close
close

When the Yankees lose 3-0 in the World Series, the excitement is ruined by quiet bats

Posted on by Vanessa
When the Yankees lose 3-0 in the World Series, the excitement is ruined by quiet bats

play

NEW YORK – They're playing a baseball game between the lines, but staging an assault on the senses between every pitch, every inning and every sustained pause in the action of this World Series.

From celebrity pleas for more noise from Ken Jeong in Los Angeles to Flavor Flav in the Bronx to blaring sirens and pounding organs, Yankee Stadium and its Dodger counterpart are turning the volume up to 11, ostensibly to engage the masses and fill the gaps a game that can offer many of these.

But on Monday night, in Game 3 of the World Series, the Yankees' continued futility produced another, very different aural sensation.

Be silent.

After a 15-year wait, the World Series baseball game returned to Yankee Stadium, and 49,368 fans packed the ballpark, eager for an electrifying moment that led to an average price of nearly $2,000 on the resale market.

But the Yankees once again demonstrated their ability to provide juice organically, their high-priced lineup was reduced to a series of flails and failures – and now this World Series is about to end almost as quickly as it began has.

They'll play Game 4 on Tuesday night, but after allowing just four hits and allowing 26 outs in a 4-2 loss to leave them trailing 3-0 in the series, that potential coronation feels close to the Dodgers like a matter of course.

The Dodgers are simply better than the Yankees, at least for now, and while there's certainly a lot of anger that can be directed at presumptive AL MVP Aaron Judge — who is now 1-for-12 with seven strikeouts in this series — feels the hand-wringing becomes more and more pointless.

GAME 3: The Dodgers are one win away from the World Series championship

The Yankees have scored seven runs in three games.

They are now batting .186 (19 for 102) in this series and have not challenged the Dodgers' upper arms in a postseason environment that is no longer kind to starters. In Game 3, it was Walker Buehler's turn: he didn't allow a hit until the fourth inning, striking out five in five innings and needing just 76 pitches.

After Jack Flaherty's five-hit outing and Yoshinobu Yamamoto's one-hit, 6⅓-inning gem in Game 2, the Yankees are 8 for 51 (.157) against the Dodgers starting pitching.

In Game 3, the mood was dark and almost inevitably bad.

A flat pregame set from Bronx native Fat Joe did little to excite the crowd. Minutes later, a Freddie Freeman rocket into the right field stands made it 2-0 before the Yankees could even mount an attack.

In the seventh inning, a fan wanted to get the crowd excited for a game-winning full-count pitch against Mookie Betts. There were few takers and when substitute Tim Hill took the pitch for the fourth ball, his swear words echoed well into the upper reaches of the stadium.

Welcome back to the World Series?

“We haven’t been here in 15 years,” said first baseman Anthony Rizzo. “I understand the fans, the development took a long time. I also grew up a Yankee fan. The way we look at it, we got to the World Series and expect to win it, and that's still our expectation.

“But it’s definitely not a hole we want to be in.”

The Yankees have abandoned the tried-and-true betting promise that every team in a 3-0 hole makes. Manager Aaron Boone said: “Hopefully we can tell this amazing story and shock the world.” But for now it's about getting a lead, winning a game and forcing another and going from there.

“But we have to grab one first.”

It quickly became clear that that wasn't going to happen in Game 3, like a prize fight that was clearly over after one round but was scheduled to last nine rounds anyway. Freeman's two-run home run brought an air of inevitability to the game. Even when the Yankees put five runners on base in the sixth, seventh and eighth innings, it seemed likely that they would strand them all, and they did.

Still, the overall score in this series is just 14-7, with Freeman's walk-off grand slam in Game 1 that clinched the Yankees' victory, a solo home run in Game 2 and a two-run run in Game 3 for the Yankees were responsible for half of the Dodgers' score.

So close and yet so far?

“The first game was ours. You won it. They had a historic hit,” said Alex Verdugo, whose two-run, two-out home run in the ninth broke the Dodgers’ shutout. “In the second game they caught us in an inning and we couldn’t recover. This is the fault of the offense.

“When we don’t score, we put a lot of pressure on the pitchers to be perfect against a really good Dodgers lineup.”

Maybe a Dodgers bullpen game is an elixir. On the other hand, the Dodgers clinched the pennant with a bullpen game in NLCS Game 6, and their heavily indebted relievers are relatively rested thanks to the performance of their starting pitchers.

Helped by the Yankees' ineptitude, which made this long-awaited night sleepy. At the end of the seventh part, a loud Metallica guitar riff caused fans to stand. It was 4-0, but Rizzo had just hit a single and Dodgers reliever Daniel Hudson made his first appearance of the series.

Unfortunately, pinch-hitter Austin Wells — 1-for-10 in this World Series, 4-for-42 this postseason — was staring at a 96 mph pitch for the third strike.

The rally came to a short circuit. The walk to the exit was underway and much of the high-rent seating area had been cleared when Verdugo hit his home run.

Definitely quiet enough to hear the fans' frustration. Not that the Yankees are in a position to think about it.

“It’s all noise,” Judge says. “The fans are here to cheer us on and support us. But we have a job to do. Anything beyond that is just noise.”

Or more precisely: silence.

Get to the heart of the news quickly with the USA TODAY app. Download for award-winning reporting, crosswords, audio storytelling, the e-newspaper and more.

Related Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *