The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City is a new book from Kevin Baker that explores the early impact of New York and New Yorkers on the game we know today. Kevin is a contributing editor for Harper’s, and has published in The New York Times, The New Republic and New York Observer. He is also the co-author of Reggie Jackson’s Becoming Mr. October. Part 1 of our discussion appeared last week.
So, that was quite a World Series.
Yeah.
You don’t seem very happy. Was this year the very worst Yankees playoff loss? Ever?
Far from it. In the Brian Cashman era, you get used to incredible, humiliating losses in the postseason. I think I speak for all Yankees fans when I say that, considering the circumstances, the 2024 World Series—even the already notorious fifth inning of the fifth game—doesn’t lay a glove on the 2004 American League Championship Series, when the hated Red Sox come back from down, three-games-to-nothing. Or the ninth-inning, seventh-game loss to Arizona, in the 2001 World Series, just weeks after 9/11.
Wasn’t this World Series already lost, with the Dodgers having jumped out to a 3-0 lead in games?
More than likely. But the Dodgers, who played magnificently despite a tidal wave of injuries that had gone on all year, seemed to be finally wobbling. Their relief pitching was starting to fray. Shohei Ohtani was running the bases with his arm in a sort of sling. I actually felt sorry for him when Cole struck him out in that fifth inning, with high fastballs he couldn’t reach. And then—
Ralph Branca of the Brooklyn Dodgers
Yes, then.
“The worst defensive inning in the history of the World Series,” they’re calling it. And I think that’s about right.
Who made the worst mistake?
For the players involved, the worst mistake was one thing. But for me, it wasn’t anything a player did at all. That play was inexcusable, of course, where Mookie Betts beat out a ground ball because Anthony Rizzo and Gerrit Cole couldn’t decide who was going to cover first. All credit to Betts, who was running hard on what looked like a sure out, in a game his team was losing by five runs. But that mix-up should never happen between two veteran players in a World Series game.
For me, though, the really unforgivable part of that inning was not what any player did, but what Aaron Boone did not do.
The Yankees manager? What was he supposed to do?
He needed to make it stop.
Yankees fans get on Boone perhaps too much, especially considering how constrained he is under Brian Cashman. But this World Series was not his finest hour. He made some terrible lineup and pitching decisions that cost the Yanks at least one game. And then there was what he did not do.
You know that picture we used last week? It’s one I have in my book, The New York Game. It’s Mickey Owen chasing a pitch that should have been the last strike, and tied up the very first Dodgers-Yankees World Series, back in 1941. Instead, Tommy Henrich reaches first base, and then the Yanks run up three hits and a walk. They win 7-4, and they win the World Series the next day.
You know who Leo Durocher, the Dodgers manager, blamed for that loss? It wasn’t Mickey Owen or his pitcher Hugh Casey. He blamed himself. Durocher blamed himself for not having gone out to the mound and let everyone cool off. Instead, he said, “I sat on my ass and didn’t do anything.”
Aaron Boone needed to go out to the mound when everything was going wrong in that horrible fifth inning, gather his team around him and say something like, “Hey, I thought I was supposed to cover first base.” Or just tell the filthiest joke he knows. Something, anything, to stop the rhythm of disaster and get his shellshocked team to breathe again. But he didn’t.
That’s the terrible thing about sports: the irretrievable moment. That one moment that goes by so fast but that you can never get over. That’s what’s going to haunt Aaron Judge.
Wait, Aaron Judge—not Aaron Boone?
Boone won’t get blamed for what he didn’t do. Anthony Rizzo will still be associated with the Cubs team that finally won, and no one expects that much out of a kid like Anthony Volpe, who made the other dumb play in that inning. But if the past is any prologue, the blame will stick to Judge, who had just turned around all his dismal postseason play in the past. Going into the fifth inning, he had already homered and made a brilliant running catch up the centerfield wall. He looked all set to go back to Chavez Ravine, knock the lights out and become the great hero of the great comeback. And then—
The irretrievable moment?
Exactly. An easy flyball that he had in his glove. For some reason, he takes his eye off it, looking for a runner who isn’t going anywhere. It’s almost the definition of a choke in sports: trying to do too much for no good reason. It will haunt him. It will follow him like it did so many worthy players who I track in The New York Game (and will in its sequel, out in spring, 2026!).
Give us some examples.
The first was probably “Happy Jack” Chesbro, a great pitcher for the New York Highlanders/Yankees who went 41-12 in 1904. He set a major-league record for wins in a post-1900 season—a record that will never be broken, at least not without some inconceivable change in the game, or human physiology.
Next-to-last game of the season, the Yanks could tie the Red Sox for first, with one game remaining against Boston. Chesbro, whose arm is falling off, not only pitches eight innings without allowing an earned run, but hits a triple and an RBI single. Nonetheless, because of his teammates’ errors, the game is tied at 2-2, going into the ninth. Yet another error puts the go-ahead run on third with two out and two strikes on the batter—but then Chesbro uncorks a wild pitch, which some observers really thought should’ve been a passed ball on his catcher. The Yankees lose—and for years afterwards, sportswriters beat a path up to where Chesbro had a farm in North Adams, Mass., to talk about how he “blew” the pennant.
The “Happy Jack” appellation was an ironic nickname; apparently, he was a very morose individual. But I think he was tremendously forbearing. If that had been me, I would have greeted those reporters with the family shotgun.
Are there other examples?
Too many. Poor Fred Merkle, a young kid with the New York Giants in a game against the Cubs, late in the 1908 season. Merkle’s on first, a teammate gets a hit that drives in the game-winning run from third, and Merkle heads directly for the clubhouse—as players had been doing for decades in such circumstances. But the field umpire for that game, Hank O’Day, had been having private discussions with the Cubs’ second baseman Johnny Evers about whether runners should have to tag the base in a force situation. He calls Merkle out, the Cubs win the pennant by one game and Merkle is forever after haunted by his “boner,” as it was called at the time (I know, I know). It really destroyed him, made him a recluse after he retired.
A few years later, another Giant, a centerfielder name Fred Snodgrass, dropped a short pop fly in the last inning of the final game of the 1912 World Series. Right after this, Snodgrass made what everybody called one of the greatest catches they had ever seen—but the Giants still lost a heartbreaker. Forever after, people spoke about Snodgrass’ “muff” (I know, I know) of a flyball. Snodgrass shrugged it off and went on to become a very successful banker and mayor of Oxnard, Cal. But when he died, in 1974, the headline on his New York Times obituary read, “FRED SNODGRASS, 86, DEAD; BALL PLAYER MUFFED 1912 FLY.”
On and on it goes, the scapegoats of our disappointment. Ralph Branca giving up Bobby Thomson’s home run. Bill Buckner watching the ball go through his legs. Too often, we call these things “chokes,” when the player in question should not be out there, or when he just gets beat. It happens even to the greatest. Mariano Rivera let up some big, awful postseason hits, though he more than redeemed himself, many times over. Sometimes you get that chance. Ralph Terry, the Yankees pitcher who let up the Bill Mazeroski homer that “walked-off” the 1960 World Series, got Willie McCovey two years later to complete a 1-0 shutout of the Giants and win the 1962 Series.
Will Aaron Judge get his shot at redemption? The odds aren’t great, which is sad. Judge will be 33 next season, tied to an aging Yankees team that seems headed down for years to come. There’s every chance that the Judge flub will stay with him “until the day I die,” as he put it—that one, irretrievable moment, when he took his eye off the ball.
Baseball is a very cruel game.
Kevin’s book is now available from Penguin Random House. Order it at your local bookstore or from Amazon!
