Los Angeles Dodgers Win 2024 World Series
For the second time this millennium, the Los Angeles Dodgers are World Series champions.
The Dodgers, who ended the Mets’ magical season in a six-game NLCS, went on to beat the other New York team in five games. It started with Freddie Freeman‘s 10th-inning walk-off grand slam in Game 1 — with the Dodgers down to their final out — and ended in a comeback 7-6 victory in Wednesday’s Game 5.
It was the Dodgers’ first World Series championship since 2020, and their first in a full, normal season since 1988. Coincidentally, in 1988, the Dodgers also beat the Mets in the NLCS to get to the Fall Classic. The Dodgers now have eight World Series titles in their history, a franchise that dates all the way back to 1883.
The Dodgers led the series 3-0, although the Yankees were in every game, never losing by more than three runs in any individual contest. But the Dodgers’ pitching stayed intact despite a disastrous Game 4 and a heavy reliance on the bullpen. The Dodgers had baseball’s best record in the regular season, and now they’ve supplanted their regular-season success with a ring.
Not only was Freeman the hero in Game 1, but he homered in the first four games of the series. That gave him six consecutive World Series games with a home run, dating back to the 2021 World Series that the Braves won. That beat George Springer‘s previous record of five for the longest such streak in MLB history.
James Lang-Imagn Images
In Game 1, Jack Flaherty gave up only a home run to fellow Los Angeles native Giancarlo Stanton, turning in 5 1/3 otherwise quality innings for L.A. The Dodgers scored only one run in six innings against Gerrit Cole, but they scratched out a run on a Mookie Betts sacrifice fly to tie it at 2-2 in the eighth. The game went to extras, and the Yankees put a run on the board in the top of the 10th. But Freeman’s slam put the game away with a 6-3 final. It was hailed an instant classic by the baseball world, with Freeman’s moment drawing comparisons to Kirk Gibson‘s home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series.
Similar to Flaherty, Yoshinobu Yamamoto permitted just a solo homer to Juan Soto in Game 2. The Soto bomb was the only hit he allowed. Home runs by Freeman, Teoscar Hernández and NLCS MVP Tommy Edman gave the Dodgers all the offense they needed in the first three innings. After Soto’s third-inning blast, the Yankees didn’t score again until an RBI single by Stanton in the ninth.
It was Walker Buehler who came up big in Game 3. The two-time Tommy John right-hander had an unremarkable regular season, but he fired five scoreless innings with five strikeouts to continue a history of success on the biggest stage. The Yankees, who lost 4-2 for the second straight game, got their only runs on a two-run homer by Alex Verdugo while down to their last out.
Freeman got the Dodgers started again in Game 4, this time with a two-run shot in the first inning. But Daniel Hudson allowed four runs and Brent Honeywell allowed five in L.A.’s planned bullpen game. The game got away from the Dodgers in the eighth, and the final was 11-4. Anthony Volpe had a momentum-shifting grand slam in the third inning.
The Yankees kept rolling early in Game 5, taking a 5-0 lead after a rough outing by Flaherty and home runs from Aaron Judge, Jazz Chisholm and Stanton. Against a seemingly cruising Cole, the Dodgers put up a five-spot in the fifth thanks to three separate defensive lapses by New York. The Yankees took the lead back on a sacrifice fly by Stanton, but the Dodgers tacked on a couple sacrifice flies of their own to retake the lead in the eighth.
Blake Treinen got seven enormous outs in the late innings, especially with two runners on in the eighth. Buehler, just two days after his Game 3 heroics, recorded the final three outs to seal the deal and make the Dodgers victorious.
That officially brings an end to the 2024 Major League Baseball season. It was a special one for the Mets, who squeezed into the playoffs as the No. 6 seed and stunned the Brewers and Phillies, both winners of their respective divisions. The Mets even put up a solid fight against this now-triumphant L.A. team, forcing a Game 6 in Los Angeles after going down in the series 3-1.
The Mets will have to wait until next year to try to bring home their first title since 1986, and to thwart the now-defending champion Dodgers.
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