For Dodgers fans, the must-have souvenir from last year’s World Series was not a cap or T-shirt commemorating the team’s championship. It was one of the stickers that popped up all over town, reproducing the Fox Sports score box that showed the New York Yankees leading, 5-0, with two out in the fifth inning.
For the Yankees, it was the image that encapsulated an inning of extremely unfortunate events: Aaron Judge dropped a fly ball, Anthony Volpe committed a throwing error, Gerrit Cole did not cover first base.
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The Dodgers tied the score before the Yankees could secure that third out and, a couple hours later, boisterously raised the championship trophy atop a makeshift stage in the Yankee Stadium outfield.
The celebrations raged for days, including a Mookie Betts podcast on which Chris Taylor said the Yankees had “s— down their leg” and a “Baseball Isn’t Boring” podcast on which Joe Kelly said the Dodgers’ scouting reports had highlighted the Yankees’ deficiencies: “They can’t make a play.”
Dodger Kiké Hernández is safe at second base after an error by Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge (99) (not shown) in the fifth inning of Game 5 of the World Series on Oct. 30. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)
You cannot glorify bat flips, as Major League Baseball itself does these days, and you cannot encourage players to market themselves and share their personalities, as the league also does, without running the risk of what the old-fashioned among us might call poor sportsmanship. To the Yankees’ credit, they get it.
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“The way I personally look at it is, when you go out and you are on the right side of the victory, you’ve got a leg to stand on,” Yankees closer Luke Weaver told me this week at Angel Stadium. “When you lose, you ain’t got much to say.
“They said what they said. That’s what they felt. I don’t take it too personally. In a perfect world, yeah, you don’t want to hear that type of stuff. We know what happened. We know we had to do a better job. We just didn’t quite do what we wanted to do. With that being said, it is what it is.”
For the first time since the World Series, the Yankees return to Dodger Stadium this weekend. The Dodgers are sold out of suites advertised this week for as much as $15,000 per game. As of Wednesday, available tickets on the team website for Friday’s series opener ranged from $103 to $567 in general, $146 to $607 with early entry included.
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