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

NEW YORK — Walker Buehler snapped a curveball past Alex Verdugo and stared into his dugout with what seemed like equal parts amazement and assuredness, his head slightly cocked, his arms stretched wide. It was 11:50 p.m. ET on Wednesday in Yankee Stadium, and the Los Angeles Dodgers — an exorbitant, star-laden team that spent its season ravaged by injury and was hardened because of it — had clinched a World Series championship in the most fitting way possible.

By overcoming a five-run deficit against one of the best pitchers on the planet. By using seven relievers — one of them Buehler, a starter making his first relief appearance in six years — to record 23 outs. By scratching and clawing and using every aspect of their roster to solidify a title that seemed inevitable in January and felt impossible at the start of October.

“Crazy,” Mookie Betts said after the 7-6, come-from-behind victory over the New York Yankees in Game 5. “That’s the definition of the 2024 Dodgers.”

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. On Friday — the day in which the late Fernando Valenzuela, who died last week, would have celebrated his 64th birthday — the Dodgers will get the parade they were denied four years ago amid a pandemic. Before these Dodgers, no team had ever clinched a championship by using that many pitchers or by coming back from down that many runs. It’s the story of their season.

“It seems like we hit every speed bump possible over the course of this year,” Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman said after being crowned MVP of this World Series. “And to overcome what we did as a group of guys, it’s special.”

Perhaps no player embodied that better than Freeman, who sprained his right ankle on the night the Dodgers clinched their 11th division title in 12 years and spent all month fighting through hours of treatment just to step on the field.

He was one of many.

The Dodgers navigated through October with only a three-man rotation after Tyler Glasnow, Clayton Kershaw, Gavin Stone and Emmet Sheehan had all suffered season-ending injuries, but they used an array of bullpen games to continually advance. Throughout the summer, the likes of Betts, Max Muncy, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Brusdar Graterol and Blake Treinen all missed extended time, and yet the Dodgers finished with a major league-best 98 wins. On the night they won their second consecutive World Series game, Shohei Ohtani suffered a subluxation on his left shoulder, and yet the Dodgers found a way to win two more games.

“One thing is that we just kept going,” Roberts said. “Even in the postseason, I don’t think anyone had us picked. I don’t think they had us picked to get out of the first series. For us to go out there and fight and scratch and claw and win 11 games in October, that’s a credit to our guys.”

The Dodgers won Game 1 on the strength of Freeman’s Kirk Gibson-style walk-off grand slam in the 10th inning, but they took a commanding 3-1 series lead thanks to, surprisingly, their starting pitching. Jack Flaherty, Yamamoto and Buehler combined to allow just three runs in 16 2/3 innings, obliterating the Yankees’ biggest advantage.

When the Dodgers fell behind in a bullpen game on Tuesday night, they essentially punted, using low-leverage relievers despite a manageable deficit to turn Game 4 into a rout. Those high-leverage arms were needed early in Game 5. Before the second out was recorded in the second inning, the Yankees had staked a 4-0 lead off Flaherty, riding back-to-back homers from Aaron Judge and Jazz Chisholm Jr.

“Every half-inning we came in,” Freeman said, “we were like, ‘Just get one. Chip away, chip away.'”

The Yankees’ defense cracked the door open in the fifth. Judge had a flare 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 to at first base. With two outs and the bases loaded, Freeman followed with a two-run single and Teoscar Hernandez added a two-run double, tying the game at 5. The Yankees re-took the lead on Giancarlo Stanton’s sac fly in the sixth, but the Dodgers gained their first advantage in the eighth on sacrifice flies by Gavin Lux and Betts.

Treinen and Buehler delivered the last six outs.

“A lot of people are gonna write about Treinen and Buehler, but it won’t do it justice,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said. “What those guys did was nothing short of incredible.”

Buehler had spent all year trying to find himself in the wake of a second Tommy John surgery and finally started to experience success in October, most notably in Game 3 of the World Series, when the zip on his fastball returned and helped him mow down the Yankees in five scoreless innings. On the bus ride over to Yankee Stadium on Wednesday afternoon, Buehler told Friedman and general manager Brandon Gomes he could be available for one inning. They didn’t think much of it. In the sixth inning, he informed the Dodgers he would make his way to the bullpen in case the game went awry. Nobody thought much of it then, either.

An inning later, Buehler started to get loose. In the bottom of the eighth, when Treinen, in his third inning of work, faced a two-on, one-out jam, Buehler was warming up alongside Daniel Hudson, the 37-year-old right-hander who had already pitched in back-to-back games. When Treinen got out of it, inducing a pop-up of Stanton and a strikeout of Rizzo, it set the stage for Buehler to get the most unlikely of ninth innings imaginable. His teammates felt confident.

“He likes the energy, even the negative energy,” Treinen said. “He feeds on it. He’s a big-game pitcher.”

Buehler toed the rubber from the stretch position and displayed some of the nastiest stuff he has shown all year — a fastball that reached 97 mph, a cutter that darted, a curve with hellacious spin. He navigated through the bottom of the Yankees’ lineup with ease, cementing his legacy as one of the ultimate October performers in Dodgers history.

Said Buehler: “I feel like I’m supposed to be in those spots.”

The Dodgers had spent the last dozen years dominating regular seasons and coming up short in the playoffs. Their lone championship was captured amid one of the most peculiar seasons in baseball history. Their legacy was attached more closely to continual disappointments in October.

There was the heartbreak of the 2017 World Series, a seven-game loss to a Houston Astros team that was later revealed to have been illegally stealing signs. The crushing finality to 2019, when the underdog Washington Nationals came from behind in the decisive game of the National League Division Series. And the sheer disappointments of 2022 and ’23, when they were ousted early by two division rivals — the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks, respectively — that they previously dominated.

This year, the Dodgers would not be denied. 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. And then they overwhelmed the high-powered Yankees.

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.

Their dominant run now has a fitting capstone.6