Baseball Bytes: The Yankees’ Path Back
Down 0-2, how can New York turn the tables on the Dodgers in the World Series?
Welcome to a special ✨Postseason Edition✨ of Baseball Bytes1 — my column in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
⚾ Fall Classic Focus
Going into the 2024 World Series, the brightest spotlight shone on the historic nature of this Yankees-Dodgers battle. A record 12th meeting between these iconic teams from opposite coasts, it was hyped up as one of the most expensive, most star-laden and all-around biggest Fall Classic matchups ever.
But the matchup also looked close on paper, with the Dodgers checking in as slight favorites. And after two games, things have indeed been fairly tight: Game 1 required an extra-innings grand slam to be settled, and Game 2 ended with the bases loaded and the tying run in scoring position.
But as close as the Yankees came to winning both contests, the Dodgers still emerged with a 2-0 lead. History now heavily favors them — teams leading 2-0 in the World Series are 44-10 all-time, winning the championship 82 percent of the time. And that aligns with the Playoff Predictor forecast heading into Game 3:
📊 2024 MLB Playoff Predictor 📈
⚾ Pinstripe Problems
With the series shifting back to New York for the next three games, the Yankees are suddenly in a world of trouble. The last team to overcome an 0-2 hole in the World Series: the 1996 Yankees, who 28 years ago survived a 16-1 combined deficit against the Atlanta Braves in Games 1-2 and staged one of the all-time Fall Classic comebacks with four consecutive wins.
In some ways, the 2024 Yankees are in far better shape than the 1996 Yankees were through a pair of games. This year’s version only lost to the Dodgers by a combined score of 10-5 — one-third as bad as the ‘96 team had it — and, again, they were in both games to the final out. But however you get to 0-2, you still have to get out of it. And that means fixing the problems that have led the Yankees to this point.
Here are 5 factors that need to change from here on out if New York is going to turn this series around in the Bronx:
Get to the Dodger starters. Before the series began, the numbers clearly identified L.A.’s rotation as a major weakness that the Yankees would need to exploit to win. But so far, the Dodgers’ starting pitchers have yielded just 3 earned runs in 11⅔ innings (2.31 ERA). While Gerrit Cole matched Jack Flaherty in Game 1, Yoshinobu Yamamoto decisively outpitched Carlos Rodón in Game 2, leading to better SP numbers in the series overall. With Clarke Schmidt (1.9 WAR in regular season) facing Walker Buehler (-0.7) in Game 3, the Yankees have a prime chance to close that gap,2 but they’ll be in a truly dire situation if not.
Jump-start Judge. The biggest offensive storyline of the series so far is the weak performance of presumptive AL MVP Aaron Judge, who is hitting just .111 with a .222 OPS after posting marks of .322/1.159 during the regular season. Judge already wasn’t exactly dominating the playoffs (.161/.704) before the World Series, but he has 6 strikeouts, 0 extra-base hits and 0 walks in 9 plate appearances in the series. If he doesn’t play like an MVP, it will be hard for the Yankees to improve an offense that has been held scoreless in 15 of a possible 19 innings (scoring multiple runs only once).
Change the balance of power. On a related note, the Yankees need to close the power gap against the Dodgers. After a regular season in which New York out-homered L.A. 237-233, the Dodgers have 4 HRs and 10 extra-base hits to the Yankees’ totals of 2 and 3, respectively. While the league’s most patient regular-season team has out-walked the second-most patient team, 6 to 3, New York’s sluggers haven’t done anywhere near as much damage when they’ve decided to swing the bats — and that’s before we even get to when the Dodgers were able to get their momentum-shifting power (more on that later).
Reduce the depth disparity. We already knew the Yankees were more reliant upon a smaller group of core players — most notably Judge and Juan Soto on offense — than the deeper Dodgers were during the regular season. But that difference has been magnified during the World Series. While L.A. has gotten an 1.100+ OPS out of three players (Tommy Edman, Freddie Freeman and Teoscar Hernández), none of whom were even their best hitters during the regular season,3 the Yankees only have one hitter with so much as an .800 OPS in the World Series — Soto (1.413) — and he was their second-best regular season hitter. In addition to getting more out of Judge, New York needs to see more Dodger-like production from the non-star contingent of its lineup.
(And it’s worth noting that they might be aided in this regard depending on the health of L.A.’s MVP, Shohei Ohtani, who injured himself trying to steal a base in Game 2. But even beyond Ohtani, NLCS MVP Edman seems to unlock a lot of good things for the Dodgers with his versatility, a factor the Yankees don’t really have a match for.)Return to timely tendencies. During the ALCS, I noted that the Yankees were doing enough to win by monopolizing the big plays in high-leverage moments of their games against Cleveland. That hasn’t been true versus Los Angeles, however, with three of the four most important plays of the World Series favoring L.A. (as well as six of the Top 10). Freeman’s dramatic, Kirk Gibson-esque walk-off HR in Game 1 added 23 percentage points of championship probability all by itself.4 It’s certainly up for debate how much clutch stats tell us — just in general, much less in a sample of 2 games — but the Dodgers have essentially flipped the Yankees’ previous formula of crunch-time success around on them. It hasn’t helped that we knew the Yankee bullpen was shaky — and they’ve clearly been outpitched by their Dodger counterparts so far.5 Surely the Yankees will face their share of big moments again, and their ability to capitalize will determine whether they climb out of the 0-2 hole or fade away against the talented Dodgers.
Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes
Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.
Assuming Buehler’s return to vintage form isn’t permanent.
Those would be Shohei Ohtani (1.036 OPS) and Mookie Betts (.863).
It was worth roughly as much as the Yankees’ four most important plays combined.
As much as Blake Treinen tried to blow Game 2 in the 9th inning.