Has it really sunk in yet that the Dodgers are full-season, no-doubt, take-no-quarter World Series champions? Has it really sunk in yet that the Yankees aren't just another group of also-rans, but a team as fully able to implode at the wrong time as any team in major league history?
Both teams needed the best they had available for Game 5 Wednesday night. The Dodgers to win it, the Yankees to stay alive long enough to force a cross-country trip to Los Angeles for Game 6 at minimum. When the Dodgers needed reinforcements, they found them, sometimes in places unexpected outside their portal.
Anyone remember Mystique and Aura? The Dodgers kidnapped them with no known ransom demand turning up at this writing. The Yankees needed Mystique and Aura but they got Wobbly and Rickety.
Just one night after showing serious enough life by blowing the Dodgers out of Game 4, the Bronx Bumblers self-dismantled in ways almost unheard-of by any previous World Series contestant. The Series-clinching, Game 5 final was 7-6. It was a close game only if you ignore the way the Yankees helped the Dodgers close an early 5-0 Yankee lead.
The Game 5 Dodgers almost didn't need stout innings from their bullpen, a shutdown ninth from projected Game 7 starter Walker Buehler, and too-timely hits enough to matter. If you didn't know better, you'd be swearing the Yankees were handing it to the Dodgers on a platinum platter.
The 161st Street Stumblers lost the Series to a Dodger team that found ways not to let little things like too many injured pitchers and a half-effective bullpen keep them down for very long. bullpen half of which would be effective keep them down for very long. But Game 5 night just might have been the single most surrealistic game of this Series, if not any Series.
Trust me when I say that that's saying something.
The top of the fifth challenges such sad Series mishaps past as Fred Snodgrass's glove turning into a trampoline, Freddie Lindstrom's pebble, Ernie Lombardi being dismantled at the plate, Mickey Owen's passed ball, Willie Davis losing two Oriole flies in the sun in the same inning, Curt Flood losing Jim Northrup's drive in the sun, or Bill Buckner's horror seeing the slow grounder skip beneath his down-stretched mitt.
Does anyone remember that the 11-4 Game 4 beatdown the Yankees dropped on the Dodgers actually had people predicting with straight faces that the sleeping giants were awakening enough to do the unheard-of and take the next three straight to teach those ornery louts from Los Angeles a lesson in manners and championship?
There went those ideas. Above and beyond the Yankees waiting 15 years to get back here only to tumble away this time, above and beyond the Dodgers winning 11 out of 12 National League West titles with only one World Series conquest to show for it until now, this is what everyone will remember about this Series in general and Game 5 in particular:
They'll remember Series MVP Freddie Freeman's Game 1-winning ultimate grand salami as the first salvo toward his reaching the seats in the first four games, which marries to his bombs in Games 5 and 6 in 2021 (when he was still a Brave) to tie George Springer for the longest Series home run streak (six games).
They'll even remember Freeman overcoming a balky ankle keeping him somewhat calm in the earlier postseason rounds. Somewhat. Because by the time Freeman got finished with his bombing in Game 4, Yankee fans were holding up signs pleading, "Freddie, Please Stop!" As if Freeman had any intention of obeying.
They'll remember Shohei Ohtani jamming his shoulder on a failed Game 2 stolen base attempt, leaving himself all but useless for most of the Series, but insisting upon staying in the lineup just in case. If only for the presence.
They'll remember Dodger starting pitcher Jack Flaherty keeping the Yankees to two runs starting Game 1, but getting flogged for four before he could get out of the Game 5 second — including Aaron Judge, heretofore the Yankees' first among the sleeping giants, awakening himself and Yankee Stadium with a 2-run homer in the bottom of the first, followed immediately by Jazz Chisholm, Jr.'s solo bomb . . . until . . .
They remember the Yankees leading 5-0, and Yankee starter Gerrit Cole striking Gavin Lux and Ohtani out swinging back to back, and not one Dodger hit thus far.
Until . . . come the fifth . . .
* With Kiké Hernandez aboard on a leadoff single, busting any shot Cole had at a no-hitter, Tommy Edman lined one that Judge — who committed only one error all year to that point — normally catches in his sleep. This time, the ball hit the web of Judge's glove and bounced away.
* Five pitches later, Will Smith grounded one to Yankee shortstop Anthony Volpe's right. Volpe picked it clean the way a Gold Glover does. Then he threw an awkward short-hopper to Chisholm at third the way a Cold Glover does. Chisholm couldn't get the handle on that throw. The Dodgers had the bases loaded and nobody out.
* The Mookie Monster singled Hernandez home, on a squibber first baseman Anthony Rizzo had to step back to snag because it was spinning like a gyroscope, practically . . . leaving Cole not covering first because the pitcher took a bad route to the ball, leaving both men resembling raw rookies with signals crossed and knotted.
* Freeman singled Edman and Will Smith home and set up first and third.
* Teoscar Hernández doubled Betts and Freeman home.
* And every last one of those 5 runs in the Dodger fifth was unearned.
"This is as bad as it gets," Cole said postgame. "It's the worst feeling you can have. You have to keep sometimes willing yourself to believe and give yourself a chance. You keep pushing and pushing, and ultimately, you fall short. It's brutal."
"You can't give teams like that extra outs," said Judge, who'd made what threatened to be the play of the night when he stole an extra-base hit from Freeman by scaling the left center field fence in the fourth. "They're going to capitalize — their 1-2-3 at the top of the order, they don't miss. You give them a chance with guys on base, they're going to capitalize. You gotta limit the mistakes."
Then, everyone will remember Blake Treinen, the man who usually gets the final three outs of a Dodger win, coming in a little bit sooner than usual to clean up a mess and keep the Yankees at bay from there. As in, the bottom of the sixth, with the Yankees back in the lead 6-5, but threatening to put the game back out of reach with first and second, two out, and Volpe due at the plate.
The same Volpe who really started the Yankees' Game 4 mayhem — when they were down 2-1 in the third thanks to yet another Freeman flog two innings earlier, but with the bases loaded on two out — by hitting Daniel Hudson's first service into the left field seats.
Treinen got Volpe to ground out to second for the side this time. Then he retired the Yankees in order in the seventh and squirmed out of a first-and-second jam with a fly out by Giancarlo Stanton and a swinging strikeout on Anthony Rizzo.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, Buehler ambled down to the Dodger bullpen. Just call me if you need me, boss. He'd only told any Dodger personnel, from teammates to front office people, that he was available to work in Game 5 if need be. He made for the Dodger bullpen after the bottom of the fifth.
Then, Buehler started loosening up. Then, he started warming up in earnest. He may well have thrown the equivalent of the first two and a half innings worth of a quality start by the time he got the call to handle the bottom of the Game 5 ninth.
He got Volpe to open with a sharp ground out to third base. He struck Austin Wells out swinging on a full count. He struck former teammate Alex Verdugo out swinging on 1-2. Buehler then spread his arms like an old-time nightclub singer inviting applause for the big finish and his mates began pouring onto the Yankee Stadium infield to start the party.
They survived the early bombs by Judge, Chisholm, and Giancarlo Stanton. They survived their Game 4 bullpen game plan getting vapourised, going into sacrificial lamb mode the better to keep their six best relief arms available for Wednesday night. They survived their own recent past of, manager Dave Roberts admitted postgame, losing games that handed them what Game 5 had before the fifth inning.
They didn't stop to ask questions when the Yankees began passing out early Christmas presents one botched out after the other in the top of the fifth. They knew the answers going into the Series.
Their knowledge only began with Betts working on playing caroms off the wall almost as incessantly as he does on his batting swing. It only continued with every Dodger no matter how wounded attacking basepaths rather than just running them. The Dodgers scouted the Yankees and determined they were über talented but fundamentally lacking. They didn't have to advertise it. They simply exposed it.
The Yankees didn't pay close enough attention to any reports telling them the Dodgers could match them talent for talent even with their MIAs. The Dodgers, for all their star and firepower, were too grounded fundamentally to let the Yankees treat them like just another poor-relations team.
Most of all — unlike the title they won at the end of the surrealistic, pan-damn-ically shortened season and under-isolation postseason — nobody so inclined can hang any kind of asterisk on this one. These Dodgers went the distance no matter whose interpreter swindled him out of millions to cover debts to a bookie, no matter who hit the injured list, no matter who lost a season to an injury. No matter that they tied and took what proved the winning lead on a pair of eighth-inning sacrifice flies.
The last man standing? A pitcher who once resembled a mound terror until two Tommy John surgeries and other ailments kept him limited this regular season, only to show up in October looking as close to his former self as his age and body allowed and hell bent on doing something, anything, to secure his team the Big Prize.
"This is the only reason I play," Buehler said postgame, "for games like this. The whole year — the offseason, spring training, the regular season — it doesn't matter. Well, it matters, but not like these games. To win championships is why I play. It's the best feeling in the world. I live for this."
He pitched the ninth to prove it. A ground out and back-to-back swinging strikeouts. Followed by stepping down from the rubber, holding his arms out like a vintage nightclub singer delivering the Big Finish, and being mobbed by a swarm of Dodgers. They all lived for this.
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