The Los Angeles Dodgers won their eighth World Series championship in team history on Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium and, like their 98-win season and 11 wins in 16 postseason games, won the championship. This comes in a completely predictable and surprising way. In a five-run hole in Game 5 and facing ace Gerrit Cole of the New York Yankees, the Dodgers orchestrated an incredible fifth-inning counterattack to even the score, scoring two more runs. again to take the lead in the eighth inning and then closed his eyes and hoped for the best from a bullpen already stretched to its limits.

That title was capped off by Kirk Gibson’s ninth-inning, Game 1 home run that turned a victory into a defeat. This championship also featured a Game 1 walk-off hero in Freeman, whose 10th-inning grand slam kicked off the Yankees’ dominance as LA won the first three games. But the Yankees countered in Game 4 and jumped out to a 5-0 lead in Game 5 before two counterattacks the first by three missed plays by the Yankees took them down. Both started with harmless singles from Kiké Hernandez. The decisive hits lacked Gibson/Freemanesque drama – eighth-inning sacrifice hits from Gavin Lux and Mookie Betts to turn a 6-5 deficit into a 7-6 lead. And the final heroics came from a bullpen that chose Jack Flaherty as its starter and scored a near-perfect 23 runs, with a home run and Giancarlo Stanton’s sacrifice fly as the highlights. The only blemish in the final 7 ⅔ innings.