The New York Yankees spent all year talking about how close this team was, so you have to give them credit for pulling together to lose the World Series as a group. In the deciding Game 5, which they lost 7–6 to the Los Angeles Dodgers, it wasn’t the shaky starting pitching or the undermanned bullpen or the feast-or-famine offense that doomed them. It was the problem that plagued them all season: They were astonishingly talented, and at times they played like astonishing knuckleheads.
Just about everyone contributed: It was the first World Series game ever in which a team committed a balk, two field errors and a catcher’s interference.
“Just a couple mistakes along the way that hurt us,” said center fielder and captain Aaron Judge. He was referring to the fifth inning, when they committed three defensive blunders to open the door to five Dodgers runs, but he could have been describing the season. It’s hard to say that a team that won 94 games and the pennant played bad baseball, but the Yankees often did. Their outfield defense ranked in the bottom third of the league and no team ran the bases worse this year, according to Statcast, which does not track “plays that make you wince.”
The Yankees had three of those in the fifth inning of Game 5 to open the door to five Dodgers runs—and eventually close the door on their season. It was all the more frustrating for how well things were going. Four batters into the bottom of the first, the Yankees led 3–0. They tacked on another run in the second. Gerrit Cole took a no-hitter into the fifth inning. They seemed well on their way to becoming the first team to go down three games to none in a World Series and force a Game 6. Then the Yankees turned back into the Yankees and the Dodgers turned back into the Dodgers.
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Dodgers center fielder Kiké Hernández singled to open the fifth. Shortstop Tommy Edman lofted a ball to shallow center, where Judge let it clank off his glove. “Just didn’t make the play,” he said. Five pitches later, catcher Will Smith grounded to shortstop Anthony Volpe, who threw awkwardly to third and failed to collect the out. “I was trying to make a play,” Volpe said. “I just pulled the throw.” Two plays that could have resulted in three outs instead resulted in zero and left the bases loaded.
Cole struck out second baseman Gavin Lux and DH Shohei Ohtani, but when right fielder Mookie Betts grounded to first, Cole failed to back up the bag—at the same time that first baseman Anthony Rizzo failed to charge the ball.
“I took a bad angle to the ball,” Cole said. “Wasn’t sure really off the bat how hard he hit it. I took a direct angle to it, as if to cut it off, because I just didn't know how hard he hit it. And by the time the ball got by me, I was not in a position to cover first.”
Rizzo diplomatically called it “a miscommunication on coverage” before acknowledging that “pitchers are always taught to get over no matter what.” In any case, Betts beat the ball out. A run scored.
The next hitter was first baseman Freddie 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. The final numbers on the inning: three extra outs, five runs, all unearned.
The Yankees retook the lead on a sacrifice fly in the sixth, but the Dodgers did the same in the eighth. Ohtani, who partially dislocated his shoulder in Game 1 and had not had a hit since, took a hack at the first pitch. Catcher Austin Wells knocked into his bat, and the home plate umpire Mark Ripperger awarded Ohtani first base. On the next pitch, Betts flied to center to plate the go-ahead run. In the ninth, just for good measure, closer Luke Weaver took a third disengagement—pitchers are allowed two per at bat—and was punished with a balk. It was the most careless performance by a group of New Yorkers since Eric Adams’s aides failed to delete their text messages.
After it was over, the Yankees milled around a quiet clubhouse, saying their goodbyes. This team could look very different next year. Right fielder Juan Soto will be a free agent and is expected to command more than half a billion dollars. Second baseman Gleyber Torres, left fielder Alex Verdugo and setup man Clay Holmes will be free agents. The team holds a $17 million option on Rizzo. Perhaps some turnover could be good for this group. In the Judge Era, New York has never won a playoff series against an opponent outside the AL Central.
In the wake of this latest disappointment, the Yankees offered little explanation and little path forward. “Just gotta limit the mistakes,” Judge said. Asked how one does that, he paused. “It’s hard to do,” he admitted. “Don’t let it happen. I don’t have a good answer for you.” He has a long offseason to think about it—three days longer than he wanted.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Yankees’ Obvious Flaws Surface in Ugly Fashion to End World Series.
