NEW YORK – They are playing a baseball game between the lines but staging an assault on the senses between every pitch, every inning, every sustainable break in the action in this World Series.
Be it celebrity pleas for more noise from Ken Jeong in Los Angeles to Flavor Flav in the Bronx, or blaring sirens and pounding organs, Yankee Stadium and its Dodger counterpart crank the volume to 11, ostensibly to engage the masses and fill in the gaps in a game that can provide many of them.
But Monday night, in Game 3 of the World Series, the Yankees’ continued futility inspired another, far different aural sensation.
Silence.
After a 15-year wait, World Series baseball returned to Yankee Stadium, and 49,368 fans jammed into the ballpark, eager for an electric moment, the kind that inspired an average price of nearly $2,000 on the resale market.
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But the Yankees again proved incapable of providing juice organically, their high-priced lineup reduced to a series of flails and fails – and now this World Series is on the verge of ending almost as quickly as it began.
They will play Game 4 Tuesday night, but after producing just four hits and getting shut out for 26 outs in a 4-2 loss to fall into a 3-0 Series hole, that potential coronation for the Dodgers almost feels like a matter of course.
The Dodgers are simply better than the Yankees, at least right now, and while there’s certainly plenty of ire to direct at presumed AL MVP Aaron Judge – now 1 for 12 with seven strikeouts in this Series – the hand-wringing feels increasingly pointless.
The Yankees have scored seven runs in three games.
They’re now batting .186 (19 for 102) in this series, and in a postseason environment that’s no longer kind to starting pitchers, have not challenged the Dodgers’ top arms. In Game 3, it was Walker Buehler’s turn: He did not allow a hit until the fourth inning, struck out five in five innings and needed just 76 pitches to do so.
On the heels of Jack Flaherty’s five-hit outing and Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s one-hit, 6 ⅓-inning gem in Game 2, the Yankees are 8 for 51 (.157) against Dodgers starting pitching.
In Game 3, the vibes were grim and almost inevitably off.
A flat pregame set from Bronx native Fat Joe did little to juice the crowd. Minutes later, a Freddie Freeman rocket into the right field stands made it 2-0 before the Yankees could even take an at-bat.
By the seventh inning, one fan aimed to get the crowd juiced for a key full-count pitch to Mookie Betts. There were few takers, and when reliever Tim Hill yanked the pitch for ball four, his expletive echoed well into the upper reaches of the stadium.
Welcome back to the World Series?
“We haven’t been here for 15 years,” says first baseman Anthony Rizzo. “I understand the fans, it’s been a long time in the making. I grew up a Yankee fan, as well. The way we look at it is, we got to the World Series and we’re expecting to win it and that’s still our expectation.
“But it’s definitely not a hole we want to be in.”
The Yankees dusted off the well-worn vows to compete that every team in a 3-0 hole utilizes. Manager Aaron Boone said “hopefully we can go be this amazing story and shock the world. But right now, it’s about trying to get a lead, trying to grab a game, and force another one, and then on from there.
“But we’ve got to grab one first.”
It was clear quickly that wasn’t going to happen in Game 3, like a prizefight clearly over after one round yet scheduled for nine, anyway. Freeman’s two-run homer brought an air of inevitability to the proceedings. Even as the Yankees put five runners on base in the sixth, seventh and eighth innings, it felt probable they would strand them all, and they did.
Still, the aggregate score in this series is just 14-7, with Freeman’s walk-off Game 1 grand slam that snatched away a Yankee victory, Game 2 solo homer and two-run Game 3 job accounting for half the Dodgers’ scoring.
So close, yet so far?
“The first game was ours. They won it. They had an historic hit,” says Alex Verdugo, whose two-run home run with two outs in the ninth broke up the Dodgers shutout. “The second game, they got us in one inning and we couldn’t bounce back. That’s the offense’s fault.
“If we’re not scoring, we’re putting a lot of pressure on the pitchers to be perfect against what’s a really good Dodgers lineup.”
Perhaps a bullpen game from the Dodgers will be an elixir. Then again, the Dodgers clinched the pennant with a bullpen game in NLCS Game 6, and their high-leverage relievers are relatively rested thanks to the performance of their starting pitchers.
With help from the Yankees’ ineptitude, which cast a sleepy proceeding to this long-anticipated night. Come the bottom of the seventh, a loud Metallica guitar riff prompted fans to rise to their feet. It was 4-0 but Rizzo had just singled and Dodgers reliever Daniel Hudson was appearing for the first time this series.
Alas, pinch hitter Austin Wells – 1 for 10 this World Series, 4 for 42 this postseason – stared at a 96 mph pitch for strike three.
The rally short-circuited. The trek to the exit was on, and large swaths of the high-rent seating area were vacated by the time Verdugo hit his home run.
Quiet enough for fans’ frustration to be heard, certainly. Not that the Yankees are in position to dwell on that.
“That’s all noise,” says Judge. “The fans are here to cheer us on and have our back. But we got a job to do. Anything beyond that, it’s just noise.”
Or, more accurately, silence.
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