Daniel Hudson boarded a team bus to the ballpark for the sort of ride the veteran reliever has taken more than a thousand times, spanning a decade and a half of his life, from early Aprils to late Octobers. This one had something that surprised him.
It was starting pitcher Walker Buehler, not even two days removed from a remarkable start to win Game 3 of the World Series, insisting he would be available from the bullpen that night to win it all in Game 5.
“As soon as he said that,” Hudson says, “I was just like, Walker’s pitching tonight.”
He could not possibly have guessed then what it would take for that situation to come to pass.
That bus ride to the ballpark led to a game unlike any that had come before. The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the New York Yankees, 7–6, to win the World Series. The final score correctly suggests a close game. It does not begin to cover what that actually entailed.
It was the largest comeback ever seen in a clinching game. That involved an unconscionable defensive breakdown by the Yankees. It featured a fielding error, a throwing error, a catcher interference and a balk. It required a second comeback after the first one. It saw Dodgers manager Dave Roberts emptying his bullpen of his top relievers, using almost every single option available to him, finally calling for a stunning choice to close it out: Buehler. It took both phenomenal luck and uncommon grit.
Any ideas on the words to fully capture that experience?
“No,” Hudson laughs.
He watched the game from what became the most important spot in the ballpark. That was the Dodgers’ bullpen out in left field. After going up 3–0 in the series, Roberts had essentially punted on a bullpen day in Game 4, choosing not to use his best relievers, and to instead let the others mop up a loss. (That had been set up by Hudson allowing a grand slam in the third inning: “That game yesterday sucked, I sucked yesterday, it was brutal,” he says. “But I knew we were going to come back.”) The gambit was designed to make sure the six members of the Dodgers’ bullpen A-team would be ready to dominate in Game 5. But that did not go as planned.
It turned out there would be no lead to hand those relievers. Los Angeles starter Jack Flaherty was chased out of the game in the second inning: He’d given up four runs while recording just four outs. This was the worst-case scenario for the Dodgers. The day after throwing a scheduled bullpen game, they were now staring down an unscheduled one, with all of their best relievers good and ready for … an early deficit. Yet the manager did not waver.
Down 4–0, midway through the second inning, Roberts began calling for some of his top relievers.
“We didn’t expect to go to the bullpen that early, but it happened,” says left-hander Anthony Banda, the first man out of the ‘pen. “The mindset doesn’t change. We just try to go out there and minimize the damage and throw up a zero and hand it off to the next guy.”
The Dodgers went from Banda to Ryan Brasier to Michael Kopech. The deficit never shrank. (In fact, it grew, with Brasier allowing a solo shot to Yankees designated hitter Giancarlo Stanton.) They soon found themselves in a decidedly undesirable position: They had used four pitchers to make it through four innings, and they were down 5–0, a larger deficit than any team had ever come back from in a clinching game. Their lineup had not managed a single hit off Yankees ace Gerrit Cole.
Yet they insist that it did not feel like a guaranteed loss. The group claims they believed they could still win. “We just needed that one opening,” Hudson says. He watched from the bullpen as they got one, and another, and another.
The Yankees suddenly bumbled into an unfathomable parade of mistakes. Their fifth inning would have seemed too unrealistically grotesque to pass muster in a nightmare. Aaron Judge dropped a routine fly ball. Anthony Volpe failed to make a clean throw to third. Anthony Rizzo fielded a grounder behind first base only to realize there was no one for him to throw to: Cole had not backed him up on the bag. New York fumbled again and again and again, Los Angeles capitalized, and by the end of the fifth inning, the score was 5–5.
Every run for the Dodgers had been unearned.
Roberts had been managing his bullpen as if his team had a lead. He did not stop when it clawed its way to a tie. He gave the fifth inning to Alex Vesia and the sixth to Brusdar Graterol. The manager was going through his list of most trusted guys, one at a time, asking for an inning apiece. But the math there was getting worrisome. There were six relievers on that list. Roberts had sent five of them out by the sixth inning. He was running out of men. And the situation looked even more dire when Graterol got into a jam and gave up a run in the sixth. The Dodgers were suddenly trailing, 6–5, and Roberts called for his last trusted reliever, Blake Treinen.
The manager did something else after that sixth inning, too. He let Buehler go out to the bullpen to begin warming up. The righthander was scheduled to start a potential Game 7. He had never worked in relief in any scenario in MLB. Yet, with his team losing by a run, with no guarantee of an opportunity, he prepared to close out Game 5. His manager swore it was not something he seriously discussed in his game-planning.
“I didn't see him, see that even coming into play,” Roberts said. “But obviously, as the game sort of played on, we had to keep the game close. Our guys were fighting, so I just felt that at that point in time, I was going to be all in.”
Buehler wanted the ball—he’d wanted it since he mentioned the idea on the bus ride over—and Roberts had no other real options.
“As soon as Walker walked out to the bullpen, I was like, He’s going to do it,” Hudson says. “It was the look in his eyes … I knew as soon as he went out that he was going to finish this game if we got the lead.”
But that would require so much to go just right. The Dodgers would need to score at least two runs in the last three innings. They would need Treinen to deliver the outing of his life: The veteran righty had not recorded more than six outs in a game in more than six years, but they would need him to get seven in Game 5 of the World Series, and they would need it to be scoreless, of course. And they would need Buehler to deliver, in his first relief appearance ever in the big leagues, after a bumpy regular season defined by his struggles to recover from surgery. They would need something akin to a small miracle, and then another one, and finally one more.
They got them. Hudson watched from the bullpen as those small miracles lined up. He watched the Dodgers score two runs. He watched Treinen grit his way through seven huge outs. He watched Buehler record the first save of his career. And then he ran out of the bullpen, among the very last men left out there, so they could all celebrate the end of their season together.
It was also the end of Hudson’s career. The reliever had decided that he would retire after 2024: After 15 seasons in the big leagues, dotted with debilitating injuries and grueling rehabs, 37-year-old Hudson knew this would have to be it. He announced his retirement in a champagne-soaked champion clubhouse. And he left with the memory of a final game that he could not begin to describe.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as ‘Walker’s Pitching Tonight’: Dodgers Bullpen Secured a World Series Win Like No Other.
