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Jorge Castillo, ESPN staff writer
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- ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the Washington Wizards from 2014 to 2016 and the Washington Nationals from 2016 to 2018 for The Washington Post before covering the Los Angeles Dodgers and MLB for the Los Angeles Times from 2018 to 2024.
NEW YORK – All year long during the American League Championship Series, the New York Yankees overcame the tendency to play sloppy baseball by beating opponents with overwhelming talent. The stats calculated (and the eyes thought) that they were the worst baserunning team in the Majors during the regular season. They regularly committed baffling defensive errors. They weren’t nearly as fundamentally sound as you’d expect from a 94-win AL champion.
But the Yankees boasted superstars. They had Aaron Judge and Juan Soto fueling an offense that produced home runs. They had Gerrit Cole fronting a top-line starting rotation. They discovered an effective bullpen formula in time for October. Ultimately, they were better than talented teams. Until they couldn’t do it anymore.
Their shortcomings finally caught up with them in Game 5 of the World Series on Wednesday night. A total defensive meltdown in the fifth inning, one that will go down as one of the worst in postseason history, cost the Yankees their season in a 7-6 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers at Yankee Stadium , ultimately ending their bid to become the champions. first club to overcome a 3-0 deficit in the World Series.
“This is as bad as it gets,” said Cole, the Yankees’ starter.
Cole was on the mound for the fifth-inning debacle. The right-hander, pitching on four days’ rest for the fourth time this season, accomplished disaster, holding Los Angeles scoreless through four hitless innings. Cole threw only 49 pitches. The Dodgers’ lone runner reached base on a walk. The problems did not seem imminent. Then everything fell apart for New York.
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It started when Enrique Hernández broke the modest no-hit bid with a leadoff single. Four pitches later, Tommy Edman hit a routine line drive to Judge in center field. The confident Judge had made a highlight catch by crashing into the wall to steal extra bases from Freddie Freeman an inning earlier. This time he failed due to his first mistake in 2024, in the regular season or in the postseason.
“That’s not happening, we have a different story tonight,” Judge said.
Five pitches later, Will Smith hit a ground ball to the right side of shortstop Anthony Volpe. Volpe, a Gold Glove winner last season and a finalist this year, played the ball cleanly but made a short jump to third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. in an attempt to catch the leading runner. Chisholm failed to correct the throw, loading the bases with no outs. Yankee Stadium fell silent.
Then Cole went to work. He struck out Gavin Lux on four pitches and finished him with a 90.4 mph fastball. Next: Shohei Ohtani. Cole also needed four pitches to retire the superstar, allowing Ohtani to swing through a curveball at the bottom of the strike zone.
Suddenly an escape without any damage seemed possible. It seemed like a certainty when Mookie Betts hit a 49.8 mph squibber to first baseman Anthony Rizzo. Because the ball bounced to Rizzo with so much spin, he didn’t charge it, but stayed behind to make sure he touched it cleanly. That meant he needed Cole to cover first base to beat Betts. But Cole didn’t rush to first base to cover the bag, and Betts reached base without a throw.
“I took a bad angle to the ball,” Cole said. “I wasn’t really sure how hard he hit it. I took a direct angle on it, like I was going to cut it off, because I just didn’t know how hard he hit it. By the time the ball passed by I wasn’t in the position to cover first. Neither of us was because the baseball was spinning and he had to secure it.”
The Dodgers scored their first run on the blunder, which went down in the box score as an infield single. It will be remembered as the beginning of the end of the Yankees’ season. Freeman, the third straight former MVP Cole to be ordered to retire, hit a two-run single to center field. Teoscar Hernández followed with a game-tying two-run double to left-center field, completing a stunning sequence that left the crowd stunned.
“You can’t give teams like that extra outs,” said Judge, who hit his first career World Series home run in the first inning to give New York an early 2-0 lead. “They’re going to take advantage, especially (with) their one, two, three at the top of the table. They’re not missing.”
Cole needed 38 pitches to survive the inning. He tied the game and recovered to pitch into the seventh inning. He left the game with one out and a one-run lead — Giancarlo Stanton’s sacrifice fly in the sixth inning put the Yankees back on top — but the fifth inning changed the game.
“We didn’t take care of the ball well enough in that inning,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “Against such a great team, they took advantage.”
With little room for error, Tommy Kahnle came in to pitch the eighth inning. He surrendered a leadoff single through the left side to Enrique Hernández and lost command from there. Edman reached on an infield single. Smith walked on four pitches. Boone decided enough was enough and replaced Kahnle with closer Luke Weaver.
“I let my team down,” Kahnle said, eyes red with emotion.
Weaver, the Yankees’ best reliever in October, delivered a sacrifice fly to Lux, which tied the game again and put Ohtani on the corner with runners on the corners. Weaver took the lead with the first pitch, causing Ohtani to foul on a changeup. But Austin Wells was called for catcher interference behind the plate on the swing, loading the bases for Betts. He delivered another sacrifice fly to give the Dodgers their first lead. It was the only clue they needed.
Ultimately, the Yankees committed almost every miscue in the box. There was Judge’s inexplicable physical accident, Volpe’s throwing error, Cole’s mental blunder, Wells’ catcher’s interference and, finally, a balk by Weaver in the ninth inning. The appearance had no impact on the scoreboard, but typified the Yankees’ shortcomings on a night when they were on display for all the world to see.
“Probably taking advantage of mistakes and opportunities,” Stanton said when asked what he thought was the difference in the series.
It was certainly the difference between the two games that bookended the series. In Game 1, Gleyber Torres’ inability to connect a throw from the outfield on Ohtani’s double in the eighth inning allowed Ohtani to advance to third base. Ohtani then scored on a sacrifice to tie the score. The run ultimately forced the game into overtime, where Freeman, with the Dodgers down by one, hit a walk-off grand slam.
The gut-punch loss marked the start of the 3-0 hole for the Yankees. They had a chance to dig further out on Wednesday. But the fifth inning changed everything. After the game, after Alex Verdugo swung through a Walker Buehler curveball to end their season, the Yankees did not open the clubhouse to the media for 45 minutes, so unusually long that Boone began his press conference by apologizing for the delay. .
The manager explained that players “poured their hearts out” with “heartfelt messages”. He emphasized, as the team has done throughout October, the proximity of this club. He said the defeat “will forever sting”. In the clubhouse, the players said goodbye with backstrokes and hugs.
“I think falling short in the World Series will probably stay with me until the day I die,” Judge said.
In the end, the Yankees’ talent was more than enough to win the AL East and claim the league’s No. 1 seed. It won in October against the Kansas City Royals and Cleveland Guardians, clubs with a piece of the Yankees’ $300 million payroll. But the Dodgers, another expensive roster packed with star power and future Hall of Famers, were too good to let that happen again. They were the better, more fundamentally sound baseball team. The fifth inning on Wednesday showed that.