The Yankee put together a defensive disaster class in the 5th inning of Game 5 as they lose the World Series at home.

Remember when Joel Payamps forgot to cover 1st base in Game 1 of the Wild Card round??? Imagine that times a thousand.

I mean VERY rarely am I ever going to have empathy for Yankees fans, but I have never seen a defensive implosion like that in a World Series game in my entire life. That was bar league softball on a Tuesday night level defense. IN GAME 5 OF THE WORLD SERIES.

The Yankees had a 5-0 lead and hadn’t even given up a hit to that point of the game. It looked certain that the series was headed back to LA for Game 6 on Friday night. And then Aaron Judge just flat whiffed a can-of-corn in centerfield. Okay, I guess that stuff happens. Still a 5-0 lead with two men on, not a total disaster. Then Anthony Volpe short-arms a throw to 3rd base when he should have just thrown to 2nd for the easy out. You could feel the worm turning at that point. You just can’t give a team like the Dodgers 5 outs in an inning.

And STILL, despite all of that, Cole gets the next two guys and got a grounder to first base that should have ended the inning. No harm, no foul. But Anthony Rizzo fielded that ball like it was a Grapefruit League game, and Cole never covered first base. Baseball 101. At that point you knew the karma gods weren’t going to let them off of the hook. The Dodgers hang a 5-spot, tie the game, and ultimately go on to win the game and the title.

Now back to my empathy for Yankee fans: I honestly don’t know if I’d recover if the Brewers did what the Yankees did defensively in that 5th inning of a World Series game. When Pete Alonso hit that 3-run bomb directly in my face in Game 3 of the Wild Card series I was already contemplating finding a new summer hobby. I can’t begin to fathom what I would do if something like that happened on the biggest stage in baseball. That might be it for me. Curtains. Exit stage left. In some ways I think the Brewers do us a favor every year by doing dumb sh– in the early rounds of the playoffs and not teasing us by making it all the way to the World Series. Baseball is truly a cruel game.

PS: Congrats to the Dodgers for winning their first World Series since 1988. Everyone knows the pandemic year didn’t count (unless the Brewers would have won).

Double PS: Lot of Twitter conversation this morning about how baseball is broken because you ended up with two major-market teams who have massive payrolls and loaded rosters in the World Series. In the words of 12-year old me, no doi. Baseball is never going to have a salary cap and small market teams are always going to need a LOT to break their way to win a title. That’s just the way it is and the way it will always be. As the great Macho Man Randy Savage once said, “You may not like it, but accept it.”