'It's going to sting for a while': Yanks lament lack of World Series execution

NEW YORK -- Ultimately, the story of the final night of the New York Yankees’ 2024 season -- and, really, a subplot of their year as a whole -- was the number of free outs and free bases they gave away, seemingly, in all phases of the game.

That’s what brought it all crashing down in a nightmare fifth inning of Game 5 of the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Wednesday night.

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And execution is what sealed their fate in the eighth.

For all the bombastic homers that thrilled the Bronx crowd early in the night and the utter chaos of misplays and misfortune that ensued for the Yankees to blow a five-run lead, they were still in position to win the game late, with the contest in the hands of their leverage relievers. And one last time, free bases haunted Tommy Kahnle and Luke Weaver in the 7-6, series-clinching and season-ending loss.

"For it to all crash like that, it's just ... I'll be thinking about this for a long time, I can tell you that,” Kahnle said. “It just sucks that maybe I could have done something differently. That's what's going to be rolling around in my head for a long time. I just feel like there was definitely more we could have done."

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This wasn’t the mayhem of the killer fifth inning, when two errors and a missed out at first base gave the Dodgers’ lineup a whopping three extra outs to turn the seeming formality of another cross-country flight to the West Coast into one final heavyweight showdown.

But there were, again, the free bases. A walk to No. 8 hitter Will Smith to load the bases, a freak catcher’s interference -- the first in a Fall Classic since Game 3 of the 1982 World Series -- that handed a seemingly compromised Shohei Ohtani a free jog to first base ahead of the Dodgers’ other two all-world MVPs.

With two sacrifice flies in the inning, advantage turned again to disadvantage, with Los Angeles dealing New York one final, decisive answer.

"You're trying to keep the ball out of the air, but you're facing three of the best hitters in the world,” Weaver said. “You're trying to make sure you're limiting the damage. Sometimes, you don't get on the right end of it, and you just tip your cap to some hitters who executed on fundamental baseball."

That’s it, really: The Dodgers executed when it mattered, and the Yankees didn’t.

With New York nursing a 6-5 lead in the eighth, Kiké Hernández led off against Kahnle with a single, Tommy Edman followed with a grounder to deep short corralled by Anthony Volpe on a dive but still good for an infield single, and Smith took a four-pitch walk to load the bases with none out.

"I really felt like I was clicking pretty good for those first few pitches, and then after that, it just kind of almost snowballed on me,” Kahnle said. “I lost command, and the next thing I know, the inning gets away from us.”

Gavin Lux battled Weaver for six pitches and ended up lifting a two-strike fastball to deep left-center to tie the game. Two pitches later, Mookie Betts put an easy swing on a first-pitch fastball to put the Dodgers on top for good.

“Don’t strike out,” Betts said of his approach at the plate. “Put one in play right there; you never know what’s going to happen. I had a little talk with Freddie [Freeman] right before that because I didn’t know what to do. Freddie just said, ‘Trust your gut,’ so I went up there and just put it in play.”

The Dodgers clearly got help from that catcher’s interference, too, on the lone pitch between those two sacrifice flies.

Ohtani had been 0-for-4 entering that final plate appearance, and 2-for-19 in the World Series, with his top hand (the extension of the left shoulder that had sustained a subluxation in Game 2) coming off the bat on many of his follow-throughs as he noticeably winced.

But on the first pitch of that battle against Weaver, the head of his bat was ruled to have clipped the mitt of Yankees catcher Austin Wells -- as confirmed by a quick replay review, much to the displeasure and confusion of the 49,263 at Yankee Stadium.

Clearly, the possibility of the first Fall Classic catcher’s interference in 42 years hadn’t even crossed Weaver’s mind -- and had that plate appearance led to a second out in the inning, a sacrifice fly wouldn’t have been good enough from Betts.

"He's obviously got a long swing, so with the changeup kind of running away, it was kind of a perfect storm,” Weaver said. “Wells is trying to be able to stay through the ball, and Shohei is just trying to cover and do a job up there. Sometimes, it's just kind of awkward and weird."

Add that to the what-ifs the Yankees will replay in their heads as they digest this through a long offseason.

Ohtani’s trip to first came of an unusual happenstance, perhaps, but it was also fitting on a night when the Yankees un-executed their way out of that brutal fifth inning and also added, of all things, a mound disengagement violation balk, not to mention throwing, fielding and mental errors at critical points in the game.

All those things, in aggregate over two innings, cost them a shot at forcing Game 6 -- and a chance to continue their chase for a title.

"It's going to sting for a while,” Kahnle said. “We're going to look back on it and see that those are the plays that we can clean up, and we're going to move on. It's part of the game. It stings that you see it all the time, and it just happened to happen to us. It sucks. It does, big time."