It wasn’t so much that the Dodgers won this one to take the Series four games to one as it was the Yankees lost it.
The Yankees built a 5-0 lead after four innings then played the fifth inning as ugly as Ichibod Crane.
The Dodgers scored five unearned runs when the Yankees made two errors and pitcher Gerrit Cole made the gaffe of the Series when he failed to cover first base on a ground ball to first baseman Anthony Rizzo.
As a result, the Dodgers made the biggest comeback in a deciding game in World Series history.
Center fielder Aaron Judge dropped a child’s play fly ball for an error. Shortstop Anthony Volpe made a throwing error that filled the bases with no outs.
Cole then struck out Gavin Lux and Shohei Ohtani. Mookie Betts hit a ground ball to Rizzo at first — a routine third out with no runs scored.
But Cole, believing Rizzo could take the play by himself, walked toward the dugout, assuming the inning was over.
It is a play the rawest rookie pitcher knows how to enact. Any ball hit to the first baseman, the pitcher runs to cover first.
So Betts was safe and a run scored. Freddie Freeman, the MVP, lined a two-run single to center and it was 5-3. Teoscar Hernandez ripped a two-run double to center to tie it, 5-5.
The Yankees bargad back ahead in the sixth, 6-5, on Gioncarlo Stanton’s sacrifice fly.
But the Dodgers scored the two winning runs in the eighth with a rally that began with a Teoscar Hernandez single, a shattered-bat infield single by Tommy Edman and a four-pitch walk to Will Smith, loading the bases with no outs.
Hernandez scored on a sacrifice fly by Lux to tie it, 6-6, and Edman scored the winning run on Betts’ sacrifice fly.
The Yankees’ shoddy and shaky play ruined an incredible pitching performance by Cole.
The Dodgers didn’t have a hit until the five runs the Yankee defense and Cole’s gaffe gifted them. Cole needed 39 pitches to cover the fifth.
But manager Aaron Boone permitted him to go back out for the sixth and he pitched a 1-2-3 innings. And he started the seventh and retired the first batter. When he walked Freeman his night was finished after 108 pitches — 6 1/3 innings, no earned runs (five unearned).
LA manager Dave Roberts brought in starting pitcher Walker Buehler, the starter in Game 3, to pitch the ninth.
Buehler, who missed two years after two Tomm y John surgeries, ended New York’s season by retiring Volpe on a ground ball, then striking out Austin Wells and A;lex Verdugo.
And the Dodgers had their seventh World Series championship and they did it with their $700 million man, Shohei Ohtani, hampered by a shoulder injury, providingo only two hits in the five games.
No team that had lost the first three games had ever won the next two, but it looked as if the Yankees would be the first when they constucted that 5-0 lead.
They scored three in the first on a first-pitch two-run home run by Aaron Judge and Jazz Chisholm followed with a home run.
LA starter Jack Flaherty outsmarted himself against Judge. All Series long, the Dodgers smothered Judge with breaking pitches and he had only two hits in the first four games.
Flahery, though, tried to trick Judge with a first-pitch fastball and Judge drilled it over the right field fence.
Volpe led the second with a double and scored on Verdugo’s single to make it 4-0. And Stanton led the third with his seventh post-season home run and it was 5-0.
In the dugout, Yankees manger Aaron Boone said, “All we want to do is get on a bird for the west coast.” Had the Yankees won, the Series would return to Los Angeles for Game 6 and a possible Game 7.
The bird never left the ground.
Cole retired the first eight Dodgers, throwing fastballs from 97 to 99 miles an hour, his highest velocity of the season.
But his defense and his own misplay let everything unravel.
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