Talking Baseball: Vol. 17

The Los Angeles Dodgers are World Series champions.

We have to talk about the 2024 World Series and the Los Angeles Dodgers win, including that fifth inning, Aaron Judge’s playoffs, Juan Soto’s future and the Dodgers themselves.

1. I could live to be one million years old, and somebody could explain it to me every single day of my existence, and I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever be able to comprehend what happened on this play in the top of the fifth inning of the Los Angeles Dodgers Game 5, World Series clinching win.

I do not mean to overstate this, but you could probably write a book about this play and the way it altered this game, this season, and baseball history.

It is the type of play that can launch countless narratives about playing hard, why some players and teams are winners, why some teams and players are losers, and the butterfly effect that can follow from one play.

The New York Yankees had a 5-0 lead going into that inning, with their ace — Gerrit Cole — absolutely cruising through the Dodgers lineup. They were primed to win their second straight game and send the series back to Los Angeles for Game 6 where they were going to face a Dodgers team already short on pitchers that had been rapidly burning through its bullpen, with its best player (Shohei Ohtani) being a shell of normal self because he could not physically swing a bat like he normally does.

Would they have won the series? History says no. But they would have given themselves a chance. They would have given themselves another day to keep playing and give a couple of future Hall of Famers some more chances to make history.

Instead, and there is no other way to sugarcoat this, they choked. And I do not like to say that about a professional sports team. Sometimes the other team just beats you. Sometimes, somebody else is simply better than you. But if a professional sports team can choke, this is what it would look like.

With nobody out and a runner on first, Tommy Edman hits a routine line drive to center field where Aaron Judge inexplicably dropped the ball. Judge did not commit a single error all season. He has committed just two errors since the start of the 2022 season. And he just …. dropped it.

Then the very next batter, Will Smith, hits a ground ball into the hole where Anthony Vople, a Gold Glove winning shortstop and one of the best fielders in the league at his position, bounced a throw to third base preventing a force out. Now the bases are loaded with nobody out when the inning could have been over.

Still, Cole managed to pitch through it and struck out the next two batters he faced, including Ohtani in an at-bat that was absolutely INCREDIBLE theatre, even if Ohtani was not fully himself.

Then he got another future Hall of Famer and former MVP, Betts, to hit a weak ground ball to first base.

The inning was over.

The game would have been, for all intents and purposes, over.

You got through the Dodgers’ big push and were going to completely shift the narrative of the series.

And then that play happened.

I am not one to criticize a player for not busting their ass out of the batters box on every single ground ball over the course of a 162-game season. Sometimes you need to conserve yourself, pace yourself, and play smarter, not harder. That can be fine on April 22 in a game against the Los Angeles Angels.

But in the World Series? In a potential knockout/elimination game? That is the time to take nothing for granted.

Betts did not.

Cole and Rizzo did.

And in that instant everything changed. You could just sense the air go out of the Yankees and the stadium. The Judge and Volpe plays were bad. Cole did not recover well after. But this play is the one that changed it, and nothing that happened before or after comes close to matching the failure of it.

You got out of it. The inning was over. All you had to do was perform a routine play that happens in every game and is the first thing you practice on the first day of spring training. The Yankees could not do it.

2. Aaron Judge is a GREAT player. He is one of the great players of this era across Major League Baseball and historically speaking he is a great Yankee. The overall numbers speak for themselves. But peak greatness when you wear the pinstripes is measured by what you do in October and whether or not you win a World Series.

Judge, to this point, has not done that, and unless he does do that in the future it is going to take a long time for him to live down this October performance.

It was bad.

He not only did not produce, he looked bad in a large percentage of his at-bats. It would have been one thing if he was consistently hitting the ball hard but simply falling victim to bad luck. But it was not even that. For most of the playoffs and most of the World Series he was having trouble even making consistent contact. He chased pitches out of the zone, he came up small when teams walked Juan Soto to get to him, and he missed pitches he would normally hit to the moon.

Then in the one game where he did hit — clubbing a two-run home run and a double, and then adding a highlight reel catch in center field at the wall — he dropped a routine fly ball that helped open the floodgates for the Dodgers’ rally.

3. I have been saying this all season, but if the Yankees do not re-sign Juan Soto this offseason then they might as well just change their name because they would no longer be what the Yankees brand represents.

Soto is a top-three player in baseball. In terms of pure hitting skills he might be the best *hitter* in baseball due to his combination of power, ability to hit for average and absurd plate discipline. The man knows the strike zone better than every umpire in the league. He is also still in the prime of his career and has at least 8-10 more years of high-level play in him. His presence in the Yankees lineup completely transformed the team and gave Judge somebody to complement him so it all did not have to fall on him to carry the offense.

If you are the New York Yankees, The Evil Empire, the team that used to make winning at all costs the ultimate priority, then there is no way you can let that man get away.

Not to Los Angeles. Not to San Francisco. Certainly not across the city to the Mets.

Nobody should outbid you. In the George Steinbrenner days, nobody would have.

While the Yankees have made some big splash moves in recent years (trading for Soto, signing Gerrit Cole) they have consistently missed out on a lot of the elite players that have hit the open market. None of Freddie Freeman, Shohei Ohtani, Manny Machado, Trea Turner, Yoshinobu Yamamoto or any of the recent elite free agents have made their way to The Bronx.

They can not let the one that they already have get away.

The Dodgers have become what the Yankees used to be, and they have two World Series in the past decade to show for it.

Speaking of the Dodgers.

4. This World Series win is huge for them and the narrative around them. Despite all of their spending and regular season success, they have had some shocking playoff disappointments, with their only championship in this era coming in the pandemic shortened 2020 season. That reality had a lot of people putting an asterisk next to that championship. They needed a “real” championship.

(I am not saying I share that narrative; a World Series win is a World Series win — I am just saying it existed).

Well, now they have it.

There is no asterisk here, there is no “yeah, but” here, there is no underlying narrative to discount it. They did it, and they did it convincingly.

It was also a masterclass in managing from Dave Roberts to get through this postseason and this series with what amounted to only three healthy starting pitchers. The Dodgers pitching staff had been ravaged by injuries all year, and he basically had to manage every single game like it was a Game 7 just to get through it.

The man deserves his props.

5. Imagine being the Boston Red Sox and not finding a way to make things work with Mookie Betts. The man is simply a champion, and he played like it in this series.

The way he beat out the ground ball in the fifth inning to jumpstart the rally. The professional at-bat in the eighth inning to give the Dodgers the lead and the way he celebrated a sacrifice fly. He knew the moment. He rose to it. Consistently.