Cole: Yankees’ meltdown in 5th ‘as bad as it gets’

NEW YORK — All year, right through the American League Championship Series, the New York Yankees overcame a tendency to play sloppy baseball by vanquishing opponents with overwhelming talent. The metrics calculated — and the eyes figured — that they were the worst baserunning team in the majors during the regular season. They regularly committed head-scratching defensive miscues. They were not nearly as fundamentally sound as one would expect from a 94-win AL champion.

But the Yankees flaunted superstars. They had Aaron Judge and Juan Soto fueling an offense that banged home runs. They had Gerrit Cole fronting a top-line starting rotation. They discovered an effective bullpen formula in time for October. Ultimately, they out-talented teams — until they couldn’t.

Their shortcomings finally caught up with them in Game 5 of the World Series on Wednesday night. A total defensive meltdown in the fifth inning, one that will be remembered as one of the worst in postseason history, cost the Yankees their season in a 7-6 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers at Yankee Stadium, ultimately ending their bid to become the first team to overcome a 3-0 series deficit in the World Series.

“This is like as bad as it gets,” said Cole, the Yankees’ Game 5 starter.

Cole was on the mound for the fifth-inning debacle. The right-hander, pitching on four days’ rest for the fourth time this season, cruised up to the disaster, holding Los Angeles scoreless over four hitless innings. Cole threw just 49 pitches. The Dodgers’ only baserunner reached on a walk. Trouble did not appear imminent. Then everything fell apart.

It started with Enrique Hernández breaking the modest no-hit bid with a leadoff single. Four pitches later, Tommy Edman hit a routine line drive to Judge in center field. An inning earlier, sure-handed Judge had made a highlight catch crashing into the wall to steal extra bases from Freddie Freeman. This time, he flubbed the liner for his first error in 2024 — regular season or postseason.

“That doesn’t happen, we got a different story tonight,” Judge said.

Five pitches after that, Will Smith hit a ground ball to shortstop Anthony Volpe’s right side. Volpe, a Gold Glove winner last season and a finalist this year, fielded the ball cleanly but short-hopped his throw to third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. attempting to nab the lead runner. Chisholm failed to corral the throw, loading the bases with no outs. Yankee Stadium went silent.

Then Cole went to work. He struck out Gavin Lux on four pitches, finishing him off with a 99.4 mph fastball. Up next: Shohei Ohtani. Cole needed four pitches to strike out the superstar, too, getting Ohtani to wave through a curveball at the bottom of the strike zone.

Suddenly, an escape without any damage seemed possible. It seemed like a certainty when Mookie Betts hit a 49.8 mph squibber to first baseman Anthony Rizzo. Because the ball bounced to Rizzo with so much spin, he did not charge it, instead staying back to make sure he gloved it cleanly. That meant he needed Cole to cover first base to beat Betts to the bag. But Cole didn’t dash to first base to cover the bag, and Betts reached base without a throw.

“I took a bad angle to the ball,” Cole said. “I wasn’t sure really off the bat how hard he hit it. I took a direct angle to it, as if to cut it off because I just didn’t know how hard he hit it. By the time the ball got by me, I was not in position to cover first. Neither of us were, based on the spin of the baseball and him having to secure it. Just a bad read off the bat.”

The Dodgers scored their first run on the gaffe, which went down in the box score as an infield single. It will be memorialized as the beginning of the end of the Yankees’ season. Freeman, the third straight past MVP whom Cole was tasked to retire, slashed a two-run single to center field. Teoscar Hernandez followed with a game-tying two-run double to left-center field, completing a stupefying sequence that left the crowd stunned.

“You can’t give teams like that extra outs,” said Judge, who clubbed his first career World Series home run in the first inning to give New York a quick 2-0 lead. “They’re going to capitalize, especially [with] their 1-2-3 top of the order. They don’t miss.”

Cole needed 38 pitches to survive the inning. He kept the score tied and rebounded to pitch into the seventh inning. He exited the game with one out and with a one-run lead — Giancarlo Stanton’s sacrifice fly in the sixth inning put the Yankees back on top — but the fifth inning changed the game.

“We didn’t take care of the ball well enough in that inning,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “Against a great team like that, they took advantage.”

With little margin for error, Tommy Kahnle entered to pitch the eighth inning. He surrendered a leadoff single through the left side to Hernández and lost his command from there. Edman reached on an infield single. Smith was walked on four pitches. Boone decided that was enough and replaced Kahnle with closer Luke Weaver.

“I let my team down,” said Kahnle, his eyes red from emotion.

The Yankees’ best reliever in October, Weaver yielded a sacrifice fly to Lux that tied the score again and brought up Ohtani with runners on the corners. Weaver got ahead with the first pitch, getting Ohtani to foul off a changeup. But Austin Wells was called for catcher’s interference on the swing, which loaded the bases for Betts. He delivered another sacrifice fly to give the Dodgers their first lead. It was the only lead they needed.

In the end, the Yankees committed nearly every kind of defensive miscue possible. There was Judge’s inexplicable physical mishap, Volpe’s throwing error, Cole’s mental blunder, Wells’ interference and, finally, a balk from Weaver in the ninth inning. The balk didn’t impact the scoreboard, but it typified the Yankees’ flaws on a night when they were exposed for the world to see.

“Capitalizing on mistakes, probably, and opportunities,” Stanton said when asked what he believed was the difference in the series.

It certainly was the difference in the two games that bookended the series. In Game 1, Gleyber Torres’ inability to corral a throw from the outfield on Ohtani’s double in the eighth inning allowed Ohtani to advance to third base. Ohtani then scored on a sacrifice to tie the score. The run ultimately forced the game into extra innings, where Freeman, with the Dodgers down one, swatted a walk-off grand slam.

The gut-punch loss marked the beginning of the Yankees’ 3-0 hole. They had a chance Wednesday to continue digging themselves out of it. But the fifth inning changed everything. After the game, after Alex Verdugo swung through a curveball from Walker Buehler to end their season, the Yankees didn’t open the clubhouse to the media for 45 minutes, such an unusually long time that Boone began his news conference by apologizing for the delay.

The manager explained players were “pouring their hearts out” with “heartfelt messages.” He emphasized, as the team has all October, this club’s closeness. He said the defeat “is going to sting forever.” In the clubhouse, players said their goodbyes with backslaps and hugs.

“I think falling short in the World Series will stick with me until I die, probably,” Judge said.

In the end, the Yankees’ talent was more than enough to win the AL East and claim the league’s No. 1 seed. It won out against the Kansas City Royals and Cleveland Guardians, clubs with a sliver of the Yankees’ $300 million payroll, in October. But the Dodgers, another high-priced roster brimming with star power and future Hall of Famers, were too good for that to happen again. They were the better, more fundamentally sound baseball team. The fifth inning Wednesday showed that.