A Meltdown of Epic Proportion Brings World Series to an End

It’s over, and quite frankly, I’m glad. I know it seems kind of ridiculous to say this about a team that made it to the World Series, but watching the Yankees this season took years off my life. It was generally an unenjoyable experience watching this team play because their brand of baseball - so sloppy and fundamentally flawed - stained the Yankees’ brand. Big, big changes are needed this offseason, but that’s a newsletter for another day. For one more time this season, let’s get to it.

Oct. 30: Dodgers 7, Yankees 6

There are so many words I could use to describe what happened Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium, and none of them even do it justice. Disgraceful, disgusting, pathetic, putrid, pitiful, catastrophic … you get the point. I could pull out a dictionary and just keep going down the list.

The Yankees embarrassed themselves on a scale that is hard to comprehend in the fifth inning of Game 5, and by the time that 20-plus minutes of sheer horror was over, a 5-0 lead had been turned into a 5-5 tie, and you knew damn well it was just a matter of time before the Dodgers eventually took the lead - which they did in the eighth inning - and won the game to clinch their eighth World Series championship and first in a non-COVID season since 1988.

Wow, that was something. I don’t like to use the word choke, but honestly, what else would you call what happened during what might have been the worst defensive inning in the history of the World Series?

You know the old saying, you can’t give a team six outs, but that’s what the Yankees did, and what a price they paid. Now they’ll have the entire offseason to think about that while they count their millions on the various beaches and private islands they’ll all jet off to in the coming days, probably not caring nearly as much about it as the fans who will seethe until spring training 2025 when hope will once again spring eternal.

“It stings now, and it’s going to sting forever,” Aaron Boone said. “They were the better team in this series, but it doesn’t take away my pride of what that room means to me, what that group forged and went through to get here. I’m heartbroken, and I’m heartbroken for those guys who poured so much into this. The end is cruel.”

Added Gerrit Cole, “This is as bad as it gets.”

He was talking about losing the World Series, but he very easily could have been talking about the inning that essentially sealed the losing of the World Series which I’ll get to in vivid detail down below in my observations.

Look, was it nice that they finally ended their 15-year wait to get back to the World Series by winning their 41st AL pennant? Sure. But for the Yankees, the simple and inescapable reality is this: You either win the World Series or the season wasn’t good enough, and as for this season, yeah, it wasn’t nearly good enough.

The Yankees were extremely fortunate to win 94 regular-season games when you recall how utterly awful they played throughout the summer, when we were hating them on a nightly basis. Remember that folks? Their epic struggles to do everything ultimately defined who they were because how they played in the summer is exactly how they played in this World Series.

They were able to win the AL East, a division usually filled with multiple land mines to navigate through, but a division this year that featured a massively talented but underachieving Orioles team, and the mediocrities that were the Red Sox, Blue Jays and Rays.

And then they caught huge breaks in the playoffs when both the Orioles and arch-nemesis Astros were knocked out in the wild-card round, leaving them to play two AL Central patsies, the Royals and Guardians. How big was that? Since the 2013 postseason, the Yankees are 19-6 against AL Central teams and 10-24 against opponents from either the AL East, AL West, and this year the NL West Dodgers.

What’s so maddening about this is that had the Yankees not played like drunken bums in all four of the losses, they could have actually won this series in five games, or at the very least would be flying to Los Angeles for Game 6 up three games to two. Instead, they were so comically bad, they lost in five.

Cole pitched like an ace in both of his starts in Games 1 and 5, allowing just one earned run in 12.2 innings, yet the Yankees won neither of the games. Yes, he was his own worst enemy with that unbelievable brain fart that ignited the travesty that unfolded in the fifth inning Wednesday, but in terms of pitching, he dominated the Dodgers yet it mattered not one bit because his teammates cratered at the plate, on the bases, and in field.

Giancarlo Stanton was incredible the entire month with seven home runs and 16 RBI, and he kept rolling in the World Series with two bombs and five RBI. Juan Soto was a stud as he hit .327 with an 1.102 OPS in the postseason, .313 with a 1.085 OPS in the World Series. The bullpen was very good almost the entire way with only a few wobbles that proved costly, finishing with a 2.67 ERA, 2.86 in the World Series.

But what else was there? Nothing.

Outside of Cole, the rotation wasn’t nearly good enough as it put up a 4.19 ERA in the World Series with Carlos Rodon, Clarke Schmidt and Luis Gil not giving the Yankees realistic chances to win. And then the rest of this offense, my God, what a joke.

In 14 postseason games the Yankees hit .228 with an OPS of .754, and with runners in scoring position they were the opposite of clutch, .188 with a .683 OPS. Focusing just on the World Series they hit .212 with a .744 OPS and with RISP they hit .200 with a .773 OPS.

While so much of the focus is on Aaron Judge and deservedly so because he just flat out stunk in the entire postseason, so did almost everyone else. Across the entirety of the playoffs, the Yankees had seven players who were abysmal - Alex Verdugo (.208), Jose Trevino (.200), Judge (184), Jon Berti .182), Jazz Chisholm (.182), Oswaldo Cabrera (.167) and Austin Wells (.120). Is it any wonder they lost four of five to the Dodgers?

As for fielding, baserunning, situational hitting, strategic use of the pitching staff, managerial decisions, the big things, the little things, the Dodgers - who weren’t even at the top of their game - did everything that needed to be done while the Yankees did virtually nothing that needed to be done.

“I think falling short in the World Series will stick with me until I die, probably,” said Judge, who finished his postseason with a gruesome .184 average, lowering his career postseason average to .205. “Just like every other loss, those things don’t go away. There’s battle scars along the way. Hopefully when my career is over, we’ve got a lot of battle scars, but also a lot of victories.”

Here are my observations:

➤ That was a helluva first inning, huh? After Cole blew through Shohei Ohtani, Mooke Betts and Series MVP Freddie Freeman on seven pitches, the Yankees set the stadium ablaze when they ambushed Dodgers starter Jack Flaherty in the bottom half. Soto walked, Judge hit a two-run homer, and Chisholm went back-to-back to make it 3-0. And then in the second, Cole went 1-2-3 on 12 pitches, and the Yankees tacked on, knocking Flaherty out of the game when Volpe doubled and scored on Verdugo’s single.

➤ You never feel like a game is over because in baseball, you need to record 27 outs - or in this game, the Yankees needed to record 30 outs - so I was never comfortable, but when Stanton homered to lead off the third and it was 5-0, it sure felt like it was the Yankees’ night and they’d be playing Game 6 on Friday night.

➤ And then it happened. The fifth inning. As bad an inning that has ever been played at a level higher than Little League. Watching it unfold was like getting stabbed repeatedly, each cut digging deeper and deeper into your soul. To this point, Cole had been untouchable as he’d thrown only 49 pitches through four innings and permitted just two baserunners, both on walks. It felt like he could go all the way and throw a complete game with his stuff electric, but 38 pitches and five runs later, that dream was dead.

➤ It began with a Kike Hernandez single, the first hit Cole allowed. And then came the follies in the field. Tommy Edman hit a line drive right at Judge, and he took his eye off the ball and dropped it. It was his first error in 1,958 innings played in center field, regular and postseason. “You can’t give a good team like that extra outs,” Judge said. “So it starts with me there, a line drive coming in. I misplayed that. If that doesn't happen, I think it's a different story tonight.” Gee, ya think? Will Smith then hit a grounder to Volpe who knew he had time to get the force at third, but threw the ball in the dirt and Chisholm couldn’t save him, so now the bases were loaded with not outs when the inning should have been over. “Just trying to make a play,” Volpe said. “I figured that was my only play.”

➤ Here, Cole manned up as he whiffed Gavin Lux, and then with the drama and tension at an incredible high, he blew away Ohtani. One more out was all he needed, and he had it when he induced Betts to hit a weak grounder to Rizzo at first. But Cole thought Rizzo was going to take it to the bag himself, Rizzo thought Cole would be covering, inexplicable laziness and stupidity by both guys. Meanwhile, Betts was flying down the line because unlike so many Yankees, he plays balls to the wall all the time, so naturally he easily beat it out while Cole and Rizzo were staring at each other and Hernandez scored to make it 5-1. Staggeringly unbelievable. “I took a bad angle to the ball,” Cole said. “I wasn’t sure really off the bat how hard he hit it. I took a direct angle to it to cut it off. By the time the ball got by me, I was not in a position to cover first. Neither of us were, based on the spin of the baseball and him having to secure it.”

➤ Yet while that sucked, it was still only 5-1, right? Get the god damn sixth out of the inning, and all is still pretty well, but now Cole was rattled and in blindingly quick fashion, Freeman singled home two runs and Teoscar Hernandez doubled in two more and the game was tied. As the walls were crumbling down, and he was clearly getting tired, what did Boone and pitching coach Matt Blake do? They stood there in the dugout blowing bubbles and chewing on sunflower seeds. Neither of them thought it might be a good idea to go out and calm Cole down and give him a breather. At least Rizzo had the common sense to do that. Yet another reason why I wish Boone and his entire coaching staff would be fired. Blake runs out to the mound every time a team sends up a pinch hitter, but he was glued to the dugout railing watching as the Yankees season was imploding before his and Boone’s eyes. Fire these guys, Hal.

➤ Cole still wasn’t out of the inning as he walked Max Muncy who went 0-for-15 in the series, before he finally retired the guy who started all the trouble, Kike Hernandez. “At the end of it, it almost felt like a win to just not give up the lead and be in a position to keep going,” Cole said.

➤ Here was Boone’s view of the whole shit show: “We didn’t take care of the ball well enough in that inning. Against a great team like that, they took advantage. It looked like just kind of that sinking liner that Judge missed. The play to Volpe, the right move obviously going to third, a little bit of a short hop over there to third, didn't complete the play. And then Mookie hits a squibber so Rizz couldn’t really run through it. He kind of had to stay there and make sure he secured the catch because of the spin on the ball. And I think Gerrit just - all that he went through in that inning, kind of spent and kind of almost working his way out of it, just didn’t react quick enough to get over.”

➤ Back in the second inning, after Verdugo’s RBI single, the Yankees had a chance to really blow the game open but after reliever Anthony Banda walked Soto and Judge to load the bases, Chisholm grounded out, stranding all three. In the fifth, the Yankees had a chance to answer the Dodgers’ big inning, but once again, after loading the bases with two outs when Volpe singled, Wells got hit by a pitch and Verdugo walked, Gleyber Torres flied out. Those two failures were part of a 1-for-10 team-wide meltdown with runners in scoring position as the Yankees ended up leaving 12 men on base.

➤ With all that bad shit behind them, they regained the lead in the sixth when Soto and Judge walked, a grounder moved them up and Soto scored on Stanton’s sacrifice fly, but here again, after Rizzo walked to put two men on base, Volpe stranded them with a ground out, wasting another chance to put up a rally.

➤ On to the eighth with Tommy Kahnle and his god damn changeup on the mound. Kahnle had a weird postseason because in his first eight appearances he did not allow an earned run, but he was in constant trouble because he yielded four hits and six walks. He danced around all that traffic, but it finally came back to bite him as he faced three men and they all reached - Kike Hernandez and Edman singled and Smith walked to load the bases. So Boone called on Luke Weaver for an impossible escape, and Weaver, who had to be gassed, could not do it. Lux tied the game with a sacrifice fly, and after yet another bonehead play, Ohtani being awarded first base on catchers’ interference against Wells that re-loaded the bases, Betts plated the eventual winning run with a sacrifice fly.

➤ The Yankees still were not dead because in the eighth, Judge doubled and Chisholm walked with one out. What does Boone always say, “it’s right there in front of us.” Yep, it was, and Stanton flied out and Rizzo struck out, threat dead. And in the ninth, the Dodgers summoned starting pitcher and Game 3 stud Walker Buehler to close it out because Dave Roberts had no one else to turn to, and Buehler mowed down Volpe, Wells and Verdugo on 16 pitches and the Bronx wept as the Dodgers piled out of the dugout to celebrate on the Yankee Stadium pitching mound, the final indignation of the night.

➤ The Dodgers got almost nothing from the best player in the world, Ohtani, as he went 2-for-19 with no RBI, some of that before he hurt his shoulder in Game 2, and still, the Dodgers won in five games. Ultimately, they were even worse at the plate than the Yankees as they hit .206 as a team with an OPS of .702, and with RISP they hit .184 with a .623 OPS. But the difference between the Yankees losing and the Dodgers winning is that in the biggest moments, the Dodgers got hits and the Yankees didn’t.

➤ One last mind-melting note: How stupidly improbable was this meltdown by the Yankees? Teams that trailed by five runs or more in a World Series all-time were 6-227. Now they are 7-227, and the Dodgers became the first team to rally from at least five runs down to win a clinching game. Proud night for the Yankees.

➤ As for Pinstripe People, I hope you enjoyed everything this season, whether you agreed with me or not. I won’t be going away because I’ll have season-ending report cards next week, and I’ll pop up with thoughts once free agency gets going, assuming the Yankees do something, and there will still be the occasional history story, but things will definitely slow down. I hope you stay on the mailing list because it has been a lot of fun sharing my rants with you.