Dodgers vs Yankees World Series live updates: Game 5 score, lineups, predictions and odds - The Athletic

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The New York Yankees are still in the 2024 World Series — but, trailing 3-1, they must make baseball history if they are to recover and deny the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Game 5 takes place at Yankee Stadium later this evening and, before then, we want to hear from you. Send us a tweet or post a comment in the “Discuss” tab on this page, and it may show up below. You can also email us over at [email protected].

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Yankees manager Aaron Boone agreed with Major League Baseball and the Yankees’ decision to ban the fans who interfered with Mookie Betts’ catch from Game 5 at Yankee Stadium.

“(They) shouldn’t be here,” Boone said, adding, “What happened last night is not OK. Shouldn’t happen, period.”

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Dave C.: I’m trying to just enjoy the moment but I can’t help thinking about Game 1. Win that, and the Series would be tied right now. Stinks.

Andy M.: Playoffs are for starting pitchers. Period. End of story. The Dodgers messed around and let the Yankees bats warm up - now they get Cole. ... The bullpen game is a regular-season emergency move, not a planned postseason event. Hope it doesn't work out for them.

Dennis W.: The Yankees believe. Judge had a good swing last night that might help him remember how to hit multiple home runs. Flaherty got bombed by the Mets in his second start against them. I think the Yankees are poised to win it in seven. The Dodgers need one more great start. It would be destiny for Buehler to shut them down in the final seventh game. And it would then be the great series we all hoped for.

Len S.: Judge got a hit! Must be hitting over .160 now!

Remember: We want to hear from you. Send us a tweet or post a comment in the “Discuss” tab on this page, and it may show up here. We’ll excerpt reader contributions a couple times throughout each game. You can also email us over at [email protected].

We remember the 10th inning grand slam in Game 1, but in three games since, the Yankees bullpen has pitched 16 innings and allowed just one run. It’s struck out 14 and walked only four. If the Yankees had gotten more from their rotation in Games 2 and 3, this series could be tied or completely reversed. The bullpen has given the Yankees a chance.

With Gerrit Cole starting Game 5, there should be less onus on the relievers to carry the load, but turning Game 4 into a blowout did keep Yankees manager Aaron Boone from sending Luke Weaver back out in the ninth inning. That restraint might have kept the Yankees closer available for tonight’s must-win game.

That’s especially important because Clay Holmes has pitched in all four World Series games, and both Tim Hill and Mark Leiter Jr. have pitched three of the past four days.

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In World Series Game 1, the ace on a nine-year, $324 million dream of a contract threw six-plus innings and surrendered only four hits and one run. Gerrit Cole pitched well enough for his team to win, though Freddie Freeman’s home run in extra innings pushed Cole’s performance to a mere footnote in a Dodgers victory.

Now in Game 5, Cole — who had a 3.41 ERA in the regular season — will seek to replicate his Game 1 results with the season on the line.

One of the game’s most prolific fastball-oriented starters, Cole used his heater on 51 percent of his Game 1 pitches. He threw 13 sliders and generated three whiffs and three called strikes. He limited Los Angeles to bundles of weak contact — the Dodgers mounted an average exit velocity of only 85.7 mph against Cole.

But even though Cole ended a drought of 44 plate appearances where he failed to strike out a right-handed hitter, he is still looking to summon better swing-and-miss stuff. Cole generated only nine whiffs on 49 swings in Game 1. That 18.4 percent rate was well below his season average of 28.5 percent, a figure that happened to be his worst since 2017.

Still, there is merit in efficiency. Cole has yet to top 90 pitches in an outing this postseason. He mostly breezed through a hard-nosed Dodgers order in 88 pitches, allowing him to cover six valuable innings his last time out. Before Game 4, Cole spoke of feeling increasingly better this year after his return from a March elbow injury.

“I feel now like I'm in good shape,” Cole said. “I have a reserve while I'm pitching. So if I need to dip into the tank, I can go get it, and then I can go get it again. It's not like a one-time thing."

When the Yankees signed Cole in the winter of 2019, it was at the time the biggest pitching contract in history. He has pitched in six playoff elimination games and his teams went 2-4. Now he faces a seventh must-win situation. He came to New York to win games like this.

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Yankee Stadium hadn’t erupted like it did Tuesday in 15 years, not since Game 6 of the 2009 World Series. Shortly after that victory, an 8-year-old Anthony Volpe watched the championship parade with his family, dreaming of one day parading down the Canyon of Heroes as fans chanted his name the same way he did for Derek Jeter.

Fifteen years later, on the set of Fox’s postgame show, Jeter playfully ribbed Volpe, suggesting he should have been in school instead of at the parade.

But with the Yankees down 3-1 in the World Series and history against them, Volpe admitted he hadn’t fully grasped the significance of Tuesday night, when his grand slam lifted the Yankees to a series-extending 11-4 win.

“Hopefully, when we win the World Series and I’m with my family, we can reflect on everything,” Volpe said. “It was just a big game. We wanted to go 1-0 today and see where it takes us.”

Volpe envisioned nights like Tuesday “probably every night” as a child. He doesn’t take for granted that this dream was shared by his friends, his cousins, and his sister, Olivia. But winning the World Series always loomed as his top aspiration.

“Nothing else compares,” Volpe said. “So there’s still a lot of work to do.”

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Anthony Volpe’s hometown grand slam provides signature Yankees moment in Game 4

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Backed into a corner with their season on the line, the Yankees did not concede the World Series in Game 4. Rather, their bats woke up. Their energy returned. Their bullpen held the Dodgers at bay and the team’s overall effort extended their season at least one more night.

“I think that we just kind of needed to say, ‘Screw it,’ and go after it and have fun,” catcher Austin Wells said, “because some guys may never come back to the World Series again.”

Whether it was a loosened mentality or simply the mercurial nature of baseball at work, the Yankees dominated the late innings of Game 4 in a way that sparked thoughts of “What if?”

In Game 5, New York has ace Gerrit Cole on the mound and the home crowd to their advantage. If they can win this one, all they need is two more.

Easy to say. Important to remember 25 teams in World Series history have trailed three games to none. With their Game 4, win, the Yankees became just the fourth to force a Game 5. Never before has a team made it to Game 6.

“No one's done what we're trying to accomplish,” Wells said, “so I think if you put too much pressure on it at this point, you're going to fail yourself, and you're not going to enjoy the journey. I think seeing what happens and having fun is where we're at.”

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Dodgers manager Dave Roberts made one small change in his lineup from Game 1 against Gerrit Cole to Game 5 against Cole, moving shortstop Tommy Edman from ninth up to seventh, slotting ahead of catcher Will Smith and second baseman Gavin Lux.

Edman, the NLCS MVP who would be an MVP candidate in this series if Freddie Freeman didn’t exist, had a popup and double against Cole in Game 1. Edman was 0-for-5 in his career against Cole before last week’s game.

In Game 1 against Cole, Smith struck out and also had a sacrifice fly, while Lux flew out to center in both of his plate appearances against Cole.

In the first four games of the World Series, Edman is 4-for-12 with a homer and two doubles in this series after going 11-for-27 with three doubles, a homer and 11 RBI in the NLCS.

The Dodgers acquired Edman in a three-team deal with the White Sox and Cardinals that brought back not just Edman, but also reliever Michael Kopech, who has appeared in nine games for the Dodgers during the postseason, including three in the first four games of the World Series.

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Kate C.: Dodgers shouldn’t be too worried about their offense. They had traffic on the bases in every inning except 3rd & 8th (not counting the 9th when the score was far out of reach). Just need to come through with a timely hit and the outcome may have been different. Cole is a monster but his ERA isn’t 0.0. It can be done.

Charles S: Bullpen games are a modern travesty. This was a giveaway game for Roberts.

Tristan R.: Why all the doom and gloom? If we had lost Game 1 and won last night to make the series 3-1, everybody would be feeling much better. Still have three chances to win one. I like our chances tonight.

Jon B.: It would be nice if someone other than Freeman and Betts would hit the baseball. Muncy, Lux, Teoscar, and Smith have been bad the entire series at the plate. Ohtani too but he’s obviously not right with the shoulder. This needs to be closed out tonight.

Ryan G.: So much panic and criticizing on the Dodgers fans' part. They're up 3-1. They just need to stay calm and play the way they play. Patient at-bats, and timely hitting, and getting enough from their starter.

Remember: We want to hear from you. Send us a tweet or post a comment in the “Discuss” tab on this page, and it may show up here. We’ll excerpt reader contributions a couple times throughout each game. You can also email us over at [email protected].

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It’s hard to find much of a silver lining in an 11-4 World Series loss, but if there was a bright side for the Dodgers in Game 4, it might have been rookie right-hander Landon Knack throwing 56 pitches to get through four innings.

Knack pitched well — two hits, one run — but given the final score, that was kind of beside the point. By providing distance, Knack kept the Dodgers from needing to dig any deeper into their bullpen, and they got through Game 4 using almost exclusively their three long men (Knack, Ben Casparius and Brent Honeywell), none of whom had seen the field in the first three games, and possibly none of whom will be needed again this series (even if it goes seven games).

For the day after a bullpen game, the Dodgers actually have a fairly well-rested bullpen heading into Game 5.

It’s worth noting, too, that manager Dave Roberts did not use Ryan Brasier in Game 4. Brasier had been an important part of the Dodgers’ first three bullpen games this postseason, but rather than use him in Game 4, Roberts pitched Brasier in Game 3, and it was in a difficult window against Juan Soto, Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton and Jazz Chisholm Jr. Brasier has good career numbers against Soto (0-for-5 with three strikeouts), and it could be that Roberts wants to save Brasier as a kind of fallback option for higher-leverage situations going forward.

On the season, Jack Flaherty’s knuckle curveball was his third-most thrown pitch, going to it 21.8 percent of the time. In Game 1 of the World Series, he threw it 35 times, the same number of times he threw his four-seam fastball.

Flaherty used his slider, which he threw 29 percent of the time during the regular season, less often in Game 1, throwing it a total of 19 times (21 percent.) He threw one sinker and no changeups, though he used both less than three percent of the time in the regular season, so it’s hardly unexpected to not use one — or both — pitches in any one start.

While Flaherty usually throws his slider more, it’s the pitch that he gets the most swings and misses with (43.6 percent). In Game 1, he got 12 of his 19 whiffs from the knuckle curve. The others were his slider (four) and four-seam fastball (three). However, 10 of the 15 called strikes he got were on the four-seamer.

In Game 1, Flaherty threw first-pitch fastballs to Aaron Judge in all three at-bats — getting a called strike in the first, a swinging strike in the third and a ball in the sixth — while striking him out in all three at-bats. In the 16 pitches he threw Judge, seven were four-seam fastballs, seven were the knuckle curve and two were his slider. He got strikeouts of Judge on all three pitches. All three of his other strikeouts — two of Anthony Volpe and one of Austin Wells — came via the knuckle curve.

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At a quarter past 4 o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, Jack Flaherty embraced a somewhat awkward assignment. Flaherty is the man the Los Angeles Dodgers assigned to pitch a Game 5 that was not yet guaranteed, with the L.A. on the brink of sweeping this World Series and making Flaherty’s pregame news conference into one about a start that remained hypothetical.

“My job is to get ready for tomorrow,” Flaherty told a room full of reporters. “I’ve got to focus on what I’ve got to do to get ready for tomorrow and root these guys on tonight. I’ve got to keep my mindset right there.”

Flaherty is used to limbo. In July, he sat four hours inside the Detroit Tigers clubhouse and waited for a decision on his trade deadline fate. He was nearly a New York Yankee before concerns about his back scuttled a deal. The Dodgers acquired him instead and on Wednesday night he will pitch at Yankee Stadium with a chance to secure a championship.

“I’m just worried about getting one more,” Flaherty said. “We know we’ve got to continue to play really good baseball in order to get that done because those guys aren’t going to go away quietly.”

The Yankees did not. “If necessary” was answered in the affirmative Tuesday night when the Yankees roared to life for an 11-4 victory. Anthony Volpe’s third-inning grand slam set the wheels in motion for Flaherty to start with the Dodgers up in the series 3-1.

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Dodgers fail to finish sweep, so all eyes turn to Jack Flaherty for Game 5

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The Dodgers did very little against Yankees starter Gerrit Cole in Game 1. They got a couple of triples, one of which led to a run, but Cole was otherwise dominant in the World Series opener. Here’s tonight’s Dodgers lineup with each hitter’s Game 1 numbers against Cole.

Those numbers aren’t particularly encouraging for the Dodgers, but here’s that same lineup with each hitter’s career numbers against Cole in the regular season. Freddie Freeman and Kiké Hernández — the two guys who tripled in Game 1 — each has a career OPS over 1.000 against Cole. Mookie Betts, who went 0-for-3, has a career .895 OPS with a .467 on-base percentage. Shohei Ohtani has hit just .200, but with a home run and a double.

Cole is, without question, one of the best pitchers of this era. But the Dodgers do have a handful of guys who have gotten to him in the past.

How kind of the Los Angeles Dodgers to announce their starting lineup for Game 5 right after we've begun our Dodgers hour here!

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For the second night in a row, the Los Angeles Dodgers begin their game as the likely World Series champions. While it looked like a 100 percent chance the Dodgers would take home the title after a 3-0 lead in the World Series, those chances are down to something closer to 99 percent.

While the one percent difference is not much, the transition from absolute to probable is jarring.

When Freddie Freeman hit his first-inning home run, it seemed the game, series and season were finished. The funny thing that happened along the way is that the Yankees didn’t just roll over, but instead took Game 4, extending the series at least one more day.

The Dodgers have every advantage at this point:

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Right-hand men

The Gerrit Cole vs. Jack Flaherty rematch looked unlikely when the Dodgers jumped ahead early in Game 4, but the baseball gods and Anthony Volpe’s blast blessed us with a Game 5. Both Cole and Flaherty pitched well in Game 1. The atmosphere will be entirely different tonight in the Bronx. Cole is pitching with immense pressure upon his shoulders in an elimination game. Flaherty should, in theory, be throwing free and easy, given the series lead. But I’ll bet he’s feeling the heat, too. Flaherty and the Dodgers are desperate not to let the Yankees claw back in this series.

History for Freddie Freeman

Freeman remains the frontrunner for World Series MVP after hitting first-inning two-run homers in back-to-back games at Yankee Stadium. Would you blame Cole if he pitches around this guy in the first inning tonight? Freeman is 5-for-16 in this series — a triple and four homers — and has now homered in a record six consecutive World Series games, surpassing George Springer for the most consecutive World Series games with a homer. Freeman has 10 RBI this World Series, trailing only 1960 Bobby Richardson (12 RBI) and 1960 Mickey Mantle (11 RBI).

Eyes on Aaron Judge

Judge hasn’t had an extra-base hit in almost two weeks, but he had better at-bats in Game 4 and reached base three times — single, walk, hit-by-pitch. He looked like he had a better idea of how to punch back against the Dodgers’ pitching plan for him. Then again, three of Judge’s four at-bats in Game 4 were against little-used long relievers he won’t see in moments that matter. Judge is still batting .152 with 20 strikeouts in 59 plate appearances this postseason. Flaherty struck him out swinging three times in Game 1. Here’s Judge’s chance for redemption.

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MLBPA executive director Tony Clark has issued a statement following last night's fan interference, in which two fans ripped a foul ball out of Mookie Betts' glove. The statement reads:

“The MLBPA takes Player safety and security very seriously, including and especially at the ballpark. As with every incident at the ballpark that affects Players, we have been in regular contact with League security officials since last night’s incident and will be closely tracking both the response to that incident and the protective measures taken going forward, beginning tonight.”

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Yankees fans who interfered with Mookie Betts catch banned from attending World Series Game 5

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On this date in 2001, the Yankees hosted the Arizona Diamondbacks in the third game of the World Series, just seven weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks destroyed the World Trade Center.

President George W. Bush stood atop the mound at Yankee Stadium for the ceremonial first pitch, taking advice from Derek Jeter, who had warned the President that fans would boo him if he threw from the grass. “Don’t bounce it,” Jeter added.

President Bush – who had never been to a World Series game – gave a thumbs-up sign to the crowd and tossed a strike to Todd Greene, the Yankees’ backup catcher, who did the honors because Jorge Posada was warming up Roger Clemens in the bullpen.

“I can’t remember a time in my life when we were more united as a community of citizens for our country,” Greene told me for “The Grandest Stage,” my book on World Series history. “And to have him walk out on top of the mound and salute the crowd with the thumbs-up and his head held high, it was kind of a symbol of: ‘You’re not going to intimidate us and make us crawl in a hole. Here we are, and we’re going to come back.’”

Many years later, after viewing an SNY feature about the pitch, President Bush sent Greene a hand-written note referencing the “emotion and drama” of the moment they shared.

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Tonight’s Dodgers starter, Jack Flaherty, struck out six batters in Game 1, but three of those strikeouts came again Aaron Judge, two were against Anthony Volpe, and the other came against Austin Wells.

Did Game 4 signal a meaningful shift for those three?

Volpe and Wells, both stone cold through the first three games of this series, combined to reach base six times and score five runs last night. Judge, famously struggling in the postseason, had his most encouraging game of the series with a single, a walk, an RBI and no strikeouts. Was that just a decent night or a sign of mechanical and mental progress? Is this Yankees lineup in a different place than it was five days ago? Here’s the Yankees Game 5 lineup with each player’s Game 1 performance against Flaherty. For most of the Yankees hitters, Game 1 at least doubled their career plate appearances against Flaherty. The only Yankees hitters with more than four career at-bats against Flaherty in the regular season are Juan Soto (1-for-8, five walks) and Anthony Rizzo (9-for-21, three homers, five walks).

The New York Yankees have announced their starting lineup for tonight's Game 5.