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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: Game Five
Vol. 16, No. 110
October 31, 2024
It’s important not to overreact. The Yankees went 94-68 this season. They ran through the AL side of the bracket with a 7-2 mark. This was a very good baseball team, with an excellent offense and yet another strong bullpen built from spare parts. It had the league MVP and another player who would have been a strong candidate most years. The team’s shortstop is one of the best defensive players in baseball. None of that gets erased in a week, a game, or a half-inning.
Damned if they didn’t try, though. The Yankees’ sloppiness on defense and the bases has been a constant topic this fall, and it finally ended their season. Up 5-0 in Game Five, ace on the mound, they seemed halfway to the greatest comeback in baseball history.
Then Aaron Judge dropped the ball.
It’s tempting to stop here and talk about Judge being 6'7", 280, and 32 years old, perhaps unsuited to keep patrolling center field. This play, though, wasn’t about any of that. This play was the kind of mistake ballplayers of all shapes, sizes, and ages have been making for more than a century: He took his eye off the ball. A quick glance to see if he might have a play on Enrique Hernandez was all it took. The ball glanced off Judge’s glove, and an epic collapse had begun.
Five pitches later, Will Smith pulled a ground ball to the left of Anthony Volpe. It wasn’t hit hard enough for a double play, and Volpe likely had a routine play on Smith at first base. Instead, Volpe tried to get the lead man at third base, made a terrible throw, and everyone was safe. The decision to go to third was defensible, a play you’ll see shortstops make when the ball takes them that way in a first-and-second spot. Volpe’s rushed throw was hideous, nowhere near the bag.
Gerrit Cole had gotten two outs with no runs on the board. I could argue that what he did next was his best moment as a Yankee. He struck out Gavin Lux and Shohei Ohtani on eight pitches total, a resounding response to what had happened behind him. Now he had two outs, a five-run lead, a shutout in the World Series. I could argue that what he did next was his worst moment as a Yankee.
Cole shares the blame for Mookie Betts’s RBI single. Most of the time when a pitcher fails to cover first, it’s because of a brain lock. He doesn’t react to the play, gets a late jump, and never arrives there. Cole doesn’t do that last night. He barely finishes his windup before running off the mound. Four steps later, though, he just...trails off, clearly thinking he doesn’t need to cover, that Rizzo has this in the bag. It wasn’t an unreasonable thought. When the ball enters Rizzo’s glove, he is much closer to the base than Betts is. The ball, though, had a lot of spin, and Rizzo was on his heels and moving slightly away from the bag as he played it. Rizzo clearly expected to toss the ball to Cole. Mookie Betts just ran.
Cole had no business peeling off. The worst-case scenario if you cover the bag is Rizzo doesn’t throw you the ball, taps the bag, and you’ve run 45 feet for nothing. Rizzo, though, should have been able to beat Betts to the base anyway. Both players were wrong, and it was 5-1.
You can argue that Cole had gotten five outs to this point, a flyball, two grounders, and two strikeouts. He should not have still been on the mound. He was, though, the game back on his shoulders, and he dropped it. He got ahead 1-2 on Freddie Freeman, then became the latest Yankee pitcher to try and beat Freeman on the inner half and allowed a two-run single. He got ahead 1-2 on Teoscar Hernandez and left a slider over the plate. The collapse was complete, and Game Five was tied, 5-5.
It took four big mistakes for the Dodgers to get anywhere near this game. Judge dropped a ball. Volpe bounced a throw. Cole didn’t cover. Rizzo didn’t get to the bag. The Yankees, who had spread out their mistakes just well enough over the first 13 playoff games, clustered them here in a way that cost them the Series.
The game wasn’t over, of course, and the Yankees would even take a 6-5 lead in the sixth. It was their turn for RISP follies, though; they went 1-for-10 with runners in scoring position on the night, and 0-for-5 after the Dodgers tied the game. They had the bases loaded in the fifth and didn’t score; first and second with one out in the sixth and got one run on a sac fly; first and second with one out in the eighth and didn’t score. Tommy Kahnle gave up two hits and a walk on eight pitches, and Luke Weaver, working a third straight day, couldn’t miss bats to get out of the inning. A pair of sac flies gave the Dodgers the 7-6 lead with which they’d finish the World Series.
For the night, the Yankees made three errors, including a catcher’s interference by Austin Wells. They had the one critical play not made by Cole and Rizzo. They went 1-for-10 with runners in scoring position. They had a balk, a disengagement violation, and issued seven walks. Saying one team lost the game always seems like an insult to the team that won it, but you can’t really conclude anything but that the Yankees lost this one. Their sloppiness finally caught up to them.
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Freddie Freeman, despite ending the season in a brutal 1-for-7 slump, was given the World Series MVP anyway. That “1” was a two-strike, two-out, two-run single during that five-run fifth inning. Freeman’s Game One grand slam is the defining image from this Series, and his homers in the first four games the defining statistic. During the season, Freeman just about moved over the line for the Hall of Fame, and he sealed his case this week. He’s 34, with 60 WAR, an MVP, six other top-ten finishes, a host of secondary hardware including a World Series MVP, and two rings. He’s in.
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I don’t write about “ball go far, team go far” as much as I used to. Sarah Langs tracks the numbers now, so I don’t have to. It’s no longer really a part of the baseball culture war.
I coined the phrase about a decade ago as a counter to the then-dominant idea that smallball wins in the playoffs. The data made clear, in fact, that it was short-sequence offense -- home runs -- that led to success in October’s lower run environment. It was harder to string together run elements as OBP fell and strikeouts rose, so the path to runs was to score as many as possible on as few swings as possible. While there are still holdouts, by and large, this is now the accepted wisdom.
Even without a dinger yesterday, the Dodgers just won the World Series by scoring 13 of their 24 runs on homers. Across their 16-game run to the championship, they hit 27 homers, scoring 48 of their 95 runs on big flies.
As we saw last night, at the game level, at the inning level, at the play level, the little things can mean a lot. The Dodgers are champs today in large part because the Yankee bollixed a whole bunch of balls in play. In the big picture, though, you can’t count on that for 11 wins the way you can count on power.
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One small thing that happened quickly was Tommy Edman batting right-handed against the right-handed Tommy Kahnle in the eighth inning. Earlier this October I wrote about platoon splits and how they emerge from pitchers’ arm angles and repertoires. Kahnle spent the month spamming his changeup, and changeups are generally more effective against opposite-handed hitters. Throwing changes to same-side hitters is considered risky. Right-on-right changeups are thrown a third of the time as right-on-left ones, and they result in a slugging percentage 20 points higher.
Edman, a better hitter from the right side, was able to go to the plate with confidence he’d be seeing changeups. He pulled the first one he saw just past a drawn-in Chisholm for an infield single and later scored the Series-winning run.
Kahnle’s decision to throw changeups almost exclusively caught up to him last night. Edman, and Enrique Hernandez before him, were both able to sit changeup for singles. It’s a very effective pitch, for sure, but unless you’re Mariano Rivera, you need a second offering. Twenty-five of the 27 pitches Kahnle threw in the Series were changeups, and the last eight set up the Dodgers’ game-winning rally.
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Back tomorrow with the annual Coda, and to set up the offseason.