BRONX, NY — Two errors and one misread was all it took for the New York Yankees’ 5-0 lead in Game 5 of the World Series to go up in smoke and, with it, their championship hopes, too.
Home runs by Aaron Judge, Jazz Chisholm, and Giancarlo Stanton had the Yankees sitting pretty in Game 5 and Gerrit Cole was no-hitting the Los Angeles Dodgers through four innings. It felt all but certain that New York would be the first team in MLB history to force a Game 6 after dropping the first three games of a World Series. But then the fifth rolled along and in a blink, the game was tied up following numerous breakdowns and mistakes.
“It’s baseball. It’s just a tough ending,” Cole said. “It is a little hard to comprehend but at the same time, I felt like we came in the dugout like, ‘Wow.’ But we’re still in the ballgame. In this situation, they did a great job on a handful of pitches, they put the ball in play. And in baseball, if you put the ball in play, you get rewarded for it sometimes. They were so relentless in their approach. They won a lot of pitches in that inning.
Enrique Hernandez led off with a single to spoil the early no-hit bid. Tommy Edman lofted a soft liner out to center for Judge — a play he makes 100 out of 100 times. Yet, somehow, it clanged off his glove to put runners on first and second with no outs.
“It comes back to me,” Judge said. “If I make that play, the other two probably don’t happen.”
Will Smith grounded out to Anthony Volpe, who tried to get the force at third but bounced his throw so poorly that Chisholm could not reel it in.
“The play to Volpe, the right move obviously going to third, a little bit of a short hop over there at to third, didn’t complete the play,” manager Aaron Boone said.
With the bases loaded and no outs, Gerrit Cole bore down to strike out Gavin Lux and Shohei Ohtani swinging. He then coaxed Mookie Betts to send a roller to first, which was fielded deeper behind the bag by Anthony Volpe.
Cole took a bad angle thinking he could make a play on the ball and could not cover first. With Rizzo too far from the bag, Betts was safe and the Dodgers scored their first run of the night.
“My angle should have been a little more aggressive toward first base to give myself a chance to continue to the bag if I didn’t get it,” Cole said. “But I just didn’t read the ball.”
Freddie Freeman lined a two-run single and Teoscar Hernandez tied it up with a double. Just like that, back to square one.
“You give a team like the Dodgers three extra outs, they’re going to capitalize on it,” Judge said. “That fifth inning, that hurt us there. Even though we were able to battle back… you can’t get a team like that extra outs.”
The Yankees did, in fact, battle back. Within one inning, they were back in the lead after Stanton’s sixth-inning sacrifice fly. But Cole departed with two outs in the seventh and by the eighth, the Dodgers scratched two runs across via sacrifice flies to re-take a lead they would hold on to win their eighth-ever World Series title.
“We just didn’t get the job done,” Judge said. “Just a couple mistakes along the way. We didn’t finish it.”
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