Freddie please stop

After Billy Joel played 100 nights at Madison Square Garden in New York City, he donated the Steinway piano he used in his concerts to the Garden.  It sits on the plaza out front in a Plexiglass case with a set list next to the piano. I saw it when I was in NYC for business.  The Knicks were in town and the concierge assured me I could walk up and get a ticket because the Knicks were stinking up the NBA, her words not mine.  Since I’d never been to Madison Square Garden, I thought, what a lucky break. It’s a terrific venue and smaller than I imagined.

Billy Joel is an iconic New York musician and it’s too bad he didn’t give us a performance of  New York state of mind when the Yankees took on the LA Dodgers for Games 3, 4, and 5 of the 2024 World Series.  But, as he told us in Only the good die young, sooner or later it comes down to fate. And the Yankees’ fate this year was to go down in flames notwithstanding they have  the second highest payroll in baseball, second only to the NY Mets.

Instead of Billy Joel, we got New York rapper Fat Joe, who is no Ice Cube. Fat Joe opened Game 3 of the World Series with an uninspiring rendition of tunes that must be popular in some neighborhoods, but unlike Ice Cube’s performance at Chavez Ravine, Yankee stadium was not rocking when Fat Joe slammed the mic down at the end of his performance. 

The Dodgers were not about to let this one get away.  In the top of the first inning of Game 3, Ohtani walked and Freddie Freeman started where he left off in Game 2 and hit a two-run homer. The Yankees remained scoreless until the ninth inning.

In the first inning, Aaron Judge struck out again on a slider so far outside the strike zone it could have been in another zip code, and I swear he had fear in his eyes over what was happening to him at the plate. He was 0 for 3 in Game 3.

In the third inning, Tommy Edman walked, and Ohtani grounded out to first allowing Edman to reach second base. Then Mookie Betts singled to right field allowing Edman to score. It stayed at 3-0, Dodgers, until the sixth inning when Gavin Lux scored after getting hit by a pitch and stealing second.  Then Enrique Hernandez singled to center field and brought Lux home to make the score 4-0, Dodgers.

In the bottom of the sixth, Judge finally got his bat on the ball with a come backer to the pitcher, but it was scored as a no hit fielder’s choice.  The poor guy can’t even buy a hit.

In the ninth, the Yankees squeezed out two runs on Anthony Rizzo’s walk and Alex Verdugo’s home run to make it 4-2. But they’ll need a lot more than that. The Dodgers lead the Series 3-0, and the odds are very low that any team comes back from that far down.

In Game 4, the Dodgers came out hoping to finish the Series. Ohtani flied out, Betts doubled to right field and Freddie Freeman brought him home with another two-run homer to deep right field.  That’s when the fans’ signs started coming out pleading, “Freddie please stop”.

The Yankees were up in the bottom of the first inning and not happy with the way things were going.  Fans deep on the first base side tried to steal Gleyber Torres’ fly ball from Mookie Betts’ glove. Betts had to climb the wall and reach over to catch it when a couple of Yankee fanatics said, ‘oh no you don’t’.

Gleyber was called out, the knucklehead fans were ejected from the game and Betts escaped the Bronx assault without injury. 

Call it a sign of the times.  An ominous one at that with the Presidential election coming up in two weeks.

The Dodgers went three up three down in the second and third innings, while the Yankees scored one in the second and four in the third with a Grand Slam by Anthony Volpe. The Dodgers scored 2 runs in the fifth to make it 4-5, Yankees, and it didn’t get any better than that for the Dodgers.

Austin Wells homered in the sixth. And with 5 more Yankee runs in the eighth inning to make it 4-11, the Dodgers were out of gas. The Yankees were making a come-back and down 3-1 with Game 5 coming up and the prospect of two more games in Los Angeles if they could pull it off.

If you can ignore the three errors by Wells, Judge and Volpe, Game 5 could have been the best so far. The Yankees came out strong in the first inning with a two-run homer by the missing-in-action Aaron Judge and another homer by Jazz Chisolm, Jr. They scored another run in the second, and a homer by Giancarlo Stanton in the third to make the score 0-5, Yankees, going into the fifth inning. That’s when the Dodger bats came alive.

They scored 5 unearned runs in the fifth inning off a single by Betts, a 2 run single by Freeman and a 2 run double by Teoscar Hernandez to tie the game 5-5. The Yankees scored one in the sixth and went into the eighth inning temporarily ahead 5-6.

In the eighth, the Dodgers scored two runs on sacrifice flies by Lux and Betts to put the Dodgers ahead 7-6.  They went on to win Game 5 behind reliever Walter Buehler who got his first major league save and was also Game 3’s winning pitcher.

The Dodgers returned to Los Angeles as the 2024 World Series Champions, and with the first ever walk off Grand Slam in Game 1 and home runs in Games 2, 3 and 4, Freddie Freeman won a well-deserved World Series MVP.  It was an exciting end to a wild beginning.

And now that Donald J. Trump won the election, all is well.