Alexander: Dodgers cement their status as baseball’s best
NEW YORK — It figured, didn’t it?
An improbable season, one in which the Dodgers achieved the best record in baseball even as their injured list expanded, ended in an improbable victory on Wednesday night in the Big Apple.
Before now, according to the people who look these things up for Fox Sports, no team had come back from a five-run deficit to win a World Series clincher. And by the end of the second inning of Game 5, the Dodgers were staring at a 5-0 deficit, starter Jack Flaherty was done for the evening after facing just nine batters, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto was probably already gearing himself up mentally to pitch a Game 6 against the Yankees on Friday night at Dodger Stadium.
Stand down, Yoshinobu. Your next obligation will be Friday, all right, but it’s going to be a parade through the streets of L.A.
Yes, the Dodgers are World Series champions. And maybe you can describe them as champions of the world, a team with representatives from Japan, Cuba, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. (Kiké Hernández literally wrapped himself in the Puerto Rican flag during the on-field celebration.) And, if you want to take World Baseball Classic representation into account you can add Canada, even though Freddie Freeman was born and grew up in Orange County.
They got here even while using 40 pitchers over the course of the season, while having two full starting rotations worth of hurlers on the injured list, and while losing Max Muncy and Mookie Betts to injury for significant periods during the season, having Freeman hobbled by an ankle injury for the first two postseason series and Shohei Ohtani nursing a partially dislocated shoulder in the final three games of this one.
(This, after Ohtani – supposedly distracted with the investigation into the gambling activities, and ultimate embezzlement, involving former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara that surfaced during the opening series in Seoul – ignored said distraction and had one of the greatest individual seasons in baseball history, becoming the charter member of the 50-50 club.)
In a sense, this championship story was improbable because of recent history, two straight first-round losses turning the fan base a bit gun-shy and a thin starting pitching rotation also dampening expectations.
As it turned out, one of those starters, Walker Buehler, channeled his inner Orel Hershiser and closed out the ninth inning Wednesday, with the Dodgers having used all of their leverage relievers, to preserve the 7-6 victory in Yankee Stadium that finished this World Series in five games.
What was it that the late Vin Scully said, after a home run out of nowhere in 1988 started the Dodgers toward what was their last full-season championship before this? “In a year that was so improbable, the impossible has happened.”
Can we suggest that maybe there is an unseen hand that guides these things? In ’88, Game 1 was decided by the hobbled Kirk Gibson’s walk-off home run, his only at-bat of the World Series, and the Dodgers beat the mighty Oakland A’s in five games. In ’24, Game 1 was decided by Freeman’s 10th-inning walk-off grand slam, and while it’s not an exact comparison it was a similar lightning bolt, as anyone in the stadium for both home runs can attest.
And yes, the Dodgers beat the Yankees in five games, and maybe in retrospect that Game 1 finish had a deflating effect as well.
One other similarity between the two full-season titles: In ’88 the Dodgers were running out of position players because of injuries, and there was an urgency to clinch the World Series in five before anybody else got hurt. In ’24 a pitching staff seemingly held together by chewing gum and baling wire somehow made it to the end. It wasn’t always pretty, and there were times in the postseason – including Tuesday night’s Game 4 – when Manager Dave Roberts had to marshal his resources, opting to sacrifice the present in pursuit of the main goal.
It worked.
But while you can count the improbables, these Dodgers really are baseball’s best team, and you couldn’t make that case in ’88 until the very end. This team finished the regular season with the game’s best record. They fought off elimination in the first round against San Diego – which, as it turns out, was the toughest team they faced in the postseason and very easily could stake a claim as the second-best team in baseball (but, sorry, Padre fans, you get no parade).
Then they swept through New York, eliminating the Mets in six and the Yankees in five.
“There’s a number of fingerprints all over this win,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said during the postgame on-field ceremony. “Scouting department, player development … there’s a number of people. It’s a special group.”
Game 5 displayed some of the reasons why these Dodgers are the best team in the game. They’re relentless offensively, and they took full advantage every time the Yankees opened the door. Two errors and a failure by Yankees starter Gerrit Cole to cover first base on Betts’ grounder to the right side contributed to the five-run fifth inning that tied the game, and a catcher’s interference call aided the two-run eighth that wiped out a 6-5 Yankees lead and decided the game.
And when closing time arrived, after Blake Treinen – the last leverage guy Roberts had at his disposal – gave him 2⅓ innings, Buehler pitched a 1-2-3 ninth, punctuating the night by striking out former teammate Alex Verdugo.
“Seventh inning, he just said that he’s going to be available,” Roberts said. “I didn’t … see that even coming to play, but obviously as the game sort of played on, we had to keep the game close. Our guys were fighting, so I just felt that at that point in time, I was going to be all in.”
Maybe the things that happened along the way – starting in the opening series in Seoul with the Mizuhara revelations – hardened these players’ spines and contributed to a cohesion that made all of this possible.
“I think sometimes when those things kind of happen, it just rallies a group of guys together,” said Freeman, who was named the World Series MVP. “When you start supporting a teammate in his first year, like we did, for (Ohtani) to go out there and have the greatest season, I think, of all time, (it was) pretty special.
“It seems like we hit every speed bump possible over the course of this year. And to overcome what we did as a group of guys, it’s special. This is what we start out to do every single spring training, to win a championship. I think it’s the hardest thing to do in sports because you just never know what’s going to happen. I mean, we were down 2-1 in the NLDS and it easily could have gotten away from us. And to come back and win those two games and keep it going like we did, it’s just a special group of guys.”
Roberts noted, in his pregame briefing Wednesday night, that this was an unusually cohesive team, and “when you’re around people you care about, that you believe in, you’re just better collectively.”
Afterward, he elaborated.
“We did go through a lot, but I’ll say we still had the best record in all of baseball this year,” he said. “It wasn’t easy, but our guys fought and played every day the right way, played to win.
“There was a lot of backfilling on talent because of injury. A lot of young players cut their teeth, which is good. But one thing is that we just kept going. Even in the postseason, I don’t think anyone had us picked … to get out of the first series. For us to go out there and fight and scratch and claw and win 11 games in October, that’s a credit to our guys.”
And yes, there will be that long-awaited parade on Friday. Maybe they can invite some of the guys from the 2020 – and even 1988 – champs to join them.
jalexander@scng.com