Ah, the heartbreak of baseball—where the smallest of errors can echo through eternity. In the storied 2024 World Series, that echo became deafening for the New York Yankees.
Let's set the scene: Yankees up 5-0 over the Dodgers in the top of the fifth, Gerrit Cole is owning the mound, and the Yankees are hungry to drag the series back to Los Angeles with some serious muscle. Everything feels like it’s going their way, until—well, it wasn’t.
Gerrit Cole was in full ace mode, and the Dodgers seemed stymied. That is until the baseball gods decided to stir the pot.
Things took a wild twist when Hernández led off the inning with a single, and Tommy Edman sent a line drive screaming toward center field. An Aaron Judge error—an event as rare as a snowstorm in July—meant Hernández beat the throw to second base.
Here’s where panic can become a palpable, swirling force. With Judge’s misstep setting the stage, Will Smith connected for a routine grounder that led to a fielder's choice. Yankees rookie Anthony Volpe, unable to make the throw to third, saw the Dodgers’ bases suddenly filled with anticipation and zero outs on the board.
Fast forward through a pair of strikeouts, and up came Mookie Betts. In a twist no one saw coming, Betts hit a grounder to first.
But uncertainties between Anthony Rizzo and Gerrit Cole meant nobody was home to cover. Betts reached first safely, scratching a crucial run across for the Dodgers.
In a season where the Yankees had racked up 65 poor plays—7th most in the majors—this one seemed to cut the deepest. The Dodgers capitalized on what could only be seen as baseball charity and knotted the game at five before eventually wrapping up the World Series four innings later.
After that fifth inning disaster, the emotions were raw. Clarke Schmidt from the Yankees summed it up with a gut-wrenching, "It's pretty sickening."
The clubhouse was stone-quiet, under a cloud of disbelief and frustration. Could-have-beens filled the air like ghosts of missed opportunities.
Aaron Judge, whose rare error began the Yankees’ unraveling, reflected on the bitter pill of the loss: "All I really think about is, we lost. It's what it comes down to.
We can break it down from Game 1 all the way through. But when it comes down to it, we didn't get the job done."
The pain of it all? That's the stuff of legendary cautionary tales. In this high-stakes chess match we call baseball, one balky inning reminds us how even the most rock-solid leads can slip through our fingers with a few twists of the improbable.
