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2024 World Series: Yankees at Dodgers


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9 minutes ago, txhorns said:

Well Cole is a dumbass.  The pitcher should be running towards first base until the first baseman is moving to the bag with the ball, especially in a World Series game.  Honestly both are at fault but Cole definitely gave up on the play.

Agree with everything except holding Rizzo accountable.  He fielded the ball cleanly, yet was left hanging when Cole failed to present himself as an option for a routine 3-1 put out to end the inning.

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20 minutes ago, InkaUtexas said:

Of course. And sadly this is not only a LA thing.

Looting broke out on the streets of Los Angeles on Wednesday night after the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the New York Yankees to win the 2024 World Series.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said they had received reports of "looting at several stores in the area of 8th and Broadway" and people were urged to stay out of the area.

"If you are on the street, at or adjacent to that intersection, leave the area immediately and follow all officers orders," the LAPD wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

The LAPD also warned about "a hostile crowd" that had surrounded an MTA bus and was "attempting to set it on fire in the area of Sunset and Echo Park." A video shared by the Los Angeles Scanner on X shows a bus in flames at Sunset and Echo Park, where police were trying to stop baseball fans gone rogue.

 

I thought looting was legal in California.

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Just now, CurlyDumps said:

Just to pile on helo - when i skimmed his slew of "i quit" and "this series is over" posts after game one, I was not aware he titled his 2024 Yankees thread, "Never Surrender."

Hello Bias is the new name.

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That play is 100% on Cole. As a pitcher in that situation when the ball gets hit to your first baseman you get your ass going to first full out. If he calls you off you peel off.

Cole was scratching his ass watching baseball instead of playing baseball.

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22 minutes ago, Surly Bevo said:

That play is 100% on Cole. As a pitcher in that situation when the ball gets hit to your first baseman you get your ass going to first full out. If he calls you off you peel off.

Cole was scratching his ass watching baseball instead of playing baseball.

He was wondering what to get Jimmy and Milly for their wedding.

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Rizzo had that little lean to his right that guaranteed he wasn't going to be able to make it to 1st in time.  Cole can point all he wants, but he should have covered the bag.  What really happened is his ass was worn out from throwing a lot of pitches that inning and he didn't feel like running to first.  Pointing at the bag was some cya on his part, he already knew it was too late.

Edited by kevwun
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Gotta love the Red Sox fucking the Yankees, again.

Dave Roberts manages a beautiful series.
Kike Hernandez scores the tying run.
Mookie Betts hits the series winning RBI.
Alex Verdugo strikes out to end the series.

image.gif.c80959ea6a9b1ec4840b8bc17fd0978c.gif

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2 hours ago, InkaUtexas said:

Of course. And sadly this is not only a LA thing.

Looting broke out on the streets of Los Angeles on Wednesday night after the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the New York Yankees to win the 2024 World Series.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said they had received reports of "looting at several stores in the area of 8th and Broadway" and people were urged to stay out of the area.

"If you are on the street, at or adjacent to that intersection, leave the area immediately and follow all officers orders," the LAPD wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

The LAPD also warned about "a hostile crowd" that had surrounded an MTA bus and was "attempting to set it on fire in the area of Sunset and Echo Park." A video shared by the Los Angeles Scanner on X shows a bus in flames at Sunset and Echo Park, where police were trying to stop baseball fans gone rogue.

 

Houston didn't riot, win or lose, in 4 world series trips in 6 years. DFW didn't riot after their title last year. LA is 2 for 2 in rioting. Just sayin

Edited by Dennis Taylor
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its pretty remarkable how the loudest of the "KEEP IT IN THE CR!!" are the ones who cannot help but see any post on this board about California- whether its "food and travel," "music," or "baseball" - and take a political shot. Then of course, the thread devolves into a political discussion and they start whining about the CR crowd. 

every fucking time.

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JoePos:

Spoiler

A baseball game is often lost on a slimmer margin than a foot and a yard. It’s truly been said it’s a game of inches.

—Harold C. Burr, The Brooklyn Eagle, 1929


Harold Burr, a wonderful old Brooklyn sportswriter who later in life would regale Vin Scully with stories about the Babe, is usually credited as the first to publicly call baseball a game of inches. He almost certainly was not—Burr himself made that vividly clear by prefacing his famous line with the phrase “it’s truly been said”—but if we are going to even try to understand the madness that took place at Yankee Stadium on the day before All Hallows’ Eve in Anno Domini 2024, we have to start somewhere.

Burr called baseball a game of inches after watching Cleveland beat the Yankees on a September day six weeks before the stock market crashed in 1929. The Indians caught two game-altering breaks in the ninth inning because of the geometric quirks of then-seven-year-old Yankee Stadium—one fly ball turned into a home run, one home run turned into a fly ball—and Burr was particularly taken by the fact that Yankee Stadium was designed by a firm of Cleveland architects.

“Look at what a set of engineers can do to ruin a ballgame,” he wrote.

In the 95 years since 1929—and surely even for a couple of decades before 1929—it has been canon that baseball is a game of inches, that you do the tiniest things well or you lose. Some of this, certainly, is nonsense. Many teams that play mediocre defense win the World Series. Many teams that run into too many outs on the bases win the World Series. Many teams with a bevy of shaky pitchers who too often walk the leadoff hitter or fall behind in the count win the World Series.

“That will catch up with them!” professional and amateur analysts will gripe when they watch the hometown team squander opportunities and bungle the fundamentals. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the big things—titanic home runs and rocket line drives and magical pitches that jump over or limbo under bats—liquidate the little things. Sometimes, despite our deeply-felt belief that the sounder, sturdier, more alert team should win the game, it doesn’t work out that way.

And then, sometimes, yeah, sometimes baseball is a game of inches after all.


The New York Yankees held a 5-0 lead over the Los Angeles Dodgers going into the top of the fifth inning, and the little things had nothing to do with it. The Yankees didn’t get to this place, Game 5 of the World Series, by moving runners over and hitting the cutoff man and making the routine plays. Diligent Yankees fans have been complaining for years about the way this team carelessly throws away outs and routinely complicates games with minor malfunctions.

But what do any of those little things matter when the boys are boppin’? First inning, Dodgers starter Jack Flaherty threw Aaron Judge the middlest-middle fastball you ever saw. Judge hasn’t hit a thing in weeks. But this time… BLAMMO! Judge crunched a 109-mph home run to right.

Next batter, Jack Flaherty threw Jazz Chisholm Jr. the middlest-middle fastball you ever saw. BLAMMO! Chisholm launched a 105-mph home run to right.

In the second inning, with a runner on third, the Dodgers brought in the infield because they knew that they couldn’t fall any further behind. And… blippo, Alex Verdugo lofted a soft single over the infielders’ heads.

Finally, in the third inning, the Dodgers tried a new pitcher, Ryan Brasier, who tried the Flaherty strategy of throwing a middle-middle fastball to Giancarlo Stanton. Brasier didn’t quite hit the middle of the plate—it was a tiny bit up and a tiny bit outside—but it was close enough. BLAMMO! Stanton launched a 105-mph home run to right.

That’s 5-0, and that surely was more than enough runs for Yankees starter Gerrit Cole, who was firing lightning bolts. Announcer John Smoltz would later call Cole’s performance on Wednesday the greatest he’d ever seen, which—as we will see—is a bizarre thing for anyone to say, but particularly Smoltz, since he was on the losing end of Jack Morris’ 10-inning World Series Game 7 shutout. But we’ll get to all that.

The point is, Cole was dynamite. He did not allow a hit in the first four innings. Los Angeles’ Kiké Hernandez led off the fifth with a solid single. So what? The Yankees were up five. Cole was dealing. The Series was going back to Los Angeles. Tommy Edman hits a soft line drive to centerfield, and Judge jogged in and was there in plenty of time and…

Here is where our story takes a turn.


In Game 4 of the 1929 World Series—this would be less than two weeks before that stock market crash—the Chicago Cubs led the Philadelphia Athletics 8-0 going into the bottom of the seventh inning. Charlie Root was on the mound that day for the Cubs—the same Charlie Root who three years later would give up the home run that Babe Ruth called/didn’t call—and for the first six innings, Root was masterful. He did not even allow an A’s runner to reach third base.

“I think,” Root would write in the papers the next day, “I was never in better form in my life.”

On the third pitch of the seventh inning, Philadelphia’s Al Simmons launched a home run into the leftfield stands. What followed is so staggering that simply looking at the boxscore all these years later still can make you shudder. Root gave up five singles, one because Hack Wilson lost the ball in the sun. After Root got pulled, Art Nehf came in to face Mule Haas, who launched a fly ball to center. Wilson again lost it in the sun. The ball raced by him for an inside-the-park home run. Then Nehf walked a guy and was relieved by the remarkably named Sheriff Blake, who promptly gave up a couple of singles. Pat Malone replaced Blake, he hit a batter and gave up another single, this one with the bases loaded.

When the inning mercifully ended, the Athletics led the game 10-8. They would win the World Series the next day.

Until Wednesday, that was probably the worst inning in World Series history.

But here’s what must be said about that inning: The A’s did most of the work. “I do not want to detract one minute from the Athletics victory,” Root wrote. “There was no stopping those hit-crazed White Elephants.”

That’s how most tragic innings go. You might make a mistake here or there, but generally it’s paired with heroics from the other team. Yankees fans will lament Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, when they led 7-4 going into the eighth and blew the lead. But the Pirates did their own hitting that inning, knocking four singles before Hal Smith’s should-be-more-famous three-run homer.

Phillies fans will never live down the ninth inning of Game 6 in 1993, when Mitch Williams couldn’t hold on to a one-run lead. But, I mean, giving up a walk to the great Rickey Henderson (who walked more than anyone not named Barry Bonds), a hit to Paul Molitor (who had 3,319 of them in his Hall of Fame career) and a home run to Joe Carter (who hit 396 of them) is hardly giving the game away.

When Tommy Edman hit that ball to centerfield, and Judge settled under it, the Yankees win probability was 92%. With Gerrit Cole on the mound, it felt much higher than that.

Judge, as you now know, dropped the ball.


Cole valiantly made it to the seventh, by which point most of the damage was done. (Elsa/Getty Images)
OK, runners on first and second, nobody out, that’s no tragedy, not with a 5-0 lead. Sure the win percentage took a small ding—now the Yankees only had an 88% win probability—but this game was still in the bag. Will Smith topped a ground ball to shortstop. Easy play for Anthony Volpe, one of the best defensive shortstops in baseball. It was probably hit too slowly to turn a double play, so Volpe instinctively threw to third to get the lead runner. It was the right instinct.

But he threw the ball into the ground. Third baseman Jazz Chisholm couldn’t come up with it. Now the bases were loaded.

Yeah, not great, but still… no problem! This was Gerrit Cole on the mound! In this age of drones coming out of bullpens to throw ungodly fastballs and exploding sliders, Cole is a reminder of days gone by, when starting pitchers got out of their own jams and lifted up their teammates when things went wrong. He whiffed Gavin Lux on a 99-mph fastball on the outside corner. He whiffed Shohei Ohtani on a knuckle curve that expired just as it reached home plate. He then threw the perfect slider—one which broke just off the plate—and Mookie Betts reached out for it and hit a helpless little ground ball to first.

Inning over! The Yankees held their gigantic 5-0 lead! The Series was going back to Los Angeles!

Here is where our story takes another turn.


In Game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship Series, the Cubs led the Marlins 3-0 going into the top of the eighth inning. That inning famously went horribly wrong, and in the blur of the moment, way too many people obscenely blamed a lifelong Cubs fan who simply did what fans do—he reached up for a foul ball hit at him. As the years have gone on and sanity settled in, the blame has largely turned to the Cubs’ shortstop, Alex Gonzalez, who booted a Miguel Cabrera ground ball that might have been a double play.

I would guess that for years, Yankees fans will be arguing about who is more responsible for botching the Mookie Betts ground ball.

The two nominees are first baseman Anthony Rizzo, who passively let the ball come to him rather than aggressively going after it, and Gerrit Cole, who bafflingly did not race over to cover first base.

For me, it’s the easiest call in the world: It’s Cole’s fault. Utterly. Entirely. If you watch the play repeatedly, you can see that coming out of the batter’s box, Mookie knows that he’s out. It’s only when he sees that Cole has meandered to some nowhere point halfway between home and first—Cole would later say he took a bad angle trying to field he ball, which doesn’t make a lot of sense—that Betts starts to hope and accelerates into a full sprint. Rizzo picks up the ball and is ready to flip it to Cole. But Cole isn’t there.

That is the blunder that will last. In the immediate aftermath of the play, many Yankees fans seemed eager to blame Rizzo, some even making the bizarre claim that Cole could not have beaten Betts to the bag even if he had tried to cover first. This is nonsensical—and, I think, a direct reflection of people’s hunger to deify Cole’s performance. Pitchers have been beating hitters to the bag for more than 100 years. Cole blew the play.

Now the score was 5-1, and now horror movie music was playing in New York, and the bases were loaded. The inning should have ended months ago. The incredible Freddie Freeman hit a jam-shot single off a 100-mph fastball to score two more runs. Teoscar Hernandez blasted a hanging slider over the head of Aaron Judge. That scored two more runs. The game was tied.

Smoltz, as mentioned, would call Cole’s performance the greatest he had ever seen because he got the third out after that fiasco and then pitched 1⅔ more scoreless innings before coming out. Cole threw 108 pitches in the game, which, adjusted to today’s game, is something like Juan Marichal’s 227-pitch, 16-inning duel with Warren Spahn in ’63. It was a gutsy outing, no question.

But, no matter what Smoltz says, it wasn’t a great performance or even a good one. In the end, Cole blew a five-run lead at Yankee Stadium. You can blame everybody else if you want. You can say that if Aaron Judge catches that or Anthony Volpe throws it like this or Anthony Rizzo charges…

Forget all of that. You gotta cover first, man.


The Yankees did take the lead back in the sixth… and did so with little things! Dodgers reliever Brusdar Graterol walked Juan Soto and Judge to lead off the inning, and after Chisholm moved Soto over with a ground ball to the right side (little thing!), Stanton lofted a sacrifice fly that scored Soto (little thing!). True, Chisholm tried to nullify the run by racing to second on the sac fly, but Chisholm is fast, and he beat the throw, and the Yankees led.

The Yankees actually seemed in even better shape than their one-run lead might indicate, because the Dodgers were pretty much out of pitchers. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts made it his mission this October to manage hyper-aggressively. So, even with the Yankees taking their huge lead, he burned his bullpen in the early innings—seven pitchers to get through the first six innings. That left him with only Blake Treinen and… well, Blake Treinen.

Treinen is 36 years old. He missed all of 2023 with an injury. The last time he pitched more than two innings in a game? April of 2018. He was with Oakland then. But Roberts had nowhere else to turn. And so he rode Treinen and rode Treinen and hoped that his team would find a way to score… or that the Yankees would mess up again.

Cue the eighth inning. The Yankees went to their changeup specialist, Tommy Kahnle, who had not given up a run in the postseason. Kahnle threw a weak changeup to Kiké Hernandez that caught way too much of the plate. Hernandez lined it for a single. Kahnle threw a dandy changeup that shattered Tommy Edman’s bat. But the ball rolled defiantly between short and third for another single. Kahnle then threw four changeups to Will Smith, none of which was even close to the plate. The bases were loaded.

That’s when Yankees manager Aaron Boone went to his best bullpen pitcher, 30-year-old Luke Weaver, who until this season had drifted from town to town, not unlike David Carradine in “Kung Fu.” Weaver found something this year, and he became the Yankees’ best option in the biggest moments. He fell behind Gavin Lux in the count, then worked the count full, and then threw a 95-mph fastball down. Lux did the professional hitter thing and lofted it to centerfield. He hit it deep enough to score Hernandez for the tying run, and Edman tagged up as well.

Up came Shohei Ohtani with runners on first and third. Ohtani has very clearly not been himself, and it’s such a bummer. He dislocated his left shoulder trying to steal a base in Game 2, and though he gallantly kept playing—even crunching a single in Game 4—it was obvious by the awkward way he turned his whole body on his follow-through that he was half a Shohei up there.

Weaver started him with a changeup, and Ohtani made an uncomfortable swing and fouled the ball back. Only then, home plate umpire Doug Eddings pointed at Yankees catcher Austin Wells, who had stuck his glove out too far on the pitch. Replays clearly showed it: Ohtani’s bat hit the glove. That’s catcher’s interference. And Ohtani was awarded first base.

On the next pitch, Weaver tried to throw a high, outside fastball by Mookie. And Betts clubbed it high and deep to center. It wasn’t nearly deep enough to leave the park; Judge settled under it well short of the warning track. But it was plenty deep enough to score the go-ahead run. Betts pumped his fist in triumph as he jogged toward first base.


All that was left was for the Dodgers to get to the end. Treinen gutted his way through the eighth inning. He did give up a double to Judge and a walk to Chisholm, but got out of it with a Stanton pop-up and, finally, by striking out Anthony Rizzo on his 42nd pitch. He’d given all he had to give.

That left Roberts with pretty much an empty bullpen—none of his remaining options were all that appealing—so he went instead to Game 3 starter and every Dodger fan’s favorite bulldog, Walker Buehler. And, you know, if the starter thing doesn’t work out for Buehler, the closer role suited him. True, he faced the bottom of the Yankees’ lineup, but he still made it through with little stress, getting Volpe to ground out and then striking out Austin Wells and Alex Verdugo. Then they ran around like kids on the Yankee Stadium diamond to the sound of New York silence. The Dodgers celebrated their eighth World Series championship and their first full-season title since 1988.

This final game, let’s be honest, was a mess, especially for the Yankees. In total, there were 13 pitchers, 17 walks, two errors, a catcher’s interference, a failure to cover first, a silly balk and 22 runners left on base. But it was a riveting mess that, over three hours and 42 wild minutes, had heroes and villains and comedy and tragedy and got the heart pumping and the emotions stirring.

And when all is said and done, the Dodgers rose to the moment, Walker Buehler found the baseball everyone thought he’d lost and Freddie Freeman was a superhero. I know Los Angeles fans count 2020 as a full-blooded title, and they should. But this one had to be sweeter.

And when all is said and done, the Yankees lost this game—and really the whole Series—because they failed to do the little things. Sometimes Harold Burr’s old line is true. Sometimes baseball is a game of inches. And then all that’s left is a cold winter of thinking about what might have been.

And here's that boxscore of that WS game: https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/PHA/PHA192910120.shtml

Edit: Man, I was just thinking last night about how cool it was that the Dodgers have 3 future Hall of Famers hitting back-to-back-to-back, and BOTH of those 1929 teams had Hall of Famers batting 3-4-5 in the order.

Edited by Beau Vine
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1 minute ago, Sgt Hulk said:

For all that cool fun shit about this area.  LA is full of the absolute dregs of society. He truly worst of the worst bottom of the barrel garbage watching the shit unfold last night is embarrassing as fuck 

The cool part of LA isn't in LA. It's Redondo Beach, Newport, etc

Edited by n64ra
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It's 1:22 PM CDT on Thursday and OU sucks and Gerrit Cole still hasn't made it over to cover 1B.

37 minutes ago, Jshep34 said:

Every Yankee "fan" would kill for the run the Astros have had since 2015. If altuve was a Yankee he'd be held to same god like status as jeter

QFT

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4 hours ago, Surly Bevo said:

That play is 100% on Cole. As a pitcher in that situation when the ball gets hit to your first baseman you get your ass going to first full out. If he calls you off you peel off.

Cole was scratching his ass watching baseball instead of playing baseball.

He flashed back to his Pirates days. 

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Whole lot of people that don’t know ball in this thread. No surprise. Think about who was batting. Ask yourself if Gerrit Cole could beat that guy in a race to 1st. 
 

Rizzo should’ve been asking himself that before the AB. He has to know that play is his. If he just sprints to first after getting the grounder Mookie is out easily, You guys are letting your Cole butthurt get in the way of the truth

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