In the previous season, in which the Los Angeles Dodgers did not reach the playoffs, Barack Obama had not yet been re-elected. They were still very good in 2012, which was Andre Ethier’s last good season, Chad Billingsley’s last healthy season, and Kenley Jansen’s first as a full-time closer. They improved from 86 wins in 2013 to 92 wins and have not fallen below 91 wins or missed the playoffs in any full season since. They only won one World Series in that span, and both of them were completely earned – when the Dodgers won they had an absurd .712 winning percentage. The edition of the World Series that ended 2020’s plague-distorted mini-season-And there’s not really anything external anyway. The Dodgers won 111 games in 2022 with an equally absurd .715 winning percentage, and that team did not survive the NLDS. The Phillies team that made it to the World Series that year won 87.
It doesn’t seem quite right to say that the Dodgers were cheated out of a World Series victory during any of those years, with the possible exception of the half-year in which they actually won it. They’ve been in the postseason for nearly a decade and a half, and during that time have become the model organization in the game — as smart and visionary as the most financially optimized franchises, as detail-oriented and visionary as the most growth-oriented. More oriented, richer and more ambitious than any other team in the game, and just as cynical as everyone else. It would have been strange if the Dodgers hadn’t won the World Series somewhere in there, though it wouldn’t have felt quite right – it wouldn’t have been appropriately October-coded or appropriately called the Dodgers – if it hadn’t been a little silly when it finally happened.
The team that ended its five-game World Series sweep against the Yankees on Wednesday night with an extremely ugly, brutal and retroactive 7-6 victory was not far and away the most impressive of the Dodgers teams this season. Could not do this during. The team’s tenure at the top of the National League. This year’s champions were again the winningest team in the National League, but they were much less healthy and always seemed less affected by the strange grace of October than the Padres and Mets teams they sent to the World Series. He sent them all away just like that.
Fortune and grace are great, and It’ll be a lot of fun as long as they lastBut a team that refuses to make mistakes like the Dodgers did this October will always have an advantage. It makes sense that the team batted bestand which was taken advantage of the most external marginal type Whoever fills out the lineup with the best and best-compensated will ultimately rise to the top. It makes more sense when that team also has three Hall of Famers in various stages of their prime at the top of their lineup, as the Dodgers have. And yet, until the moment when Walker Buehler – the starting pitcher, the same guy who missed two years due to arm injuries and who had pitched two days earlier – got the last out in the bottom of the ninth at Yankee Stadium, it Never felt sensible, or remotely appointed. Which is to say, it fits.
It’s fitting that the most unlikely Dodgers juggernaut of this generation of juggernauts — a team that entered October with 60 percent of the starting rotation, no closer, and a first baseman who ran like he was wearing parking boots — would have the same job. To finish. October is like that, and so is baseball. It doesn’t make this Dodgers team any less deserving, but it also doesn’t make the far better teams that preceded them any more deserving. This Dodgers team certainly earned it, but this World Series was also about the best organization in baseball ultimately overcoming the inevitable and harsh debilitating effects of October baseball. Just keep getting there, and eventually what happened to the Dodgers in the top of the fifth inning of Game 5 can happen to you too. This is true whether you “deserve” to be there or not. Deserve in October has nothing to do with this.
Game 5 took several games; A great thing happened in the fifth inning alone. This World Series ended more or less the same way. The Yankees quickly outclassed Dodgers starter Jack Flaherty, especially when Aaron Judge shook off his postseason struggles by hitting a super-loud two-run homer in the bottom of the first. Flaherty didn’t survive the second, Jazz Chisholm and Giancarlo Stanton homered, and the already gassed Dodgers bullpen was called into action much earlier and under more pressure than expected. It was looking good for the Yankees, or things could have looked that good for a team with a 3-1 series deficit. Their superstar was awakening, Stanton was looking even more Jack Reacher-ish than usual, and their ace was looming.
Gerrit Cole did not allow a hit until the top of the fifth, in which he entered fresh and effective with a 5–0 lead and which he left, 21 minutes after that half-inning, with the score 5–5 and no outs. The score began with earned runs allowed. Very few teams have had worse innings in the World Series – the Cardinals gave up 10 runs in an inning in 1968, and the Cubs entered the seventh inning of Game 3 of the 1929 World Series down 8–0 and trailed 10–8. Left. -But the cursed softball inning that cost the Yankees the lead Wednesday night still felt historic. When Cole finally gave up his first hit, Judge ruled out an easy Tommy Edman liner for a bizarre and unlucky error – it looked as if he had taken his glove off too soon.
By the time the inning ended, shortstop Anthony Volpe had made a throw to third for a force out and Cole himself, after tremendous strikeouts by Gavin Lux and Shohei Ohtani, with the bases loaded, grounded out to short instead of covering first. , which should have been an inning-ending cue-shot from Mookie Betts. Given those extra three outs, the Dodgers made an inning of it through dinks and dunks and other acts of non-capitulation. All five runs were unearned, and the result for the Yankees was about as bad an inning as one could imagine performed by a very good MLB team at more or less the worst possible time. But those (brutal, extremely painful to watch) mistakes weren’t the whole story.
Yankees errors lengthened innings, but the series turned, as in the Dodgers’ previous wins this postseason, as the Dodgers continued to lengthen their innings and take advantage of opportunities given to them by their opposite numbers. It just seemed sadistic. In fact, they were doing what great teams do; The Dodgers won this series due to the irascibility of Tommy Edman and Kiké Hernández and the contributions of superstars like Mookie Betts or Shohei Ohtani; It’s fitting that a roster full of Hall of Famers would win less through big-ticket pyrotechnics, rather than being patient, ruthless and unrelenting in the ways that more professional or random champions have been. None of this felt inevitable, even in Game 5, but at some point it all started to stink of destiny. The last game of this series wasn’t what you’d call “good” – the teams combined to give up 22 runners and issue 17 walks in a nearly four-hour long game – but damned if it wasn’t smelly.
That the Yankees were able to come back and take a 6–5 lead in the sixth was impressive, especially after wasting a bases-loaded opportunity in the bottom of the fifth; There was a lot of baseball in this game. It seemed inevitable later that the Yankees would lose that lead, with a tired bullpen putting too many runners on base and the Dodgers bringing them home via a series of dutiful sacrifice flies. Such a fate could, and almost did, befall the Dodgers, who were pressured by Flaherty’s early exit and whose bullpen – a prime and classically now almost Dodgers collection of reclaimed randos, thirtysomethings and pitch-design creatures. – Was reduced to such an extent that Blake Treinen was asked to prevent a steal by throwing 42 pitches to get seven outs. It worked, and by the time Buehler was out of the Finals, every previous stupid thing seemed, as it always does when a team wins the World Series, the result of rigor and some grand design.
But it is not really so, or it is not always so. Good baseball teams are troublesome; are great baseball teams stressfulIn such a way that it becomes difficult to imagine that any team will ever be able to defeat them. These types of teams don’t make mistakes, and for those rare champions who rise to the occasion and continue on their way to victory, there are many teams who get there by testing locks and widening the margins and refusing to mess up. Reaches. The Dodgers’ greatest players are among the best of their era, which is also true for the Yankees. Some of those players were greater than others in this series, and one of them, Freddy Freeman, made for a very deserving World Series MVP. But it is the nature of the game, or the version of the game played during this last difficult month, that a series between the two best regular season teams in each league, each with Hall of Famers, will end as strangely as this. In. Even when things align in such a way that the World Series pits two superteams and the game’s most charismatic superstars against each other, it will come down to Tommy Edman who somehow manages to be annoying. Will open another level. After leaving the Cardinals And Blake Treinen’s unkempt facial hair and uninhibited sweeper are causing some kind of uneasiness.
There are a lot of cruel terminology in baseball, but “error” is probably the harshest of them all. There’s really no other word for the foul play that plagued the Yankees in this one, turning a promising awkward moment into what was otherwise a one-sided series. Nevertheless, there is something wrong with it, only in the sense that the idea of error represents a violation or deviation from some broader design. If you watch baseball, you already know it doesn’t work out that way. There are things that should happen, and then there are things that happen instead, and the best any team can do is keep themselves in the mix and hope for the best. Keep doing this and you may not only finally win one, but win one that somehow feels like it was yours all along.