NEW YORK — One more win.
One more win to erase the pain of endless collapses.
One more win to silence the frustration of countless criticisms.
One more win to earn their first full season championship in 36 years, their first title of any sort in four years, and the first chance in forever to ask the most wonderful of questions.
Are you ready for a parade?
Figueroa, clear your sidewalks. Fans, pack your rally towels. Floats, start your engines.
The Dodgers will soon be marching through Los Angeles like they’ve been marching through New York, boldly and powerfully and redemptively after taking a historically insurmountable three-games-to-none lead against the Yankees with a 4-2 victory Monday night in Game 3 of the World Series at blustery Yankee Stadium.
No team has ever come back from a three-games-to-none deficit to win a World Series, and the Yankees aren’t going to be the first, not after they were demoralized for a third straight game on a chilly night in front of their loud, profane and ultimately scarf-swallowing fans.
“Our guys are very heady, very hungry for a championship, a parade,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “So nothing is going to get in the way of that, nothing.”
Despite all the pre-Series buzz, the truth is that baseball’s two most celebrated franchises are not in the same class. The Dodgers are a great team, the Yankees are not. The Yankees aren’t as good as either of the two teams the Dodgers vanquished to get to this point — the San Diego Padres and New York Mets — and are probably worse than half a dozen other National League teams.
The starting pitching has been shaky. The bullpen has been little help. And Aaron Judge, widely considered the best hitter in the game, has epitomized their performance by being just awful, going one for 12 with seven strikeouts.
Like the 1988 Oakland A’s in the wake of Kirk Gibson’s Game 1 walk-off homer, the Yankees have appeared to be in shock since Freddie Freeman’s Game 1 grand slam, never fully recovered from the dramatic blow.
The Dodgers, meanwhile, have played like a team determined to overcome the stigma of consecutive first-round upsets against the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks amid talk that they’re the modern-day Atlanta Braves.
The Dodgers have made the playoffs for 12 consecutive seasons, 11 of those as National League West champions. Ten of those seasons have been with the celebrated Andrew Friedman running the front office. Nine of them have been with the respected Roberts running the dugout.
Yet only one of those seasons has resulted in a championship, and that was during the 60-game COVID-shortened 2020 season.
The Dodgers needed to win a title under regular conditions to cement their legacy and silence the doubters.
“I think for some of the guys that were here … we want that parade,” Roberts said. “We never got a chance to celebrate with the city of Los Angeles. That’s something of incentive.”
It appears they’re not only about to get that long-awaited air-tight crown, but they’re doing it at the expense of baseball’s greatest champions and in baseball’s most renowned address.
Monday marked the first World Series game in the Bronx in 15 years, and the Yankees decorated the place in history and hype, showing videos of past championships, enlisting Derek Jeter to throw out the first pitch and regaling the thirsty crowd with some Ice Cube-countering rap from Fat Joe.
The intimidation lasted all of three hitters.
Gritty Shohei Ohtani led off with a four-pitch walk from the Yankees’ Clarke Schmidt, who obviously didn’t remember that Ohtani was playing with a partially separated shoulder!
One out later, when Freddie Freeman stepped to the plate, Yankee Stadium’s famed right-field bleacher creatures chanted, “F— you Freddie.” Freeman promptly stuck it to them with his third World Series homer, a 355-foot blast hit appropriately into the right-field bleachers.
Walker Buehler took it from there, his season-long comeback complete with five shutout innings that was sparked with a strikeout of the hapless Judge in the first. Buehler spent much of the summer recovering from his second Tommy John surgery, and struggled late in the season, but he rebounded to help them beat the New York Mets in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series and now will enter his free agent winter as a hot commodity.
It was truly a night of altered narratives for a team that has spent all of October altering the message.
“We trust each other, we love each other, this is really a close group, so this really doesn’t surprise me,” Gavin Lux said. “We’re playing complete team baseball … guys are locked in, everybody is playing gritty.”
Mookie Betts continued his comeback from a season marred by position changes and a broken hand with an RBI bloop single in the third and a diving catch in the fourth. Kiké Hernández continued his rise from scrub to Señor Octubre with an RBI single in the sixth.
Then there was the quiet heroics of Ohtani, who partially separated his shoulder on a slide into second base in the seventh inning of Saturday’s Game 2. Although the Dodgers wouldn’t say it, the truth was obvious. If this were the regular season, Ohtani would not be playing. If this were June, he would likely be placed on the injured list and miss at least a couple of weeks.
But he insisted on playing, he even texted the entire team his decision, and the Dodgers relented. Before the game Roberts acknowledged that just having Ohtani stand at the plate — whether he could swing or not — gives the Dodgers an advantage.
Sure enough, he drew that walk and scored in the first, then grounded out in the third. Even when he’s playing with one shoulder, the guy is Superman.
The Dodgers are finishing October with a team of Supermen, and even the hallowed home of the hallowed pinstripes couldn’t faze them.
Before Monday’s game began, Fat Joe was rapping, “I’m all the way up.”
Nine innings later, one win from paradise, the Dodgers are taking the words right out of his mouth.
