World Series: Yankees give Dodgers a scare in ninth inning of Game 2 before coming up short

LOS ANGELES — The Yankees got flattened in Game 1 of the World Series on Friday night, as Freddie Freeman’s walk-off grand slam in the bottom of the 10th inning sent them hard to the canvas.

They stayed there in Game 2.

With their offense in stall mode through eight innings and Carlos Rodon tagged for three home runs in 3 1⁄3 innings, the Yankees fell to the Dodgers, 4-2, on Saturday night in front of another rocking sellout crowd of 52,725 at Dodger Stadium. They will bring a two-games-to-none deficit into Game 3 on Monday night at Yankee Stadium.

“We have to win Monday, that’s the bottom line,” said Anthony Rizzo, who was on the 2016 Cubs team that came back from a 3-1 deficit to beat Cleveland in the World Series. “We have to put pressure on them. They’re going to enjoy a nice flight to New York tonight, and rightfully so. They’re up 2-0 in a historic World Series. The Dodgers have played really well, can’t take anything away from them. But inside here, looking in everyone’s eyes, you know this is far from over.”

This is the 57th time a team has taken a 2-0 lead in the World Series, with that club winning the Series 45 of 56 times (80.4%).

The Yankees do have a positive history in that regard. They’re the last franchise to rally from a 2-0 hole, as the 1996 team earned four straight wins — the first three on the road — after dropping the first two games to Atlanta in New York. (Atlanta had outscored the Yankees 16-1 in those two games and had outscored the Yankees and Cardinals 48-2 in its last five games at that point.)

“No one said it’s going to be easy,” Aaron Boone said. “It’s a long series. And we need to make it a long series now. We won’t flinch. We’ve just got to keep at it.”

Held to one hit entering the ninth inning Saturday night and trailing 4-1, the Yankees made it interesting. Juan Soto, who homered in the third to briefly tie the score at 1-1, led off with a single against Blake Treinen. After a wild pitch, Aaron Judge struck out for the third time, falling to 6-for-40 (.150) with 19 strikeouts in this postseason. Giancarlo Stanton hit a bullet off the third base bag, with the ball trickling into leftfield and driving in Soto to make it 4-2.

Jazz Chisholm Jr. singled and Rizzo was hit by a pitch to load the bases, putting the tying run at second and the go-ahead run at first, but Anthony Volpe struck out swinging on a 2-and-2 sweeper out of the zone on Treinen’s 33rd pitch of the inning. Lefthander Alex Vesia came on to face Austin Wells, 4-for-41 in the postseason, and Boone sent up righthanded-hitting Jose Trevino, who immediately got a good pitch to hit, took a good swing at it and drove a 345-foot flyout to center.

“Our compete to the very end was really good,” Boone said. “We gave ourselves a chance to get right back in it and even win that game off a very good reliever. I loved the at-bats there at the end, the compete, the fight. I thought even Trevy got off a good swing off Vesia.”

Much of the postgame talk surrounded the two headliners going into the series, two of the biggest stars in the sport. In the case of Shohei Ohtani, the presumed National League MVP, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts disclosed that the DH suffered a “left shoulder subluxation” (partial dislocation) when Wells threw him out attempting to steal second in the seventh.

Ohtani was scheduled to have an MRI on Sunday. “Strength was great. The range of motion good. So we’re encouraged,” Roberts said. “But obviously I can’t speculate because we don’t [have] the scans yet.”

Then there’s the matter of Judge, who is having one of the worst postseasons of his career, which is saying something because he hasn’t had a lot of good ones to begin with.

“I definitely gotta step up. I gotta do my job,” he said. “Guys around me are doing their job getting on base.”

Soto, as he’s done all postseason, did his job. The Yankees’ first run came on his fourth homer of the postseason, a drive to rightfield in the top of the third off righthander Yoshinobu Yamamoto that tied the score at 1-1. Otherwise, it was another far too quiet night for the offense — until the ninth.

The Yankees didn’t get to enjoy Soto’s blast for long as Rodon allowed back-to-back homers in a three-run third — a two-run opposite-field shot by Teoscar Hernandez and Freeman’s solo blast. Rodon, who allowed a career-high 31 homers in 175 innings this season, gave up four runs and six hits in his 63-pitch outing.

Yamamoto, whom the Dodgers signed to a $325 million deal last offseason (the Yankees offered a package in the neighborhood of $300 million), was terrific, pitching into the seventh inning of a game for the first time since . . . June 7 at Yankee Stadium, when he allowed two hits and two walks in seven scoreless innings.

Yamamoto allowed one run, one hit and two walks in 6 1⁄3 innings in which he struck out four on Saturday night.

“I thought we showed some fight at the end,” Rodon said. “Unfortunately for me, it wasn’t my best.”