There’s no escaping the brutality of this Yankees failure
This one will sting. This one will leave a mark. There will be days and nights in the weeks and months to come when this game is going to visit you – in your sleep, daydreaming in your office, lamenting with friends around a water cooler.
Some games stay with you.
This one will stay with you.
The Yankees lost Game 5 of the 120th World Series last night, 7-6, and it is almost impossible to understand how that happened. It is almost impossible to believe that they will not be holding a workout Thursday afternoon at Dodger Stadium, fielding more and more questions about righting a 20-year-old wrong and solving the 0-3 puzzle.
They led 5-0. Gerrit Cole threw four no-hit innings, at one point extending a two-game Yankees streak to 27 retired Dodgers in a row. He was everything he has always promised, and regularly delivered. The crowd at Yankee Stadium, 49,263 strong, was planning for a three-hour party, and then a night, Thursday, to catch their breath and soothe their voice boxes before Game 6 Friday.
Before continuing a quest to heal that two-decade wound.
Then, in an eyeblink, it was 5-5.
And that was impossible to understand, too. Aaron Judge — who’d nearly reduced the Stadium foundation to dust with a first-inning home run, who’d earlier robbed Freddie Freeman of extra bases by making a brilliant catch right beside the 399-foot sign — dropped a fly ball.
Wait. He did what?
Yes. He dropped a fly ball, off Tommy Edman’s bat. It was a Little League fly, too. If he sees that exact same ball a thousand times — no, make that 100,000 times — he catches it 99,999 of them. It was inexplicable. And then Anthony Volpe — Gold Glove last year, maybe a Gold Glove this year — bookended it with a poor throw to third on a ball in the hole.
You can’t give the White Sox five outs in an inning and expect to get away with it; you sure can’t give a team with 108 wins like the Dodgers five outs. And yet Cole was so good, he nearly got away with it. He struck out Gavin Lux, and the crowd roared. He struck out Shohei Ohtani, and they tried to replicate the noise from Judge’s home run.
And then he got Mookie Betts to ground meekly to first.
He was going to get out of it.
Except he suffered a brain cramp at the worst possible moment. He failed to cover first base. It’s remarkable: On the last day of September, the other baseball team in town nearly saw its season die because Edwin Diaz failed to cover first. Now, on the next-to-last-day of October, Cole did the same thing. A run scored. And it was impossible to know in the moment, but the Yankees season began to die a little bit there, too.
(Follow-up: you REALLY can’t give the Dodgers SIX outs and expect to get away with it.)
They didn’t get away with it. They took the lead back later, 6-5, but the moment was too big for Tommy Kahnle. Luke Weaver, so good for two solid months, was good here, too — but two of his outs were sac flies. It was 7-6. And 7-6 is where it would stay. Forever.
“Guys are pouring their heart out right now in the clubhouse,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “I’ve talked about that all year, they love each other in there and it’s awfully tough in there right now.”
Now begins the long, endless offseason, one of the longest Yankees fans have endured in decades. Now begins the Soto Watch. The whole city suddenly feels like it’s on the clock. In some ways, it might be therapeutic to occupy your attention with how aggravating this World Series was instead of endlessly updating your social media for Soto updates.
“The end is cruel,” Boone said. “I’m heartbroken. It doesn’t take away my pride of what that room means to me, what that group forged and went through to get here.”
Boone is right. The end is cruel. The whole sport is cruel. The Yankees won 94 games and finished in first place. They won eight more in the playoffs. They had two players in Judge and Soto enjoy as explosive a 1-2 punch ride as there’s ever been. There ought to be a lot of snapshots to savor. And they will, in time. Until then …
“This,” Gerrit Cole said, “is as bad as it gets.”
But this is the Yankees. It’s right there in the mission statement: Title or bust. This year, they fell three wins shy. And for most of the night, on what turned out to be the last night, it sure felt like they were going to get two bonus days of baseball season, at least. It is almost impossible to believe that won’t happen. Almost.
