Dodgers win, beat Yankees in five games

The Los Angeles Dodgers won the 2024 World Series on Wednesday with a 7-6 victory over the New York Yankees in the Bronx, capping an impressive showing in the matchup between the two biggest market and star-studded teams in baseball.

The 4-games-to-1 win in the best-of-seven series is the Dodgers’ eighth World Series title, second in five years and first since the pandemic-plagued 2020 season. The Dodgers before that had not 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 and chased 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 trying 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 former MVP winners (Ohtani is a shoo-in for the NL MVP award this year, having hit 54 home runs and stolen 59 bases – becomes baseball’s first 50-50 player). Utility players like Tommy Edman, a trade-deadline pickup, and Kiké Hernandez provided key hits throughout the postseason, while a patchwork pitching staff that didn’t feature starters Clayton Kershaw or Tyler Glasnow held the Yankees’ at-bats, which included the AL’s MVP-two – be but Aaron Judge, Juan Soto and Giancarlo Stanton mostly at distance, especially with runners in scoring position.

Freeman, like Ohtani battling through injuries, took the World Series MVP award and knocked 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 became the first player in history to homer in six consecutive World Series games dating back to his Atlanta Braves days; his Game 1 walk-off grand slam in this World Series seemed to gut the Yankees for the next two games, a hole that proved too deep to climb out of.

The Yankees had avoided the first World Series sweep in 12 years with a must-win in Tuesday’s Game 4 as their bats came alive against the Dodgers’ all-reliever rotation, winning 11-4. These Dodger bullpen plays had been successful earlier in the playoffs against the San Diego Padres and then the New York Mets.

Judge singled in Game 4 and then homered as part of a three-run first inning tonight, his first of a postseason in which he went 8-for-46 with 20 strikeouts.

A five-game World Series is sure to be a disappointment for Fox, which has seen ratings increases for the series featuring two of MLB’s most storied franchises in the nation’s biggest media markets and was hoping for a tantalizing Game 7. The World Series through its first four games averaged 14.9 million viewers across Fox, Fox Deportes and Fox Sports streaming, the best numbers since 2017. Game 4, in which the Yankees should win, drew 16.7 million viewers in the series.