The $1.2 billion winter, the roster stocked with perhaps the most impressive collection of talent ever assembled, the dream season for the most superlative player who ever graced a baseball field—all of it came down, in the end, to the 30-year-old, twice-repaired, still-swollen right arm of Walker Buehler.
As one of the most preposterous games this sport has ever seen thundered into the ninth inning, Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts considered his options. His starter had collected four outs. He had already used all six of the relievers he trusted. The Dodgers were three outs away from their seventh championship, their second this decade and first in a full season since 1988.
So with a 7–6 lead in Game 5 of the World Series, Roberts summoned his Game 3 starter, Buehler. Once the team’s top prospect, and then its ace, Buehler had missed 22 months after undergoing his second Tommy John surgery. He returned to the mound in June and struggled so badly that he took a month away from the team, trying to fix his delivery. But he has long said that being a big-game pitcher is “kind of the only thing I care about,” and on Wednesday, he trotted in from the bullpen for the biggest game of his life.
He induced a grounder to third from shortstop Anthony Volpe, the hero of Game 4. Buehler struck out Austin Wells swinging. He took a deep breath. Then he did the same thing to left fielder Alex Verdugo.
Buehler flung his arms in the air as his teammates rushed the mound. There was DH Shohei Ohtani, the Japanese superstar whose $700 million, 10-year deal kickstarted that record-breaking offseason. There was right fielder Mookie Betts, the stud who keyed that 2020 title. There was first baseman Freddie Freeman, who won World Series MVP on one good leg after spraining his right ankle in September. All got them there. But it was Buehler, pitching on two days’ rest, who got them home.
This was the sort of grit Roberts exhorted them to display six weeks ago, when he felt them feeling sorry for themselves, and the sort they made their identity three weeks ago. They were the best team in baseball, and it was time they started acting like it.
Their confidence reached its nadir in the middle of September. The roster constituted perhaps the most impressive collection of talent ever assembled—four former MVPs, tied for the most in history on one team—but the Dodgers also led the league in days spent on the injured list. They had already weathered three months without righty Yoshinobu Yamamoto and three months without Buehler. Lefty Clayton Kershaw’s season would soon end prematurely (bone spur in his left big toe), as had righty Emmet Sheehan’s (Tommy John surgery), righty Dustin May’s (esophageal tear), top prospect River Ryan’s (Tommy John surgery) and, most frustrating of all, righty Tyler Glasnow’s (elbow tendonitis).
After a month of trying to return, Glasnow told the team in September that “something was just not right in my arm” and shut it down.
In the wake of that news, Roberts did something he never does: He called a team meeting. He could tell that his players seemed deflated. So he challenged them to reconsider that attitude.
“We’ve gone through a lot this year,” recalled third baseman Max Muncy. “We’ve had a lot of injuries. We were supposed to have a starting rotation of All-Stars, Hall of Famers, and that just didn’t happen. You’re talking about the guy who was supposed to be your ace gets dealt a blow that he’s done for the year? That was a kick in the gut. We had to have a meeting. Because you could tell, everyone was down. Everyone was like, ‘Man, not again. We had another injury.’ You have a meeting and say, ‘Guys, look around. We still have Hall of Famers in this room. We still have All-Stars in this room. We have guys who are getting paid a lot of money in this room. We can still do this.’ You get every single guy to look around and see everybody—yeah, that made a big difference for us.”
The members of the best team in baseball did something almost more impressive than romping through October: They convinced themselves that nobody believed in them.
They led the league in attendance, boasted four of the 20 most popular jerseys (those four MVPs: Ohtani, No. 1; Betts, No. 4; Freeman, No. 18; Kershaw, No. 19) and seemed to announce a sponsorship from a Japanese company every 15 or 20 minutes. But when they found themselves down two games to one in the National League Division Series against the San Diego Padres three weeks ago, they began to fancy themselves underdogs. The Dodgers were tired of letting playoff runs evaporate when their opponents played with more passion than they did. They were tired of watching worse teams celebrate in front of them. They were tired of falling short.
“I think the last couple years, other teams just out-fought us,” Roberts said this week. “And I think that we weren’t going to let that happen.”
This World Series—the league’s dream matchup, and probably the most hyped in history—featured the biggest star in the U.S., Aaron Judge, and the biggest star in the world, Ohtani. As it turned out, neither did much. Judge entered Game 5 batting .133 this postseason; Ohtani partially dislocated his shoulder sliding into second base in Game 2 and collected just one hit afterward.
But the rest of the Dodgers more than compensated. Through the first three games, they outplayed the New York Yankees in every facet of the series. Los Angeles hitters slugged more home runs, stranded fewer runners and ran the bases better. Los Angeles fielders turned more balls into outs. Los Angeles starting pitchers went deeper into games and Los Angeles relievers allowed fewer runs.
In Game 4, the Dodgers rolled out a bullpen game and the long-dormant Yankees offense exploded, tagging L.A.’s second-tier pitchers for 11 runs. In the end, that turned out to be a win for the Dodgers, too. The best result would have been a victory to clinch the series. The second-best result was a rout: Roberts was able to keep his top arms holstered and—crucially—prevent the Yankees from getting another look at them. “As far as outcomes, to have six guys in your pen that are feeling good, rested, I feel good about that,” he said afterward.
At first, Game 5 seemed to be a continuation of the night before: Four batters into the bottom of the first, the Yankees led 3–0. They tacked on another in the second. Roberts turned to those fresh relievers, and although Ryan Brasier allowed a solo shot to Giancarlo Stanton in the third, they otherwise kept the game close enough for the Yankees to turn back into the Yankees and the Dodgers to turn back into the Dodgers.
New York ace Gerrit Cole did not allow his first hit until the fifth inning, when center fielder Kiké Hernández singled to open the frame. Shortstop Tommy Edman lofted a ball to shallow center, where center fielder Aaron Judge let it clank off his glove. Five pitches later, catcher Will Smith grounded to shortstop Anthony Volpe, who threw awkwardly to third and failed to collect the out. Two plays that could have resulted in three outs for the Yankees instead resulted in zero and a diamond full of Dodgers.
Cole struck out second baseman Gavin Lux and Ohtani, but when right fielder Mookie Betts grounded to first, Cole inexplicably failed to cover the bag—at the same time that first baseman Anthony Rizzo inexplicably failed to charge the ball. Betts beat the ball out. A run scored.
The next hitter was Freeman, whose only disappointment this week was that he snapped his record streak of World Series games with a home run at six. He singled to center to score two more. As the sellout crowd of 49,263 fell silent, left fielder Teoscar Hernández crushed a cutter off the center field wall to tie the game. All five runs were unearned.
Then Roberts’s math problem began. Brasier got three outs, as did Michael Kopech and Alex Vesia. Brusdar Graterol opened the sixth inning with two walks, a fielder’s choice and a sacrifice fly to score a run. When he walked his third batter, Roberts summoned Blake Treinen to extinguish the damage.
Meanwhile, the Yankees were reckoning with their own arithmetic. Cole gutted through 6 ⅔ innings, but when he walked Freeman with two outs, Boone called for righty Clay Holmes. Holmes got out of the seventh, but that still left New York with two innings to cover and less than two innings’ worth of trusted relievers. At that point the number was basically one: closer Luke Weaver. But Weaver got four outs in Game 4, so Boone turned to righty Tommy Kahnle for the eighth. Kahnle had thrown 135 pitches in October. One hundred twenty-one were changeups. On Wednesday he threw eight more, good for two singles and a walk.
In came Weaver with nobody out and the bases loaded. Second baseman Gavin Lux, batting ninth, worked a full count, then flied to center, deep enough to score Kiké Hernández with the tying run. The moment seemed perfect for Ohtani to cap his dream season with heroics. Instead catcher Austin Wells knocked into his bat on a foul ball, and home plate umpire Mark Ripperger granted Ohtani first base. Betts jumped on a first-pitch fastball for another sacrifice fly to take the lead.
Treinen collected seven outs, leaving the ninth for Buehler.
His teammates already revered him for the way he had sought out moments such as these before. In 2021, at the end of the best season of his career, Buehler started Game 4 of the NLDS on short rest. Not quite two weeks later, when Max Scherzer asked out of Game 6 of the NLCS, citing an “overcooked” arm, Buehler took the ball on short rest again. He underwent his second Tommy John surgery the following summer. He may have cost himself nine figures in free agency, which he will enter this year. But he just bought the Dodgers a ring.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as High-Priced Dodgers Embrace Underdog Mentality to Win 2024 World Series.
