In ‘crazy’ year, Dodgers win title after wild rally

NEW YORK — The 2024 Los Angeles Dodgers were lined with stars but ravaged by injury. They had spent an entire season overcoming adversity.

And in the end, when it was time to clinch a championship, they did it once more, erasing a five-run deficit and using seven relievers — including starting pitcher Walker Buehler — to cover 23 outs in a 7-6, come-from-behind victory over the New York Yankees in Game 5 of the World Series on Wednesday night.

With that, the Dodgers clinched their eighth title in franchise history, their first since the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season and their first in a full season since 1988. They became the first team to use more than seven pitchers to clinch a championship.

“We’re obviously resilient, but there’s so much love in the clubhouse that won this game today,” Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts said. “That’s what it was. It was love, it was grit. I mean, it was just a beautiful thing. I’m just proud of us and I’m happy for us.”

Their comeback was a product of the multitude of opportunities presented to them in the fifth inning. Aaron Judge had a liner hit directly at him ricochet off his glove. Anthony Volpe threw wide of third base on an attempted force out. Anthony Rizzo fielded a slow roller but had nobody to flip it to at first base. With two outs and the bases loaded, Freddie Freeman followed with a two-run single and Teoscar Hernandez added a two-run double to tie the score at 5-5.

Yankees ace Gerrit Cole had been cruising through the first four innings, keeping the Dodgers hitless while throwing only 49 pitches. He then threw 38 pitches in a fifth inning that essentially required six outs because of the team’s misplays.

The five-run comeback was tied for the fourth-largest in World Series history, surpassed only by the 1929 Athletics’ eight-run comeback against the Cubs in Game 4, the 1996 Yankees’ six-run comeback against the Braves in Game 4 and the 1956 Dodgers’ six-run comeback against the Yankees in Game 2, according to ESPN Research.

“We just take advantage of every mistake they made in that inning,” Teoscar Hernández said. “We put some good at-bats together. We put the ball in play.”

The Yankees took back the lead on Giancarlo Stanton‘s sacrifice fly in the bottom of the sixth and preserved it when Clay Holmes came in relief of Cole to strike out Max Muncy with two on and two out in the top of the seventh. But the Dodgers broke through again in the eighth.

Enrique Hernández and Tommy Edman began with back-to-back singles, and Will Smith walked on four straight pitches, prompting Yankees manager Aaron Boone to replace Tommy Kahnle with Luke Weaver, who recorded four outs in Game 4. Gavin Lux and Betts followed with sacrifice flies, giving the Dodgers their first lead — one they would not give up.

The Yankees threatened in the bottom half, with two on and none out against a tiring Blake Treinen. Daniel Hudson and Buehler, the Game 3 starter who has struggled throughout his career out of the bullpen, were warming up. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts came out for a brief chat with Treinen, who then got Stanton to fly out and struck out Rizzo to end the threat.

Buehler checked in for the ninth and retired the bottom of the Yankees’ lineup in order. He spread his arms out wide and looked over at his dugout, then was promptly mobbed.

“There’s just a lot of ways we can win baseball games,” Buehler said. “Obviously the superstars we have on our team and the discipline, it just kind of all adds up.”

It was a fitting capstone for a dominant run. The 2020 to ’24 Dodgers became the first team since the 1953 to ’57 Yankees with multiple World Series titles and a winning percentage of .640 or better over a five-season span, according to ESPN Research.

This era’s Dodgers broke through to the World Series in 2017 and suffered a disheartening seven-game loss to the Houston Astros, a team that was later revealed to have been illegally stealing signs. The Dodgers returned to the World Series in 2018, only to be overwhelmed by the Boston Red Sox, and suffered a heartbreaking late loss in the decisive game of the 2019 National League Division Series to the underdog Washington Nationals.

The 2020 season, shortened by COVID-19, finally saw the Dodgers break through, coming back from a 3-1 series deficit against the Atlanta Braves in the NL Championship Series and then defeating the Tampa Bay Rays in six games in the World Series, claiming their first title in 32 years. The next three years featured more heartbreak — outlasted by the Braves in the 2021 NLCS, then demoralized by the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks in the 2022 and 2023 NLDS, respectively.

The ensuing offseason saw the Dodgers splurge more than $1 billion on two generational players, two-way star Shohei Ohtani and young starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Tyler Glasnow was acquired via trade and signed to a lucrative extension. Teoscar Hernández came over as a free agent on a large one-year contract.

But injuries ravaged the team in the 2024 regular season. Yamamoto, Betts, Muncy, Treinen and Brusdar Graterol all sat out extended time; several key members of the rotation — Glasnow, Clayton Kershaw, Gavin Stone and Emmet Sheehan — were lost to season-ending injuries. On the night they clinched their 11th NL West title in 12 years, Freeman sprained his right ankle. On the night they took a 2-1 lead in this World Series, Ohtani suffered a subluxation of his left shoulder.

But the Dodgers kept going. They used a bullpen game to blow out the Padres with their season on the line while on the road in Game 4 of the NLDS, then came back to Dodger Stadium and shut them out to advance into the next round. They then used an overwhelming offensive attack to dispatch the surging New York Mets, accumulating an NLCS-record 46 runs. The first three games of the World Series showcased their end-to-end dominance.

Trailing by one with two outs and the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth in Game 1, Freeman provided a Kirk Gibson-style walk-off grand slam for a thrilling victory. But it was starting pitching that powered the Dodgers through the first three games, with Jack Flaherty, Buehler and Yamamoto, the only three members of a maligned rotation, giving up only three runs in 16⅔ innings.

The Dodgers absorbed an eventual rout while utilizing mostly low-leverage relievers in Game 4. The thought, despite trailing by only one run after five innings and two runs heading into the eighth, was to save their best relievers for Game 5. Those relievers began to factor in as early as the second inning, by which point Flaherty had given up four runs on back-to-back homers from Judge and Jazz Chisholm Jr., and an RBI single from Alex Verdugo.

Anthony Banda, Ryan Brasier, Michael Kopech, Alex Vesia, Graterol and Treinen — representing the group of arms that has so often stepped up throughout this postseason — combined to hold the Yankees to only two runs and four hits in 6⅔ innings, solidifying a title.