Sometimes the Baseball Gods Are Just

Some thoughts on the Los Angeles Dodgers winning the 2024 World Series.

Photo by Jose Morales on Unsplash

[WARNING: New York Yankee fans should, under no circumstances, read any further.]

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has made no secret of rooting for the Boston Red Sox. As predicted, however, this past year’s Hub team was frustrating and underwhelming. For the postseason this left Red Sox fans doing the only just and honorable thing they could do: root hard for whichever team was playing the New York Yankees. And lest I started wavering in that duty, Netflix’s The Comeback trailer offered a reminder:

So I watched the World Series between the Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers and rooted for the Dodgers. It was an entertaining series, especially when the Dodgers won the first three games! Only the aforementioned 2004 Boston Red Sox team had ever come back down 0-3 to win a playoff series.

Then the Yankees won Game Four, a game that included this attempted mugging of Dodgers right fielder Mookie Betts by two Yankee fans:

The polite observation to make is that those two Yankee fans tried way harder to keep Mookie Better than Red Sox owner John Henry did back in 2019. The more honest take is that these two yutzes are lucky they didn’t hurt Betts. Any right and honorable baseball fan should be glad they were banned from Game Five.

Last night, the Yankees went up 5-0 in Game Five off of three early home runs, with Gerrit Cole not even allowing a hit until the fifth inning. And I’m not gonna lie, I started to worry that the Yankees would be able to pull off a similar feat to the 2004 Sox. The Yankees’ starting pitching behind Cole was pretty great, and any lineup featuring Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, and Giancarlo Stanton can explode at any moment.

But then Cole allowed his first hit in that fifth inning, and chaos ensured.

SBNation described it as “a World Series choke-job for the ages.” ESPN’S Stephen A. Smith blasted the Yankees for “sloppy baseball” — in contrast to the Dodgers being a “fundamentally sound team.”¹

You can click here to watch that inning in all its glory, but for the newsletter let’s just post Scott Van Pelt’s ESPN highlight:

TheRinger’s Zach Kram noted that the Yankees’ swerve from plucky underdog in a drama to villain in a screwball comedy reflected how poorly they had played throughout the Series:

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. The New York Yankees blew Game 1 of the 2024 World Series—their first Fall Classic game in 15 years—in large part due to manager Aaron Boone’s fateful choice of the wrong reliever in extra innings. Thus Freddie Freeman began his World Series MVP campaign with a walk-off grand slam.

Five days later, the Yankees blew another World Series game, and this one clinched the championship for the Los Angeles Dodgers in front of a stunned Yankee Stadium crowd. But New York didn’t lose Game 5 because of a tragic bullpen decision; rather, it imploded in spectacular, farcical fashion.

In fumbling 5-0 and 6-5 leads in a 7-6 Dodgers win, the Yankees committed two fielding errors, a catcher interference, and a balk due to an extra pickoff throw. They left 12 men on base. Their best pitcher, in arguably the most crucial play of the game, forgot to cover first base on what should have been a groundout.

As a thrilling MLB postseason concludes, it’s worth celebrating the Dodgers, who parlayed MLB’s best regular-season record into their second title this decade, and their first in a full season since 1988. (Gibby, meet Freddie, and so on.) But it’s also worth rubbernecking at the Yankees, who squandered two games they should have won, and therefore their first trip to the World Series since 2009….

New York’s win probability in Game 5 peaked at 96 percent, meaning the Dodgers, at that point, had a 1-in-25 chance of winning the World Series on Wednesday night. The Dodgers seized that chance—or, rather, the Yankees gave them that chance, with physical mistakes and mental lapses and a catastrophic teamwide collapse. The Dodgers are worthy champions of the 2024 MLB season. But it’s the Yankees’ inning of horrors that might be remembered forever.

Indeed. As great as some of the Yankees are — and props are due here to Cole in particular, who allowed five unearned runs due to the fielding behind him but then went out and pitched another inning and two/thirds of solid pitching — they found all sorts of ways to give the Dodgers extra outs. And the baseball gods usually punish such teams with heartbreaking losses.

That is what Game Five was to the Yankees. But it was wildly entertaining for everyone else. Fangraphs’ Davy Andrews ably summarized up the game:

This paragraph is just a list of things that happened during Game 5, so hold on tight. There was a brief no-hit bid from one starter and a disastrous, abortive start from the other. There were monster home runs, broken bat singles, seeing-eye grounders, great defensive plays, calamitous errors, inexcusable mental mistakes, a five-run inning, a five-run comeback, unearned runs, nearly catastrophic baserunning decisions, a catcher’s interference, a disengagement penalty, a surprisingly high number of sacrifice flies, a starter coming in to get the save on one-day’s rest, and, I’m absolutely certain, a bunch of other stuff that I’m too fried to remember. The only thing that didn’t happen, thankfully, was two ding dongs grabbing Mookie Betts. In the end, the Dodgers were the team left standing, securing a 7-6 victory over the Yankees at Yankee Stadium for their eighth World Series title in franchise history and the second in the past five years.

For everyone but New York Yankee fans, baseball is awesome today. And that is a good day for America.

1. It is undeniable the Yankees cannot run the bases to save their lives.