in 2024. Yet they will finish the season as champions of the world.”
More Dodgers: McCullough makes the Hall of Fame case for Roberts.
Ken’s Notebook: What made this team different
From my latest column:
NEW YORK — Well before the craziness of last night, before the wild comeback and the gallant relief efforts by Blake Treinen and Walker Buehler, Dave Roberts saw his club as different, the grittiest of the nine he had managed with the Dodgers.
Roberts declared as much two days earlier, sitting in his office at Yankee Stadium in a meeting with the Fox broadcasters. The Dodgers led the World Series, three games to none. And Fox’s Joe Davis, preparing for the possible clincher, asked Roberts how the 2024 Dodgers should be remembered.
“We learned how to street fight,” Roberts said.
In the 2022 Division Series, Roberts said, the Dodgers were “out-toughed” by the San Diego Padres. In the 2023 Division Series, they were “hit in the mouth” by the Arizona Diamondbacks.
This Dodgers team was different. This team again met the Padres in the Division Series, but rallied from a two-games-to-one deficit by throwing shutouts in the final two games, the first of which was a bullpen game featuring eight pitchers.
To Roberts, the comeback epitomized the Dodgers’ newfound edge.
“We out-fought the Padres. And that’s their style,” Roberts said. “They’re like brawlers. They’re like the UFC. We’re like the technical (fighters). But we showed ourselves that we can brawl.”
Last night, even more was at stake. And the Los Angeles Brawlers were at it again.
Trailing the Yankees 5-0 after three innings, the Dodgers were on the verge of becoming the first team to take a three-games-to-none lead in the Series and then be forced to play a Game 6.
Through four innings, they had no hits against Yankees ace Gerrit Cole. They had allowed home runs to the Yankees’ Aaron Judge, Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Giancarlo Stanton. Yet somehow, they emerged with a 7-6 victory, securing their second World Series title in five years and first in a full season since 1988.
Yes, the Yankees were most generous hosts, gifting the Dodgers five unearned runs in one of the most embarrassing defensive innings in Series history (more on that next). But the Dodgers took full advantage of the Yankees’ missteps in the fifth, running the bases alertly and aggressively, producing a pair of two-strike, two-out, two-run hits to tie the score.
Afterward, Roberts recalled a postseason game that started similarly: Game 7 of the 2017 World Series against the Houston Astros. The Dodgers were at home. After two innings, they trailed, 5-0. And they never came close to recovering, losing 5-1.
“In years past, we would have lost this game,” Roberts said. “This team, look what they did.”
More here.
Disasters: Dissecting the Yankees’ fifth-inning collapse
Remember when it was shaping up to be a “boring” World Series? By the fourth inning last night, it was starting to get very interesting. After a Game 4 win, the Yankees jumped out to an early 5-0 lead in Game 5, getting home runs by Aaron Judge (finally), Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Giancarlo Stanton.
No team had ever come back from a 3-0 deficit in the World Series. We weren’t about to see a historic comeback, right?
Actually…
The Yankees’ trouble started in the top of the fifth, when — after a Kiké Hernández single — Judge dropped a fly ball by Tommy Edman. On the next play, Anthony Volpe spiked a throw to third. Bases loaded, no outs.
And for two and a half batters, Gerrit Cole was Gerrit Cole, striking out Gavin Lux and Shohei Ohtani, then inducing a soft ground ball to first base from Mookie Betts. Cole pointed to Anthony Rizzo, as if to indicate “You got this.” Inning over, 5-0 Yankees, right?
Except … Rizzo did not “got this.” Betts beat him to the spot. Cole didn’t cover the bag.
It was 5-1, and two hitters later, the game was tied. It was the biggest comeback in a clinching game in World Series history.
It’s not all on Cole. Two errors preceded the gaffe, and he rallied after it, holding the Dodgers at five runs until he left in the seventh. Had the bullpen held it, it would have been a 6-5 win.
But as blunders go, it was a historically bad moment — and an inflection point in the craziest World Series clincher ever, as Jayson Stark writes.
Shockers: Freddie Freeman, World Series MVP
While we’re on the topic of overcoming adversity … how about Freeman’s 2024 season?
In late July, his son Max was battling a life-threatening bout of Guillain-Barré syndrome. Freeman missed 10 days to be by his family’s side until his son was on the path to recovery.
That was the big one. But it wasn’t the only one.
There was the broken finger in August. And a severe ankle sprain that brought his availability into question in the NLDS and NLCS. He battled through it, vacillating between days of healing and nights that slowed the healing process down.
Who would have guessed that guy would hit the walk-off grand slam in Game 1, then go on to set an MLB record by homering in each of the first four games — and a record six World Series games in a row, dating back to 2021 with the Braves?
By the time Freeman drove in the second and third runs last night, disbelief had given way to de rigueur. Of course it was Freeman, tying the record with 12 RBIs in one World Series. And one batter later, of course he was sprinting home to score the winning run.
So when he stepped to the podium as World Series MVP? That would only be surprising if you stopped watching before Game 1.
Handshakes and High Fives
As you undoubtedly heard, the fan who interfered with Mookie Betts in Game 4 was banned from Game 5. Mark Puleo spoke to Jeffrey Maier, who famously reverse-robbed a Derek Jeter home run in 1996, when Maier was 12 years old.
Speaking of … More big-leaguers joined us for Games 3-5. You wanna hear Tommy Pham’s thoughts on Tuesday’s incident?
Next up: free agency. Juan Soto is the biggest fish on the market, Chandler Rome details the factors for Alex Bregman to consider staying with the Astros and Tim Britton attempts to answer the question: How much should the Mets pay Pete Alonso?
Dinosaurs, show dogs, rock stars and scratch-n-sniff cards: The 2024 Allen & Ginter set is here.
“Rates & Barrels” recapped Game 5 and looked ahead to the offseason for both World Series teams.
Most-clicked in yesterday’s newsletter: Our news story on the fans who pried the ball out of Mookie Betts’ glove during Game 4.
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(Top photo: Wendell Cruz / Imagn Images)
