What we learned from the 2024 World Series

The 2024 baseball season is over. And just look at who the winner was: It’s you. You’re the winner, friend, because you’ve learned something about baseball during the World Series. We all have. We all know more about baseball now. Hooray for us!

The Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees in the 2024 World Series, four games to one. Here’s what we’ve learned.

Teams should catch the ball and play defense if they want to win a World Series

Tom Emanski leads a very private life these days. He doesn’t do interview requests, and good for him. But it’s possible, if not likely, that he’s running amok right now in a populated area, flipping over cars and setting fires, with 17 ineffective tranquilizer darts dangling from his upper torso. I don’t blame him. The way to win this beautiful game of baseball is to RESPECT the fundamentals. Respect them, dang it.

The Yankees did not respect the fundamentals. They might have played the sloppiest inning in World Series history, if not the sloppiest game in World Series history. It was certainly the sloppiest game from a World Series team facing elimination, and I’m not fact-checking that. It has to be true. A laundry list of debacles and demerits from that disastrous fifth inning:

• Aaron Judge not making a play that he’s made 10,000 times in his life, if not more. In each of those 10,000 times, his brain did not turn into a fog and leak out of his ears. In this specific instance, though, it did and the error started an avalanche. History was going to remember it as the Aaron Judge Game, with his first inning homer setting the tone and his wall-smashing catch adding a little flair. Instead, he made a once-in-a-career flub, and the timing wasn’t especially great.

• Anthony Volpe making the smart play and going to third for a force out, but just pulling the string short on his throw, making a tough play for Jazz Chisholm Jr., who isn’t used to backhanded scoops. The scoop from Chisholm wasn’t something that middle infielders and centerfielders typically practice. Heck, it’s not something that third basemen typically practice. Of all the debacles and demerits, this was the most reasonable, especially as it came on a weak grounder that didn’t deserve to cause chaos. Doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt, though.

• Gerrit Cole not covering first on what should have been an absolute miracle, a dominant show of force under impossible circumstances. He was pitching with the bases loaded and nobody out. It was a mess that existed entirely because of defensive incompetence behind him, and it would have been a small victory if he got out of it after allowing only two runs. Except he was about to get out of it without allowing anything. He got two nasty, nasty, nasty strikeouts, including one where he disassembled Shohei Ohtani piece by piece. Then he got Mookie Betts to hit a harmless grounder to first … except that it wasn’t harmless.  Anthony Rizzo didn’t charge the grounder because he assumed Cole was going to cover first. Cole didn’t. It was I-got-it-you-take-it nonsense of the highest order, and it probably cost them the World Series.

But it wasn’t just about that inning. There was a disengagement violation in the top of the ninth that didn’t end up affecting the outcome of the game, but it’s worth noting here because it’s the first time I’ve written “disengagement violation,” which is apparently a baseball term now. Disengagement violation. Feels weird to type. But of course the Yankees had one of them in this game, which will live forever as a testament to the dumbest baseball imaginable.

Ohtani, with a cranky shoulder and a .105 batting average in the World Series, reached first on catcher’s interference in the top of the eighth, and it led to the World Series-winning run. It was the only way Ohtani was going to reach base. The World Series was promoted like “Godzilla vs. Kong,” except one of the monsters got hurt before he could do anything. Then Yankees catcher Austin Wells stuck his glove out a centimeter too far, and the victor of “Godzilla vs. Kong” was partially decided by a very, very tall capybara accidentally knocking over a stack of files.

Catch the ball. Make the plays. Don’t give six outs to a team with a historically impressive heart of the lineup. That’s twice as many outs as teams usually get!

No, seriously, teams should catch the ball and play defense if they want to win a World Series

Just wanted to re-up this point in case it wasn’t clear the first time. The Dodgers were rattled and thinking about the flight home and the pressure that came with a World Series slipping through their fingers. Then the Yankees did the thing from the famous NSFW tweet about not being clear about what kind of move they were trying to do. Now we’re here.

The Dodgers’ batting average in the World Series was .206. The Yankees’ was .212.

The Dodgers’ on-base percentage was .296. The Yankees’ was .332

The Dodgers’ slugging percentage was .406. The Yankees’ was .412.

The Dodgers’ ERA was 4.80. The Yankees’ was 3.83.

The Yankees had more hits, more homers, more stolen bases and more walks. They allowed far fewer baserunners.

They didn’t catch the ball and play defense, though. Teams should catch the ball and play defense if they want to win a World Series. (The Yankees also ran the bases like a bunch of ding-a-lings, too.)

It’s never the players you expect

Well, fine, sometimes you expect Freddie Freeman. But the rest of the Dodgers’ stars? Not so much. Mookie Betts had a .681 OPS in the World Series, and that’s inflated by the hit given on the screw-up from Cole and Rizzo on the easy grounder that didn’t end the fifth inning. Will Smith hit a homer and still finished with a .483 OPS. Max Muncy didn’t have a single hit in five games. Ohtani has a lower career World Series batting average than Barry Zito and John Smoltz.

The Dodgers won because of Tommy Edman, a latter-day Ben Zobrist or Marco Scutaro, emerging at the perfect time to be the utility player getting hot at exactly the right time. He’s the reason the Dodgers won the pennant, and he was the best hitter on the team other than Freeman and Teoscar Hernández, whose .350 average led the Dodgers in the Series. No Dodger crossed home plate more than Edman in the World Series. When you buy a ticket for OHTANI vs. JUDGE, sometimes you get Tommy Edman and Alex Vesia as the opening act, and the headliners don’t come on stage. The show is still worth watching, though.

Starting pitchers don’t matter like they used to

The Dodgers traded for Tyler Glasnow because they wanted to win the World Series. He didn’t throw a pitch in the postseason. It’s too glib to say that he wasn’t missed, but his injury was more of a minor inconvenience for the Dodgers than a season-ending development. Teams can get by without starting pitchers in the postseason.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Walker Buehler had excellent starts, to be sure, but the Dodgers didn’t have a single pitcher throw more than seven innings this series. They’re the first championship team in history to not have a seven-inning pitcher in the World Series. Gerrit Cole threw nearly twice as many innings in the World Series as anyone on the Dodgers, and he had a 0.71 ERA. The Yankees lost both of Cole’s starts.

Teams can get by with relievers and matchups, white-knuckle innings and different looks from every bullpen arm they send to the mound. Sometimes it works, like with what the Dodgers did for most of the Series. Sometimes it doesn’t, with Tommy Kahnle having an especially sleepless night on Wednesday.

Keep this in mind when your team is looking to sign a nine-figure starter in the offseason. The team with the best nine-figure starter in the Series was 0-2 in his starts. There are ways to work around a sketchy rotation. Teams will get even more inventive in the future, too. This is the modern game of baseball. No shirt, no shoes, no starters, no problem. There are ways around that.

(Although Walker Buehler becoming the best version of himself for the first time since 2021 might be the biggest reason the Dodgers won the World Series. So maybe starters still matter an awful lot. It’s complicated.)

(Top photo of Ohtani’s bat clipping Wells’ glove in the eighth: Alex Slitz / Getty Images)