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 each camp than pitcher’s fielding practice.

Day after day. The routine. The monotony. And within all the various permutations of these drills, none is more practiced than ground ball to first, pitcher gets over to cover. It is designed to make sure the most basic of plays is executed correctly.

So fittingly, it executed these 2024 Yankees — perhaps the most technically unsound team to ever get this far.

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

And the Yankee season is over because of it, finalized in a 7-6 World Series Game 5 loss that carried the Dodgers to their eighth title and sent the Yankees to an offseason of regrets.

“You look at what haunted us the whole year and it might 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,” Nestor Cortes said.

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 those two games, they handed away outs and 90 extra feet like the kindest Santa in the world. They did not lack talent as much as technique — and that only cost them history.

For there is a stew of willfulness, relentlessness and pride to do the routine in baseball well. The Yanks talked about embracing each other, but they never did quite embrace the need to button up all that was wrong with them. Instead, multiple Yankees talked in a losing clubhouse about “mistakes” that doomed them as if they were not within the team’s control to prevent. Since mid-February. And, really, longer than that.

These Yankees, after all, have been on a rinse, repeat cycle as to how they lose in the postseason during the Aaron Judge Era. Their fundamental maladies are overcome against inferior AL Central opponents, but when the degree of October difficulty rises, 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 have played eight rounds against everyone else and won only one, the one-game wild card in 2018 vs. the A’s, who kind of spiritually (if not geographically) belong in the AL Central.

They won one World Series game this year — Game 4, when the Dodgers threw none of their main pitchers: The AL Central of strategies. The Yankees were to the Dodgers what the Guardians were to the Bombers in the ALCS — a team tantalizingly close to winning every game, yet eliminated in five against a superior opponent.

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

The Yankees all but built an oxygen tent to revive the Dodgers as they played to both halves of their 2024 personality in the finale.

They are at their best when they hit homers and Judge plays well — as Judge goes, so often do the Yankees. 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 slamming into 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 none out in the fifth. He said there was no reason for what was his first error all year. Anthony Volpe then spiked a ball that Chisholm could not corral at third and the bases were loaded with no out. Cole, though, 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 the play unassisted. Cole said he initially broke as if to try to grab the grounder — which was not really that close to him — and that set him off on a bad pathway to cover first … and he just stopped. Neither made it to the bag. Betts did. An inning-ending groundout instead became an RBI single.

Afterward, Rizzo and Cole would apologize to each other. Boone would say that Cole’s exhaustion from the inning perhaps limited his energy to reach the bag. The routine becoming not routine. The Yankees being the 2024 Yankees.

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

The Yankees would actually take a 6-5 lead in the sixth, but it was an inning in which they had three walks and no hits. They drew eight walks from the second to eighth innings and that was the lone one that scored. 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 — of course aided by another Yankee mistake, a catcher’s interference against Austin Wells.

Thus, the story of the 2024 Yankees was finalized — beneficiaries of a favorable draw, talented enough to get to the World Series, but again not technically sound enough to beat a heavyweight opponent.