Of all the cavorting Los Angeles Dodgers who danced gleefully on the metaphorical graves of the two Yankee louts who tried to claim Mookie Betts' arm as a souvenir, 37-year-old Daniel Hudson danced the best. "This was the only reason I came back," Hudson said in announcing his retirement. "To go out on top. And that’s what’s happening."
Now that's a baller move—to call your shot months in advance and still hit it in the end.
To be fair, Hudson had nothing to do with the Dodgers' whirlwind 7-6 victory that clinched their first adult-sized World Series in 36 years on Wednesday night. In fact, his last big moment in the series was giving up a grand slam to Anthony Volpe that blew Game 4 to smithereens the night before. But in a postseason dominated by a relentless Dodger bullpen, every little bit helped even when it hurt.
You may now judge whether you like a championship won in this manner, because when we say the Dodger bullpen dominated this postseason, we mean it as a statement of quantity rather than quality. In 16 games, manager Dave Roberts made 72 pitching changes affecting 366 opposing batters; his relievers threw 82 of the team's 145 innings, doing through sheer bulk what could not be done with skill, or anyway by the few name-brand guys in the rotation. It was a game plan that felt sourced from Costco.
These are ridiculous numbers by any standard, a final victory for the refutation of traditional pitching staff structure begun 16 years ago by the masking-tape-and-baling-wire Tampa Bay Rays. The fact that it did not crush the Dodgers along the way left as much of an impression as megadental MVP Freddie Freeman. Years from now, fans who watched this series will realize that not only do they remember exactly what Ryan Brasier and Anthony Banda look like, but that they spent as much time around them as members of their immediate family for a month in 2024.
Traditionalists will not like this team or its title, because it was so aggressively not traditional. And unless you like watching middle-aged men trudging to and from the pitchers mound taking one and putting another one in his place, it was also aggressively non-spectacular. A five-game series is almost by definition unspectacular; one in which the two certifiable MVPs hit .162 and drove in three of the 49 runs is beyond merely dismal. The high moments were the way the Yankees vomited up Games 1 and 5, and seeing if the Dodgers could vomit them back. They couldn't do that in Game 1 because Freeman walked it off, but no other game felt safe or warm because the Dodger pitching was unsafe at any speed.
Los Angeles did not have a starting rotation as much as a supermarket checkout line—one to handle the register, one to bag. Only Jack Flaherty and Yoshinobu Yamamoto operated as pure starters; Walker Buehler had a rocky season after an accordioned arm that cost him all of 2023, but that showing did not eliminate him from the postseason rotationette. He had to finish last night's clincher because Roberts had used his entire bullpen in the previous two games. That Buehler’s was one of only two clean innings the Dodgers managed last night almost served as a mockery of the championship run, unless you are the sort of modern thinker who views handling a pitching staff as "Oh, slap some glue and electrical tape over the hole, and we'll come back to check on it in an hour."
Never mind your feelings about the Dodgers and Yankees as part of baseball's axis of evil; they don't matter here, nor does your pitiable whining below. The Dodgers’ entire bullpen cost about $19 million, which is barely more than the amount of Shohei Ohtani’s money that got lost on gambling (by whom is up to you; wear the tinfoil hat that fits you best). The Dodgers replaced three of those relievers during the postseason, probably to be retreaded.
Yet game after game, Roberts managed that pen with a snow shovel, and in an era in which managers are no longer allowed to run a game because it wrecks the fantasy team aspirations of the members of the analytics department, Roberts pulled it off. That's a lot less visually enjoyable than watching Ohtani or Mookie Betts or Freeman or any of the hitters, and in an era in which a bloated time of game is a certifiable Baseball Crime in the eyes of the commissioner’s office, the Dodgers averaged three hours and 11 minutes per game. Much of that was Roberts.
Ultimately this will not be remembered as a satisfying week of baseball unless your taste runs to the goofy, and most of that was provided by those sped-up I Love Lucy episodes that were the Yankees. But goofy cannot stand alone; there has to be an underlying structure to allow the goof to reach its proper level. That was the Dodgers bullpen in all its "what, another one?" glory. And we will not begrudge Daniel Hudson his moment, although in fairness he also had one of those when he closed the 2019 Series for Washington. He got to go out as one of many equals, and the ring will fit, the winner's share will spend, and the parade will be massively drunken just the same. What else do you want from sports? More hype?
