The Los Angeles Dodgers clinched the 2024 World Series on Wednesday with a 7-6 victory over the New York Yankees in the Bronx, finishing off a impressive display in the matchup between the two biggest-market and star-laden teams in baseball.
The 4-games-to-1 victory in the best-of-seven series is the Dodgers franchise’s eighth World Series title, the second in five years and the first since the pandemic-impacted 2020 season. The Dodgers before that hadn’t won Major League Baseball’s Fall Classic since 1988 and before that 1981, when they beat the Yankees.
The Dodgers did it in dramatic fashion tonight, coming back from a 5-0 deficit after three innings against a Yankees team whose bats finally woke up, chasing Dodgers starter Jack Doherty. The Dodgers tied the game in the fifth with the help of three Yankees errors, then fell behind again 6-5 before a two-run eighth inning got the job done, with starter Walker Buehler closing the door on the Yankees with the save in the ninth. New York was attempting to win its 28th World Series.
Los Angeles won the series with contributions beyond its star trio of Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, all previous MVP winners (Ohtani is a shoo-in for the NL MVP award this year, after hitting 54 home runs and stealing 59 bases — becoming baseball’s first 50-50 player). Utility players like Tommy Edman, a trade-deadline pickup, and Kiké Hernandez provided key hits all postseason, while a patchwork pitching staff that didn’t have starters Clayton Kershaw or Tyler Glasnow kept the Yankees’ bats that included the AL’s MVP-to-be but Aaron Judge, Juan Soto and Giancarlo Stanton mostly at bay, especially with runners in scoring position.
Freeman, like Ohtani battling through injury, picked up the World Series MVP award, knocking in two of the Dodgers’ runs tonight to give him a World Series-record 12 RBIs. He didn’t homer Wednesday, but this year he did become the first player in history to homer in six consecutive World Series games dating to his Atlanta Braves days; his Game 1 walk-off grand slam in this World Series seemed to deflate the Yankees for the next two games, a hole that proved too deep to climb out of.
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The Yankees had avoided the first World Series sweep in 12 years with a must-win in Tuesday’s Game 4, when their bats came alive against the Dodgers’ all-reliever rotation and won 11-4. Those Dodger bullpen games had been successful earlier in the playoffs against the San Diego Padres and then the New York Mets.
Judge did single in that Game 4 and then homered as part of a three-run first inning tonight, his first of a postseason that saw him go 8-for-46 with 20 strikeouts.
A five-game World Series will certainly be a disappointment to Fox, which has seen ratings gains for the series pitting two of MLB‘s most storied franchise in the country’s biggest media markets and was hoping for a tantalizing Game 7. The World Series through the first four games averaged 14.9 million viewers across Fox, Fox Deportes and Fox Sports streaming, the best numbers since 2017. Game 4, with the Yankees needing to win, drew a series-high 16.7M viewers.