Miscues Define Bitter End To A High-Achieving Bombers Season
Miscues Define Bitter End To A High-Achieving Bombers Season
There is a stigma to getting swept in a World Series, but I can’t imagine such a fate would have been more embarrassing than what transpired on the hallowed grounds of Yankee Stadium during Wednesday night’s Game 5.
The Bronx Bombers roared to a 5-0 lead over the Dodgers and let it slip away through some of the most blundering baseball you’ll ever see outside of a Little League fence. Los Angeles graciously accepted New York’s largesse and took the game, 7-6, and the World Championship, four games to one.
As thrilling as Tuesday’s 11-4 rout was, Yankees fans might have felt better about their squad if the season had ended there with another ho-hum 4-2 Dodgers victory like in Games 2 and 3. That way, there would have been no shame in losing to a more complete ballclub, one with a little bit better pitching, hitting, fielding, and baserunning.
Instead, the winter will be spent replaying all the Yankees miscues that contributed to an inconceivable defeat in an elimination game when in reality, this has been a flawed team all season, reaching this level only because the rest of the American League was worse.
The Bombers relied on a select few arms and bats to carry them through the year. The playoffs were no different, except for switching Aaron Judge’s regular season with Giancarlo Stanton’s postseason and vice versa. The rest of the lineup was stocked with .220 hitters or worse, just like it was for 162 games. Maybe two pitchers could be trusted to get people out in big spots. And the Yankees continued to run into outs throughout their playoff run as they did in the regular season. Sending the laborious Stanton home from second on Anthony Volpe’s fourth inning single during Game 3 was an all-time brain fart of a coaching decision.
But on Wednesday, the Dodgers made the Yankees pay the most for their shoddy defense. In the top of the fifth inning, Judge dropped a routine fly ball in center field to put runners on first and second with no one out. The next L.A. batter hit a grounder into the hole, where shortstop Volpe fielded it and opted to get the lead runner at third. Except Volpe bounced the throw, loading the bases.
Yankees ace Gerrit Cole rebounded to strike out the next two hitters, including certain NL MVP Shohei Ohtani, but mental errors by first baseman Anthony Rizzo, who didn’t aggressively charge Mookie Betts’ slow ground ball, and Cole, who didn’t run hard to cover the first base bag, extended the inning. Two hits later and the game was tied.
During the Dodgers’ two-run rally to take the lead for good in the eighth, they parlayed one hard-hit single with an infield hit, a walk, and a catcher’s interference call to move runners into scoring position for a pair of sacrifice flies. Fittingly, it was much-maligned Yankees leftfielder Alex Verdugo who K’d for the final out.
Unfortunately, the Yankees’ trash performance in Game 5 will be how many remember the season when this team, at least from my perspective, probably overachieved. A year ago, the Bombers were in limbo, figuring out how to blend in some youth and energy into a slow and aging group. They traded for outfielder Juan Soto, who brought a mix of swag and hitting professionalism unseen in these parts in decades. Led by Soto and Judge, whose 58 home runs and .458 on base were otherworldly, the Yanks went from on the outside looking in to their first World Series appearance in 15 years.
Only Judge’s awesome regular season will now be dwarfed by his egregious error, not to mention his failures at the plate virtually all postseason. In addition, Luke Weaver, who had a magical ascension in the last month to take over the Yankees’ closer role, will go down with two blown saves in a World Series on his record. Neither was his fault—besides allowing two inherited runners to score without surrendering a base hit or walk in that frame on Wednesday night, he was also dinged in Game 1, though if a relay from Soto to Gleyber Torres was executed properly, Ohtani doesn’t take third and score on a Betts sacrifice fly to tie the score at 2-2 in the bottom of the eighth inning. A Freddie Freeman grand slam off Nestor Cortes, who hadn’t pitched since he went on the injured list in September, walked it off for L.A. in the tenth.
All in all, doesn’t a Dodgers sweep sound like it would have been less excruciating?