In the last season in which the Los Angeles Dodgers did not make the playoffs, Barack Obama had not yet been re-elected. They were still pretty good in 2012, which was Andre Ethier’s last good season, Chad Billingsley’s last healthy one, and Kenley Jansen’s first as a full-time closer. They improved from 86 to 92 wins in 2013 and have not been below 91 wins or out of the playoffs in any full season since. They won just one World Series in that stretch, and it was both fully earned—the Dodgers had an absurd .712 winning percentage when they won the version of the World Series that ended the plague-warped mini-season of 2020—and somehow not really an outlier. The Dodgers won 111 games in 2022, for an equally absurd .715 winning percentage, and that team didn’t survive the NLDS. The Phillies team that made it through to the World Series that year won 87.
It doesn’t feel quite right to say that the Dodgers were cheated out of World Series wins during any of those years, with the possible exception of the semi-year in which they actually won it. They have been in the postseason for nearly a decade and a half, and have during that time become the model organization in the sport—as astute and farsighted as the most financially optimized franchises, as detail-oriented and forward-thinking as the most development-oriented, richer and more ambitious than just about any other team in the sport, and exactly as cynical as everyone else. It would have been strange if the Dodgers didn’t win a World Series somewhere in there, although it wouldn’t have felt quite right—it wouldn’t have been appropriately October-coded or appropriately Dodgers—if it wasn’t a little stupid when it finally happened.
The team that finished off a five-game World Series victory against the Yankees on Wednesday night with an admirably ugly, brutal, and retrospectively commanding 7-6 win was not remotely the most dominant of the Dodgers teams that couldn’t manage that during the team’s tenure atop the National League. This year’s champs were the winningest team in the National League, again, but they were by far less healthy and always seemed less touched by October’s strange grace than the Padres and Mets teams they dispatched to get to the World Series. They dispatched them all the same.
Destiny and grace are great, and great fun while they last, but a team that refuses to make mistakes in the ways that the Dodgers did this October will always have the advantage. It makes sense that the team that took the best at-bats, and which made the most of the outwardly marginal types that fill out even the best and best-compensated lineups, would wind up on top at the end. It makes more sense when that team also has three Hall of Famers at various stages of their prime at the top of its lineup, as the Dodgers do. And yet, until the moment that Walker Buehler—the starting pitcher, same guy who missed two years with arm injuries and pitched two days ago—got the last out in the bottom of the ninth at Yankee Stadium, it never quite felt sensible, or remotely ordained. All of which is to say that it fit.
It fit that the most unreasonable Dodgers juggernaut of this generation of juggernauts—a team that entered October with something like 60 percent of a starting rotation, no closer, and a first baseman who ran like he was wearing a parking boot—would be the one to finish the job. October is like that, and baseball is like that. It doesn’t make this Dodgers team any less deserving, but it also doesn’t make the far better teams that preceded them any more undeserving. This Dodgers team absolutely earned it, but this World Series was also about the best organization in baseball finally outlasting the inevitable and inexorable deranging effects of October baseball. Just keep getting there, and eventually what happened for the Dodgers in the top of the fifth inning of Game 5 might happen to you. This is true whether you “deserve” to be there or not. Deserve, in October, has got nothing to do with it.
Several games happened in Game 5; a pretty good one happened in the fifth inning alone. The one that ended this World Series went more or less like this. The Yankees jumped Dodgers starter Jack Flaherty early, most notably when Aaron Judge shook off his postseason struggles to hit a super-loud two-run homer in the bottom of the first. Flaherty didn’t survive the second, Jazz Chisholm and Giancarlo Stanton homered, and an already gassed Dodgers bullpen was called into action much earlier and under much more duress than hoped. It looked good for the Yankees, or as good as things could look for a team with a 3-1 series deficit. Their superstar was awake, Stanton seemed even more Jack Reacher-ish than usual, and their ace was cruising.
Gerrit Cole didn’t allow a hit until the top of the fifth, which he entered fresh and dominant and with a 5-0 lead and which he left, 21 minutes after that half-inning began, with the score 5-5 and without having allowed an earned run. A very few teams have had worse innings in the World Series—the Cardinals gave up 10 in an inning in 1968, and the Cubs entered the seventh inning of Game 3 of the 1929 World Series up 8-0 and left it down 10-8—but the accursed Softball Inning that cost the Yankees the lead on Wednesday night felt historic all the same. After Cole finally gave up his first hit, Judge duffed an easy Tommy Edman liner—he seemed simply to close his glove too soon—for a bizarre and ominous error.
By the time the inning was over, shortstop Anthony Volpe had spiked a throw to third for a forceout and Cole himself, after overwhelming strikeouts of Gavin Lux and Shohei Ohtani with the bases loaded, shorted out instead of covering first on what should have been an inning-ending cue-shot from Mookie Betts. Given those extra three outs, the Dodgers made an inning of it through dinks and dunks and other acts of non-capitulation. All five runs were unearned, and the result for the Yankees was about as bad an inning as anyone could imagine a very good MLB team putting up, at more or less the worst possible time. But those (brutal, sincerely painful to watch) blunders were not the whole story.
The Yankees’ mistakes lengthened the inning, but the series swung, as the Dodgers’ previous wins in this postseason had swung, on the Dodgers just continuing to lengthen their innings and exploit the opportunities their opposite numbers extended. It only felt sadistic. In point of fact, they were just doing what great teams do; the Dodgers won this series as much through the abrasiveness of irritants like Tommy Edman and Kiké Hernandez as through the contributions of superstars like Mookie Betts or Shohei Ohtani; it fits that a roster stacked with Hall of Famers would win less through big-ticket pyrotechnics than through being patient, ruthless, and unrelenting in the ways that more prosaic or random champions have been. None of it felt inevitable, even in Game 5, but it all started to take on the stink of destiny at some point. The last game of this series was not what you would call “good”—the teams combined to leave 22 runners on and issue 17 walks over a game that was nearly four hours long—but damn if it wasn’t fragrant.
That the Yankees were able to come back and reclaim a 6-5 lead in the sixth was impressive, especially after squandering a bases-loaded opportunity in the bottom of the fifth; this game had a lot of baseball in it. That the Yankees wound up losing that lead due to an exhausted bullpen putting too many runners on base and the Dodgers bringing them home through a series of dutiful sacrifice flies felt oddly reasonable as it happened. It’s just what a good baseball team would do when gifted a bases-loaded situation. Such a fate could have befallen, and very nearly did befall, the Dodgers themselves. Flaherty’s early exit pressed hard on a weary bullpen—a dominant and classically circa-now Dodgers collection of reclaimed randos, thirty-somethings, and pitch-design creatures—that was reduced to the point that Blake Treinen was asked to stop the steal by throwing 42 pitches to get seven outs. But they held on, and by the time Buehler got the final out every previous stupid thing seemed, as it always does when a team wins a World Series, inexorable and the result of some grand design.
But that’s not really it, or not any more than it always is. Good baseball teams are annoying; great baseball teams are stressful, in a way that makes it difficult to imagine any team ever beating them. Those types of teams simply do not make mistakes, and for the rare champions that thump and thrash their way to victory, there are many more that seem to get there by testing the locks and pushing the margins and just refusing to mess up. The Dodgers’ greatest players are among the best of their era, which is also true of the Yankees. Some of those players were greater than others in this series, and one of them, Freddie Freeman, made for a very deserving World Series MVP. But it is the nature of the game, or just of the version of the game played during this last lurid month, that a series between the two best regular-season teams in each league, each stacked with Hall of Famers, would end as weirdly as this one. Even when things align such that the World Series pits two superteams and the game’s most charismatic superstars against each other, it will come down to Tommy Edman somehow unlocking another level of being annoying after leaving the Cardinals and Blake Treinen’s unconscionable facial hair and unhittable sweeper achieving some sort of queasy communion.
Baseball has a lot of brutal terminology in it, but “error” is maybe the rudest of all those. There’s not really another word for the misplays that undid the Yankees in this one, which flipped a promisingly freakish moment in what had otherwise been a decently one-sided series back into form. Still, there’s something off about it, just in the sense that the idea of an error implies a violation of or deviation from some broader design. If you watch baseball, you already know that’s not how it goes. There are the things that are supposed to happen, and then there are the things that happen instead, and the best any team can do is to keep putting itself in the mix and hoping for the best. Keep doing that and you might not just finally win one, but win one that somehow feels like it was yours all along.
