LOS ANGELES — East Coast versus West Coast. Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts versus Juan Soto and Aaron Judge. Los Angeles Dodgers versus New York Yankees. The World Series matchup of Major League Baseball’s dreams — an epic clash of big names, big money and big markets – is a reality.
Seemingly destined for the Fall Classic ever since landing Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto during their billion-dollar off-season, the Dodgers finally got there Sunday night, putting an end to a stirring New York Mets run with a 10-5 Game 6 victory.
That they’ll try for the eighth championship in franchise history isn’t a surprise, although their path to a 22nd World Series, and first since 2020 when they beat the Tampa Bay Rays in the Arlington pandemic bubble, certainly is.
“I really feel like we finally arrived, I finally arrived at this stage,” Ohtani said through interpreter Will Ireton. “A lot of the games we played were really tough and hard to win. And it was truly a team effort to get here.”
Consider the National League Championship Series finale, before a roaring Dodger Stadium crowd of 52,674, a microcosm of their improvising on the fly and finding ways regardless of circumstance.
Tommy Edman, batting cleanup in a batting order missing Freddie Freeman, ripped a two-run double in the first inning and added a two-run homer in the third en route to NLCS MVP honours, while reliever Michael Kopech, acquired from the White Sox in the same three-team, deadline deal as the former Cardinals utilityman, was the first of seven pitchers in a bullpen day that closed out the Mets.
“You look at what happened in the off-season, you sign Shohei and you’ve got so many superstars on the team, the expectation is to have success,” said Edman, whom the Dodgers had been trying to acquire from St. Louis for years before the July 29 trade went down. “And to have those expectations and to come through on all those is impressive and says a lot about the group that we have here.”
The bullpen day was L.A.’s second of the series and third of the post-season, a necessity with a rotation-plus worth of starters hurt, a prime demographic in the $43.2 million worth of injuries they endured during the season, as calculated by Spotrac.
“We did not have easy in our playbook all year,” said Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations. “This is as challenging a season in terms of the injuries, adversity, things that popped up as I can remember. For us to be where we are right now speaks to our scouting staff, our analysts, our player development group. The fingerprints that are on this for the contributions our young players are able to come up and make really speaks to the veterans in our clubhouse who made it so comfortable for them to come up and be confident.”
In the Yankees, they’ll face an organization that is in some ways their East Coast equivalent, a big-spending, destination club steeped in lore that is also championship-or-bust every year.
“If you’re a baseball fan, two big-market teams that have been around for a long time, can’t write it up any better than this,” said Kevin Kiermaier, acquired from the Blue Jays at the deadline for defence. “Superstars on both teams. Great pitchers. Great hitters. It’s going to be a hell of a series.”
The Mets are trying to join the Dodgers and Yankees in that stratosphere, and their next steps after getting so close this year will be fascinating to watch. Soto, the pending free agent whose 10th-inning homer Saturday night eliminated the Cleveland Guardians and sent the Yankees to the World Series, could become the spoils of a Gotham tug-of-war that could have far-reaching implications for the player market.
Imagine how he’d look in the Mets lineup between Francisco Lindor and Mark Vientos — who hit his fifth post-season homer, a two-run drive in the fourth inning that made it a 6-3 game — and perhaps with Pete Alonso, another pending free agent, back batting cleanup.
They laid some important franchise foundation by rallying from 11 games under .500 in early June to win a wild card, eliminate the Milwaukee Brewers in three games, take down the Philadelphia Phillies in four and then push the Dodgers to six.
“It’s not easy to come through so much adversity, but we kept finding ways to get the job done,” said Mets manager Carlos Mendoza. “Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case this series. But this should be our expectation moving forward every year, we should be playing games deep into October. Proud of the whole organization.”
While Mendoza and the Mets are left to look forward, the Dodgers can keep their sights on the present, hosting Game 1 of the World Series on Friday.
They have four days to reset, a chance for Freeman to further rest his sprained right ankle, Gavin Lux to heal his troublesome hip and a bullpen that’s handled 59 per cent of their post-season innings to recover.
How sustainable that will be against the Yankees, especially their trio of doom in Soto, Judge and Giancarlo Stanton, is a pivotal question.
To get through the Mets in the finale, Roberts got one inning from Kopech, who allowed Alonso’s RBI single, 1.1 innings from Ben Casparius, Anthony Banda and Ryan Brasier, followed by an inning each from Evan Phillips and Daniel Hudson, plus two innings at the end from Blake Treinen.
“It comes down to me trusting everyone on the roster,” said Roberts, who noted that Casaprius was so far down the depth chart when the season began that they hadn’t even met. “There are some guys that cut their teeth in the post-season and it’s not ideal. But they showed well. They competed (and) fought. And for this ballclub, that’s what we’re going to need from the pitching.”
Such an approach is taken out of necessity rather than desire, but that’s also where the wider industry is at.
“As pitchers, when we see our guys that we’ve been with for an entire season go out and just do their job and put up a zero, it’s almost like a relay race,” Banda, who appeared in seven games for the Toronto Blue Jays in 2022, said of the bullpen’s approach. “You just hand that baton back on to the next guy and you basically root for them and understand that they’re going to do their job and do their best to put up another zero. And it’s so forth and so forth.”
While Alonso’s infield single in the first — on a squib charging Chris Taylor fielded and threw wildly to first — opened the scoring, the Dodgers responded immediately in the bottom half against Mets ace Sean Manaea, so good in a Game 2 win but ground mercilessly in this one.
Ohtani ripped a leadoff single and after Mookie Betts struck out, Teoscar Hernandez broke out of an 0-for-18 NLCS rut with a laser off the centre-field wall to put men on the corners. Edman, who missed most of the season with wrist and ankle injuries but crushed lefties to the tune of a 1.299 OPS in a small-sample-size of 36 plate appearances, worked Manaea to six pitches before hooking a sweeper into the left-field corner.
Manaea needed 34 pitches just for the first and while he escaped the second unscathed, he came undone in the third, when Hernandez opened the inning with a single and Edman followed with a two-run homer. After a walk to Max Muncy, Phil Maton took over and served up a two-run shot to Will Smith that made it 6-1.
Vientos’ homer in the fourth gave the Mets some life and they loaded the bases with two out in the sixth, but Phillips got Jesse Winker on a weak fly ball to left to keep the game 6-3.
Ohtani’s RBI single in the bottom half made it 7-3, and after Francisco Alvarez’s sacrifice fly in the seventh pulled that one back, the Dodgers cracked things open in the eighth on Betts’ RBI double, Teoscar Hernandez’s sacrifice fly and Kike Hernandez’s RBI single, the depth and talent of their lineup simply wearing out the Mets’ relievers.
“It’s the unity we have,” said Hernandez. “We stuck together, even through a lot of the injuries we had this year. A lot of bad moments. A lot of sad moments. We kept our heads up and we kept going forward until the end. And now we’re going to the World Series.”
Mendoza managed the Mets especially aggressively, using closer Edwin Diaz against the top of the Dodgers’ order in the fourth after Vientos’ homer, and he threw two clean innings that gave his team a chance to get level.
But the Dodgers were too much all game, all series and now they’re facing the Yankees in a marquee World Series clash, after an unexpected route to their long-expected destination.