World Series debacle shows everything wrong with Aaron Judge-era Yankees

From the first day of spring training to the last, nothing is more common in every camp than pitchers’ fielding practice.

Day after day. The routine. Montonia. And within all the different permutations of these drills, none is more practiced than the ground ball to first, pitcher comes over to cover. It is designed to ensure that the most basic of games are performed correctly.

So fittingly, so did these 2024 Yankees — perhaps the most technically unsound team ever to make it this far.

In a slapstick fifth inning in which the Yankees played all their biggest hits — or more familiarly, mistakes — they still would have survived if Anthony Rizzo and Gerrit Cole had completed a Baseball 101 game. But in the worst World Series blunder at first since perhaps the ball went by Billy Buckner, both committed errors and omissions.

And the Yankee season is over because of it, ending in a 7-6 World Series Game 5 loss that led the Dodgers to their eighth title and sent the Yankees into a period of regret.

“You look at what haunted us all year and it could have been some plays that could have been made and weren’t made or some situations that we could have gotten out of and we didn’t,” said Nestor Cortes.

The Yankees lost the first game of the World Series and the last game of the 2024 MLB season because they are bad at baseball. In the two games, they handed out outs and 90 extra feet like the world’s cutest Santa Claus. They didn’t lack talent so much as technique – and it only cost them history.

Because there is a stew of will, ruthlessness and pride in doing the routine in baseball well. The Yanks talked about embracing each other, but they never quite embraced the need to button everything that was wrong with them. Instead, several Yankees in a losing clubhouse spoke of “mistakes” that doomed them as if they were not within the team’s control to prevent. Since mid-February. And actually longer than that.

After all, these Yankees have been on a rinse, repeat cycle of losing in the postseason during the Aaron Judge Era. Their fundamental woes have been overcome against inferior AL Central opponents, but when the difficulty increases in October, the Yankees crumble.

The Yankees were 31-9 (.775) against the AL Central (postseason included) this year and 71-65 (.522) against everyone else. They have played seven rounds against the AL Central in the playoffs since 2017, including two to win the AL pennant this year and advanced through all seven. They’ve gone eight rounds against everyone else and won just one, one-game wild card in 2018 against the A’s, who somehow spiritually (if not geographically) belong in the AL Central.

They won a World Series game this year – Game 4, in which the Dodgers didn’t throw any of their key pitchers: The AL Central of Strategies. The Yankees were to the Dodgers what the Guardians were to the Bombers in the ALCS — a team that came tantalizingly close to winning every game, yet was eliminated in five against a superior opponent.

“It comes down to what it always comes down to — you’ve got to limit mistakes,” Judge said. “You don’t give your opponent a chance to breathe.”

The Yankees almost built an oxygen tent to revive the Dodgers as they played to both halves of their 2024 persona in the Finals.

They’re at their best when they hit homers, and Judge plays well — as Judge says, the Yankees do so often. And Judge hit a two-run homer in the first, Jazz Chisholm followed with a blast and Giancarlo Stanton opened the third with his team-record seventh postseason homer. Judge also made a brilliant defensive play, robbing Freddie Freeman of an RBI double with a backhanded catch just before hitting the left-center field wall in the fourth.

That allowed Gerrit Cole to preserve a no-hitter and the Yankees to hold a 5-0 lead.

But as Judge goes, so go the Yankees. He dropped a routine fly to center with one on and nobody out in the fifth. He said there was no reason for what was his first mistake all year. Anthony Volpe then nailed a ball that Chisholm couldn’t contain at third, and the bases were loaded with no outs. However, Cole struck out Gavin Lux and Shohei Ohtani and induced a squibbed grounder to first.

Rizzo said he laid back on it because of the English on the ball, but attacking it would have allowed him to make plays without help. Cole said he initially broke as if to try to grab the grounder — which wasn’t really that close to him — and that put him on a bad path to cover first … and he just stopped . None of them reached the bag. Betts did. An inning-ending groundout turned into an RBI single instead.

Afterwards, Rizzo and Cole would apologize to each other. Boone would say Cole’s exhaustion from the inning may have limited his energy to reach the bag. The routine does not become routine. The Yankees are the 2024 Yankees.

And still, Cole could have limited it to one run. But World Series MVP Freddie Freeman hit a two-run single and Yankee killer Teoscar Hernandez hit a two-run double, and it was tied. The volume and energy was drained from a crowd of 49,263 who believed the Yankees were about to make history and become the first of 25 teams to go down three in the World Series and force a Game 6.

The Yankees would actually take a 6-5 lead into the sixth, but it was an inning in which they had three walks and no hits. They struck out eight times from the second through the eighth innings, and that was the only run to score. They went 1-for-10 overall with runners in scoring position.

Luke Weaver was on the mound for two sacrifice flies in the eighth that put the Dodgers ahead — aided, of course, by another Yankee error, a catcher’s interference against Austin Wells.

Thus ended the story of the 2024 Yankees—recipients of a favorable lottery pick, talented enough to make the World Series, but again not technically sound enough to beat a heavyweight opponent.