Any journey, whether it be in life, love, or in this case, sports, is often tumultuous. The end of that journey would not have the same significance if it was simple, or easy. The voyage must contain trials and tribulations, meant to beat you down and break you along the way.
Those journeys are filled with a series of moments, preserved and innately felt like a dream catcher next to your bed. So when those moments inevitably arise, do you give up and quit? Or do you keep fighting?
There were plenty of those moments on Wednesday night in Game 5 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium. Moments that are meant to test and tease you. Moments in which you will either rise up with resiliency, or surrender to it entirely.
When the Los Angeles Dodgers went down by five runs after the third inning, that was one of those moments. They had already used three of their seven available pitchers, and facing the reigning Cy Young Award winner in New York Yankees ace Gerrit Cole, the situation seemed dire.
Get top local stories in Southern California delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC LA's News Headlines newsletter.
In fact, it was insurmountable and in many ways impossible. No team in the 120-year history of the World Series had ever come back from five runs in a clinching game, let alone with a future Hall-of-famer on the opposing mound.
So when the Dodgers fell behind by five runs and couldn’t even muster a single hit after four innings, everyone seemed ready to board a plane back to Los Angeles for a Game 6 on Friday.
Everyone that was, except for the players themselves. Believe it or not, even against impossible odds, they felt like they had the Yankees right where they wanted them.
You see, the journey of the 2024 Dodgers was always fraught with turmoil. They were knocked down, beaten, and left for dead several times throughout the regular season. But each and every time they got back up and persevered. This team had already been through hardships and setbacks. They had been to hell and back and were battle-tested and brave.
So why should a five-run deficit in Game 5 of the World Series in the most hostile environment in all of sports be any different?
What will forever be known as the Golden Era in Dodgers baseball began in 2013 when the team qualified for the postseason for the first time in five years. They would eventually get eliminated by the St. Louis Cardinals in six games in the NLCS. The starting pitcher on the mound for that final game of the season was a 25-year-old southpaw named Clayton Kershaw.
For Kershaw, his playoff journey was only just beginning. Little did he know what was in store for him in the decade to follow. For the next three years, Kershaw and the Dodgers went through a seemingly endless cycle of postseason disappointments.
Finally, in 2017, with new manager Dave Roberts at the helm they removed the proverbial monkey off their back and advanced to their first World Series 29 years. They were by far the better and more talented team against the hated Houston Astros, but lost the series at home in seven games, only to find out years later their opponent was cheating the entire time.
Back-to-back years watching their opponent celebrate a championship on the field at Dodger Stadium only added to their agony. In 2019, they constructed a roster that may have been their best team in the 134-year history of the franchise. They won a then-record 106 games during the regular season, but could only manage to win two against the Nationals in the NLDS, with Kershaw once again haunted by the demons of his postseason past.
In 2020, after eight straight years of disappointment, sorrow, and distress, a global pandemic struck and shortened the season to 60 fan-less games. The Dodgers finally triumphed by winning their first World Series title in 32 years, but they weren’t able to celebrate it. There was no parade down Vin Scully Avenue, and instead only talk of an asterisk being added to the history books.
Three more years of playoff exits, and no closer to parade, the Dodgers began to wonder if it would ever come. Twelve years of triumphs and tribulations, of anguish, agony, and an asterisk. The Dodgers had enough disappointment and heartbreak to last a lifetime. But they bounced back each and every year to go through the gauntlet again. Hoping one day it would have to be different.
After a tough Game 4 loss that swung the momentum back to the Bronx Bombers, the Dodgers could have folded and packed their bags back to Los Angeles. The back-to-back home runs by Aaron Judge and Jazz Chisholm in the first inning of Game 5, could have rattled a lesser team, but not these Dodgers, regardless of what happened on Wednesday, they were ready to etch their names into the record books.
Seven months earlier, the Dodgers opened the season in Seoul, South Korea against the San Diego Padres. What was supposed to be a joyous occasion, showcasing the game and its biggest stars on the international stage, instead turned into a week of scandal and allegations after Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter was accused of stealing $17 million dollars of the superstar’s money to pay off sports gambling debts.
An investigation into Ohtani and his interpreter ensued with media from across the globe bearing down with an interrogative lens on the Dodgers and their new $700 million dollar man. It would be enough to derail any team, but not these teflon-tough Dodgers.
“I don't think that was on the script of how we started off this year, but I think sometimes when those things kind of happen, it just rallies a group of guys together,” said the 2024 World Series MVP Freddie Freeman of the scandal that started in South Korea. “When you start supporting a teammate in his first year, like we did, for him to go out there and have the greatest season, I think, of all time, it was pretty special.”
When Giancarlo Stanton homered the following inning, the Dodgers still didn’t blink. Just like they didn’t bat an eye when both Max Muncy and Mookie Betts each missed more than two months in the middle of the season with injuries.
Former Dodger, Alex Verudgo, added another run to the Yankees lead with an RBI single in the bottom of the third. The five-run deficit seemed insurmountable. Hopes of celebrating a title seemed dashed, just as they did when the team found out in June and July that they would be without starting pitchers Walker Buehler, Clayton Kershaw, and eventually All-Star ace Tyler Glasnow. The latter two, for the remainder of the season.
“We lost Tyler Glasnow, We lost Clayton Kershaw. Those were pretty dire situations, and yet we came back from those,” said Muncy, speaking to the Dodgers newfound resiliency in 2024.“This game was literally the epitome of our season.”
Muncy was right, the entirety of the World Series, and Game 5 itself was a microcosm of their season and the last twelve years of Dodger baseball as a whole. You get knocked down, you get back up, you get knocked down again, you fight even harder. At some point, these Dodgers would not be denied, and that’s when fate and fortune, or maybe the Baseball Gods themselves, finally joined their side.
Aaron Judge dropped a routine fly ball that bounced off his glove. Chisholm Jr. couldn’t handle a bouncing throw from Anthony Volpe for the force out at third base ,and Gerrit Cole didn’t cover the bag on a routine grounder to first. Thanks to the Yankees miscues and mental lapses, the Dodgers had life again.
“Once you get it back in it anything can happen,” said Freeman, who hit a two-run single moments later ahead of a game-tying double by Teoscar Hernandez. “We won it because everyone in that room was contributing to this from day one. It's just a special team to be a part of.”
Freeman, the Dodgers Iron Man for the last two seasons had a tumultuous journey of his own this year. The 35-year-old missed three separate stints of time during the regular season with a broken finger, an ankle injury suffered during the final game at Dodger Stadium before the playoffs, and because of a heartbreaking family incident involving his three-year-old son, Max.
Max woke up with a limp on July 22nd, and by the end of the day was unable to walk. Two days later he was suffering from full-body paralysis, stopped eating and drinking, and was placed on a ventilator. Freeman flew from Houston back to Los Angeles to be with his family and missed the next 10 days, while his son recovered from what doctors eventually diagnosed as Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder in which the body's immune system attacks the nerves.
“I wish I'd never had to go through what we did as a family. But ultimately Maximus is doing really, really well right now. He's a special boy, but it has been a grind for three months. It really has. It's been a lot,” said Freeman reflecting back on his own personal journey to this point. “Then obviously with the injuries at the end, it makes it all worth it kind of in the end. It seems like we hit every speed bump possible over the course of this year. And to overcome what we did as a group of guys, it's special.”
The Yankees fought back and took a 6-5 lead on a sacrifice fly in the bottom of the 6th. Suddenly, with Cole still on the mound, the Dodgers were down to their final three outs, and the situation once again looked dire.
Freeman’s ankle injury, which caused him to hit just .219 with no home runs and one RBI in the first two rounds of the postseason, was also a tough blow for the Dodgers to face. As was Ohtani’s dislocated shoulder. But even with their two top hitters hobbled, they rallied again.
They moved ahead of the Yankees with timely sacrifice flies in the top of the eighth, but the Yankees fought back in the bottom half, putting the tying run on second base with one out.
That’s when the most underrated moment of Game 5 happened.
An exhausted Blake Treinen, pitching into his third inning of relief, had just allowed a one-out double to Aaaron Judge and a walk to Jazz Chisholm Jr, setting the table for the Yankees hottest hitter in the postseason in Giancarlo Stanton.
Roberts, who’s always scrutinized come October, headed out to the mound to check on his guy. Many thought he was going to remove him from the game, but instead he looked Treinen dead in the eyes and said, “Tell me what you got?”
“We had to lay it all out on the line tonight,” said Roberts of that mound meeting with Treinen, which was also meant to allow him time to catch his breath and slow the game down, something Yankees’ manager Aarron Boone did not to do with Gerrit Cole in the 5th inning.
“We had no one left, outside of a starting pitcher. At that moment, I wanted to get his pulse. I wanted to slow the game down, look in his eyes and hear him tell me he’s got Stanton. He told me, ‘I want this guy.’”
Treinen got Stanton to pop out to end the threat.
That starting pitcher Roberts referenced was Game 3 starter, Walker Buehler, who came out of the bullpen in the bottom of the ninth to record the first-ever save of his career on one day of rest.
The move was a masterstroke, setting the stage for the most glorious of World Series finishes.
“It was all adrenaline,” Buehler admitted afterward. “One day’s rest or not, I wasn’t missing this.”
When the final out was recorded the suddenly silent stadium in the Bronx turned into a Dodgers dance party of white and blue.
The City of Los Angeles, finally got to taste the unfiltered flavor of a World Series victory.
“Tonight was the epitome of our season,” said a champagne-soaked Muncy in the celebratory clubhouse after the game. “We got dealt a couple blows and came back. We got dealt another blow, and we came back. It’s just guy after guy grinding away, we kept persevering.”
For the Dodgers, their eighth championship in franchise history wasn’t just a trophy or a title, but a gritty exclamation point, 12 years in the making, etched into history with every comeback, every heartbreak, every tear, triumph, and smile along the way.
To punctuate their season, they once again needed to emulate it.
They fell behind early, only to claw their way back in the type of comeback that is only found in fairy tales and dreamscapes. Ironically, the thrilling come-from-behind victory in Game 5 was the same way the World Series started as well, with Freddie Freeman’s walk-off grand slam in Game 1 setting the tone for resilience and relentlessness the 2024 Dodgers have become known for.
“It feels surreal,” said Dodgers reliever Blake Treinen, as he stood amidst a jubilant sea of blue and gold on Yankee Stadium’s hallowed field. “We’ve been through so much as a team, but somehow, we kept going. We weren’t just playing for each other; we were playing for Los Angeles, for every fan who stuck with us through all these years.”
The fans back in L.A., all 2,792 miles away, were certainly doing their part. You could almost hear the echo of their cheers bouncing off the Hollywood Hills, and the crack and pop of fireworks erupting through the night sky.
For a franchise whose legacy is as rich as Dodger Blue, this championship meant everything. Sure, they won the title in 2020, but this was different. This was the first full-season title since that iconic 1988 squad led by Orel Hershiser, Kirk Gibson’s limp-off homer, and a team, similar to its present day counterpart, that always refused to back down.
Fast-forward 36 years, and this 2024 team seemed destined to finally break the curse, redeeming near misses in 2017, 2018, and years of heartbreak. This time, they did it with a gritty flair that no Hollywood script could ever capture.
Freeman, who claimed the World Series MVP trophy with a World Series record 12 RBIs and four home runs, looked back on the team’s long road to get here with pride.
“This season felt like it threw everything at us—injuries, losing streaks, health scares, but none of it mattered. We just kept coming back,” he said. “I hope everyone is talking about the job Doc [Dave Roberts] did tonight. That's one of the best games I've ever seen managed. That was special.”
And indeed it was special, this team had to claw their way out of countless tough spots during the 162-game marathon of a regular season. It was a season where every time they fell behind, they somehow found a way to pull themselves back up.
The Padres took them to the edge in the NLDS, forcing the Dodgers to fight back from their last outs. Then they steamrolled past the New York Mets in the NLCS, a series defined by a jaw-dropping 33-inning scoreless streak that showcased the full force of the Dodgers’ pitching staff, as well as a postseason record for walks (42) and runs (46, 6.7/per game) in a series.
“We did go through a lot this year,” said Roberts. “There was a lot of back filling on talent because of injury, a lot of young players cut their teeth, which is good. But one thing is that we just kept going. Even in the postseason, I don't think anyone had us picked. I don't think they had us picked to get out of the first series. So for us to go out there and fight and scratch and claw and win 11 games in October, that's a credit to our guys.”
Those 26 guys (and more) all had to pull together on the same rope, there could be no room for individualism, or egos, or selfishness. It had to be one, cohesive, and collective unit to win the World Series and play Dodger baseball. That’s what the series against the Yankees revealed to the world.
From a wobbly starting rotation that found its footing just in time, to a bullpen that became untouchable under pressure, this Dodgers team was more than the sum of its stars. It was the combined effort of seasoned veterans and gritty newcomers, all united under Roberts, who himself has weathered years of criticism and scrutiny. Roberts managed each bullpen decision and lineup change with precision, guiding his squad through injuries and adversity to pull off the perfect postseason strategy.
For the city of Los Angeles, this victory carries the weight of over a decade of pent-up hopes, dreams, and high expectations.
“The city deserves this,” part-owner Magic Johnson said, his smile stretching wide as he looked out over the ecstatic crowd of remaining Dodgers fans at Yankee Stadium. “We’ve been waiting for this moment, and it’s finally here.”
Underneath the bright lights of the Bronx and across the sprawling metropolis of L.A., this title belongs to every Dodger, every fan, and every Angeleno who believed through the ups and downs.
As they prepare to roll through downtown L.A. for the first parade since 1988, the Dodgers are finally kings of baseball once again. This golden era, long promised by president Andrew Friedman, has finally taken its place in the annals of Dodgers lore.
And the Dodgers have won the World Series. Can you believe it? They really, finally, did it.
