The visitor’s clubhouse at Yankee Stadium may never recover.
The Los Angeles Dodgers spared no one in the clubhouse as they sprayed champagne and poured beer just about everyone in the vicinity.
They blasted Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” a song the Yankees also used in their playoff celebrations earlier in the month. But it’s the Dodgers that get to use that song because as the World Series champions, no other team is like them.
“I’m heartbroken, and I’m heartbroken for those guys that poured so much into this,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said after losing Game 5 7-6. “The ending is cruel. It always is.”
The road to the championship went through New York City, with the Dodgers eliminating both of the local teams. New York doesn’t like to settle for second-best, especially when the competition is Los Angeles, but its baseball teams have to settle for being also-rans this year.
Both the Mets and Yankees were in the running this year, but will they be close next year? It might be easy to say the Yankees are closer to winning a World Series than the Mets given they made it further in the postseason, but if you look at how these two teams are built, the Amazins’ more closely resemble the champs.
The Dodgers won the series because they were able to execute in every facet of the game. President of baseball operations Andrew Friedman and general manager Brandon Gomes constructed a roster that could out-pitch and out-hit teams, and prevent runs. They created an exceptionally long lineup and hired people who could instill good fundamentals in the hitters.
The Dodgers don’t chase pitches outside of the zone, they run the bases well and use their lineup length to give pitchers fits.
The Yankees, on the other hand, have a lineup of one-dimensional hitters. They have a lot of home run hitters, but those big power guys aren’t exactly fast and they make a lot of outs on the basepaths.
Former Yankees ace Luis Severino joked that his old team only had “like two good hitters” earlier this season. That’s not a joke you want people to make.
After going up 5-0 in Game 5, the Yankees handed five runs back to the Dodgers with bad defense. Aaron Judge couldn’t field a routine fly ball in center field, shortstop Anthony Volpe couldn’t make a flip to third base and Gerrit Cole didn’t cover first base.
“I think from a PFP standpoint we’re pretty good,” Boone said. “It’s always magnified when obviously in a moment it doesn’t happen. I’d have to look for sure, but from a pitching standpoint, we’re pretty good at those kinds of things.”
The fundamentals are important. The Mets learned that the hard way after a dismal start to their season left them 11 games under .500. However, run prevention and lineup length are priorities for president of baseball operations David Stearns. He’s made that much clear in his first year in Queens.
But it’s hard to prevent runs when giving out free passes. The Mets walked too many hitters. They had pitchers with good stuff who didn’t know how to sequence their pitches and ended up throwing too many balls and not enough strikes.
The Dodgers showed everyone in baseball a thing or two about pitching depth by winning a World Series with only three starters. Imagine what October might have looked like if all of the big-name arms on the injured list were actually healthy.
“You don’t know what’s going to do it,” Friedman said. “So you want to be as talented as you can possibly be, have as much depth as you can possibly have, because you don’t know what life form these games are going to take on and you want to be as prepared as you possibly can.”
It certainly helps when you have three MVP-caliber hitters at the top of the lineup and the Dodgers do with Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman. But they were able to integrate those superstars into their clubhouse after they became superstars because of the standards they set.
Hollywood might be full of egos, but there are none at Chavez Ravine. This is something the Mets have tried to preach as well, and something they’ll continue preaching with owner Steve Cohen willing to spend big on top free agents.
Boone and general manager Brian Cashman stood at the entrance of the visitor’s clubhouse while the Dodgers celebrated their second title since 2020. They wanted to congratulate their Los Angeles counterparts. It couldn’t have been easy for them to hear the cheers and chants and the West Coast G-Funk blaring from the clubhouse speakers.
Maybe this will be the push they need to learn from the mistakes of the series and improve the fundamentals of the Yankees. This organization moves slowly and doesn’t like change. Maybe this was the push the Mets needed to understand the importance of stability, in the clubhouse and in the front office. While the Yankees are slow to make changes, the Mets have historically made too many too quickly, making it difficult to build on any progress.
So until the Mets and Yankees right their wrongs, the Dodgers can continue to say, “They not like us.”
