Yankees drop the ball in Game 5 of World Series, give title to Dodgers in unfathomable loss
Yankees starting pitcher Gerrit Cole reacts during the fifth inning against the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 5 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
This October, the Yankees repeatedly credited their tightly-knit clubhouse and resilient nature for getting them to the World Series. That, plus a $300 million roster, a handful of All-Stars, a cakewalk through Kansas City and Cleveland, along with featuring this year’s likely MVP, Aaron Judge.
What they couldn’t do is catch the baseball.
On Wednesday night, in the sloppy, sickening season-ending Game 5, it wasn’t any more complicated than that. The dream of a 28th championship didn’t die in the Bronx because the Dodgers ripped away the Commissioner’s Trophy.
The Yankees simply handed the hardware to them.
There’s really no other way to describe the criminal negligence that happened in plain view of the 49,263 stunned witnesses at the Stadium. Sure, the final score says the Dodgers won, 7-6. But five of those runs were gift-wrapped during a nightmare fifth inning that sunk the Yankees’ revived hopes of heading back to L.A. with a chance to shock the world.
The Yankees were the 24th team to fall behind 3-0 in the World Series, but after a raucous 11-4 pasting of the Dodgers in Tuesday’s Game 4, and an early 5-0 lead Wednesday behind ace Gerrit Cole, they seemed perfectly positioned to be the first to force a Game 6.
Judge and Jazz Chisholm hit back-to-back homers in the first inning, Alex Verdugo added an RBI single in the second and Giancarlo Stanton went deep in the third. The Bombers were back, the Bronx was rocking and anything seemed possible.
“You feel pretty confident with your ace up there and a five-run lead,” Verdugo said. “But you know, that’s baseball, man. They played the better baseball in this World Series.”
We could comb through the various blunders that put the Yankees in that 3-0 hole to begin with, but there’s no need. Not when they put on a clinic in self-sabotage during the fifth inning of Wednesday’s crushing defeat, perfectly illustrating how to blow a series in the margins.
The Yankees committed a pair of errors and also suffered an inexplicable brain freeze — with neither Cole nor Anthony Rizzo beating Mookie Betts to first base on a routine grounder — that opened the floodgates to five unearned runs that wiped out the early 5-0 lead. Not to mention knocking the Yankees sideways mentally.
“I guess it’s a little hard to comprehend,” an exasperated Cole said afterward. “But the same time, I feel like we came in the dugout like, ‘Wow!” But we were still in the ballgame. They put the ball in play, and in baseball, when you put the ball in play, you get rewarded for it sometimes.”
When you’re lucky enough that the team trying to catch it is the Yankees, absolutely. The amazing thing is that Judge was the one who started the avalanche by somehow clanking Tommy Edman’s sinking liner off the heel of his glove. The night was shaping up to be a legacy game for Judge, who not only smacked his first homer of the World Series but also made a great leaping catch, crashing into the wall, to rob Freddie Freeman. But now he’ll be remembered for the Edman Error instead.
“Just a— couple mistakes that you can’t give a good team, the extra outs,” Judge said. “It starts with me on that line drive coming in. I just didn’t make the play.”
Little did the Yankees realize it was contagious. Next up was Will Smith, who smacked a grounder at Anthony Volpe — a finalist this year for his second Gold Glove — and he spiked a throw to third on an attempted fielder’s choice that loaded the bases with none out.
Still, Cole muscled up, blazing a 99-mph fastball by a swinging Gavin Lux, then whiffed Shohei Ohtani with a knuckle curve. When Betts hit a slow spinner at Rizzo, the threat seemed to be averted. But Rizzo stood flat-footed waiting for the grounder, and Cole watched from halfway up the first-base line, allowing Betts an easy RBI infield single.
“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, as if to cut it off . . . but by the time the ball got by me, I wasn’t in a position to cover first. Neither of us were, based on the spin of the baseball and him having to secure it. Just a bad read off the bat.”
To think that a hundred-foot grounder, traveling 49 mph, basically torpedoed the Yankees’ championship dreams. But that’s pretty much what happened, as Freeman — later named the World Series MVP — followed with a two-run single and Teoscar Hernandez a two-run double to tie the score at 5 before a shell-shocked Cole finally got Enrique Hernandez on a bouncer to short.
“We just didn't take care of the ball well enough in that inning,” manager Aaron Boone said. “Against a great team like that, they took advantage.”
That’s putting it mildly. The Yankees didn’t just crack the door for the Dodgers in that fifth. They opened it wide, then held it for them to charge through. Such charity is not easily forgotten, especially when the Yankees were so close to making a historic run at the title.
“I think falling short in the World Series will stay with me until i die, probably,” Judge said.
Teams lose. It happens. But for the Yankees, a team with so much championship potential, kicking the chance away like they did Wednesday night had to make it all the more crushing. The World Series literally slipped through their hands — and gloves.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.