Dodgers hold off Yankees to win 8th World Series title

The Los Angeles Dodgers are back on top of the baseball world, rallying in the eighth inning to beat the New York Yankees 7-6 in Wednesday’s Game 5 at Yankee Stadium to win the World Series four games to one.

Starter Walker Buehler came on in relief in the ninth and recorded the final three outs.

It’s the franchise’s eighth World Series title and first in a 162-game season since 1988. The Dodgers won the 2020 World Series during the COVID-shortened season.

Los Angeles trailed 5-0 through four innings before scoring five unearned in the fifth to tie the game after a trio of defensive miscues by the Yankees. The Dodgers’ win marks the largest comeback ever in a World Series-clinching game.

New York took a 6-5 lead in the bottom of the sixth, but L.A. struck back two innings later against relief ace Luke Weaver. Mookie Betts’ sacrifice fly brought Will Smith home for the series-winning run.

The Dodgers were forced into a second straight bullpen game after starter Jack Flaherty allowed four runs in 1 1/3 innings. Blake Treinen picked up much of that slack, gutting out 2 1/3 scoreless innings while throwing an unusually high 42 pitches. Manager Dave Roberts left Treinen in to face Giancarlo Stanton after he walked Jazz Chisholm Jr. to put two on with one out in the eighth. The reliever responded by getting out of the inning unscathed.

“He’s our guy. I extended him,” Roberts said of his conversation with Treinen on the Fox Sports postgame show. “We had to lay it all out on the line tonight. We had no one left (in the bullpen) outside of a starting pitcher. So for me, right there in that moment, I wanted to get his pulse. Things are speeding up a little bit. I wanted to slow the game down; as you said, I wanted to look into his eyes. I wanted to hear him tell me that he’s got enough to get Stanton. … And he said, ‘I want this guy.’

“So he gets a pop-up, finishes the inning with a big punch (strikeout of Anthony Rizzo), and the rest is history.”

Buehler, who started Tuesday’s Game 3, followed Treinen to clinch the victory. He joined Madison Bumgarner in 2014 as the second pitcher since 1969 to win a game as a starter and record a save in the same World Series, according to Josh Dubow of The Associated Press.

The Dodgers have been one of the most dominant teams in baseball over the last decade, reaching the playoffs every year since 2013 and winning four pennants over that span. While they won a World Series during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, their previous trips to the Fall Classic during this run ended in losses. L.A. was eliminated in the NLDS in each of the past two seasons.

“We deserve this. We’ve been playing really good baseball for a lot of years. Everybody talks shit about 2020 and whatever, but they can’t say a whole lot about it now,” Buehler, a member of that 2020 championship club, told Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports.

The Yankees have now gone 15 years without a championship, marking the second-longest drought in the franchise’s history.

New York got off to a quick start in Game 5, scoring back-to-back homers from Aaron Judge and Chisholm in the first inning. Stanton hit his seventh homer of the postseason in the third.

Gerrit Cole was rolling on the mound until the fifth when a series of defensive miscues – including Cole failing to cover first base on a ground ball – allowed the Dodgers to tie the game. Cole became the fourth pitcher in World Series history and the first since 1960 to allow five or more runs with all of them being unearned, according to FanGraphs’ Matt Martell.

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