The Yankees played two different games on Wednesday night. The one where they hit homers and Gerrit Cole dominates and you can convince yourself they are the type of team that should win a World Series.
And the one in which they botch and bumble and you can convince yourself the whole group met in the parking lot before the game.
It should be put in a time capsule to describe the 2024 team.
In the end, the Yankees could not homer their way beyond superior competition. They had control of both the first game of this World Series and the last game of the 2024 season. They lost both. Two of the most inexcusable, painful defeats in their history. They never cleaned up all their issues of poor fundamentals and execution that so plagued them all year. So their season ends not with a 28th championship, but misery of what could have and should have been.
The Dodgers beat the Yankees 7-6 to win their eighth World Series and celebrate on the Yankee Stadium field.
The Yankees lost because stars Cole and Aaron Judge were both G-O-A-Ts and goats in this clincher. Because they had a fifth inning that boggled the mind for ineptitude — except if you watched the Yankees all year. And because when the Dodgers hit back, the Yankees could not counter enough.
Sound familiar?
It should.
This is the story of the Judge Era. When the AL Central is in the way, the Yankees are world-beaters. When sturdier competition gets in the way, the Yankees do not win the World Series.
The Yankees were 31-9 (.775) against the AL Central (postseason included) this year and 71-65 (.522) against everyone else. They have played seven rounds against the AL Central in the playoffs since Judge’s first full season in 2017, including two to win the AL pennant this year, and advanced through all seven. They have played eight rounds against everyone else and won one, the one-game wild card in 2018 vs. the A’s, who kind of spiritually (if not geographically) belong in the AL Central.
They won one World Series game this year — Game 4, when the Dodgers threw none of their main pitchers: The AL Central of strategy.
The reality is the Yankees should have won two other games, but they lost Game 1 in Los Angeles with a bunch of bad defense. You will never guess what happened in Game 5.
They took a 5-0 lead over the first three innings and Cole did not permit a hit through the first four. Judge hit a two-run homer three batters into the game and Jazz Chisholm went back-to-back. Alex Verdugo delivered an RBI single in the second and Giancarlo Stanton led off the third with his Yankee record seventh homer of this postseason. Judge made a dazzling catch while slamming into the left-center field wall in the fourth — and because it was Judge, it felt great for the Yankees — as he goes, so goes the team so often.
And this felt like he had finally joined the 120th World Series with his bat and glove. That turned up the volume at Yankee Stadium and opened the door that the Yankees would become the first team of 25 to ever go down oh-three in the World Series and force even a Game 6 and force this best-of-seven to Los Angeles for a potential baseball miracle.
But the tenor of the game changed when Judge dropped a Tommy Edman one-on, no-out fly ball in the fifth — as Judge goes, so goes the Yankees. Then Anthony Volpe spiked a throw to third that Chisholm could not corral and the bases were loaded. And still Cole had a chance to wiggle out. He struck out both Gavin Lux and Shohei Ohtani. And then Mookie Betts hit a squiggly grounder to first.
There is nothing done in spring training from the first day to last like pitchers fielding practice — going over the routine constantly. Going over a play like this when Rizzo should have charged. He didn’t. Cole should have not just broken to the bag and stopped, but actually raced to cover first. Betts, therefore, reached easily and a run scored. A door flew open.
Freeman, the Series MVP, lashed a two-run single and Yankee killer Teoscar Hernandez a two-run tying double. The air was out of the Yankees and the Stadium. The Yankees would actually take a 6-5 lead in the sixth, but it was an inning in which they had three walks and no hits. They drew eight walks from the second to eighth innings and that was the lone run that scored. They went 1-for-10 overall with runners in scoring position.
Luke Weaver was on the mound for two sacrifice flies in the eighth that put the Dodgers ahead — of course aided by another Yankee mistake, a catcher’s interference against Austin Wells.
The Dodgers had their starter Jack Flaherty knocked out after recording just four outs, they were reeling all game trying to cover it with their pitching. And the Yanks could not accept the gifts — not when they persisted in giving more gifts away.
So a World Series they could have and should have won, instead ended in five games. The Yankees never cleaned up their game — and are off to a winter of regrets because of it.
