LOS ANGELES — Dodgers Game 2 starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto fooled the Yankees in their winter meetings by throwing out a few random facts about pinstriped lore. You know, the kind of stuff you could learn by googling. Anyway, intentional or not, it served as a great curveball, and he had the Yankees, who were assuming rumors he preferred to go west were wrong and he actually dreamed of The Bronx. Oops.
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Well, Yamamoto did it again, using a repertoire from the heavens to make all the Yankees except the great Juan Soto look like rank amateurs in LA’s 4-2 Game 2 World Series victory. Yamamoto hadn’t pitched his best since returning weeks ago from shoulder woes, but he fooled us all again by looking like the monster talent who received a record $325 million contract from the Dodgers. (The Yankees bid $300M before realizing he wasn’t going to come, no matter the money.)
Yamamoto, who got $1M more than Yankees ace Gerrit Cole (albeit for one more year) and almost exactly double Yankees Game 2 starter Carlos Rodon’s $162M free-agent take, pitched perhaps the best game of his inaugural Major League season on the biggest platform. Throw in the $50.6M posting fee and he still looks plenty worth it today after finishing with 6 ¹/₃ innings of one-hit baseball.
“On this stage, he was fantastic tonight,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
Meantime, Rodon got hammered — make that double hammered. Third inning back-to-back home runs by Teoscar Hernandez and Game 1 grand slam hero Freddie Freeman sealed Rodon’s fate.
Boone praised Rodon’s stuff, but he became too reliant on his calling-card fastball with his breaking pitches often non-competitive. The Yankees were supposed to have the starting pitching edge, but in another surprise through two games, that isn’t the case.
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“How about both our starters the last two nights? Everybody was saying maybe we didn’t have the starting arms to make a run at the World Series,” Dodgers closer Blake Treinen said. “What Jack [Flaherty] did yesterday and Yamamoto in his first World Series game, that’s really impressive. They’re giving us a great chance. … Tip your cap.”
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The Yankees didn’t do the little things in Game 1 but switched it up for Game 2, when they didn’t do some big things, either — at least until mounting a ninth-inning rally undone when Anthony Volpe struck out and Jose Trevino flied to pretty deep center field with the bases loaded. That was a solid half inning, but through two games, they don’t look very good. In fact, they look less good than the crosstown Mets looked against this juggernaut Dodgers team.
The World Series opener was devastating in that there was a lot to lament, from Aaron Boone’s risky pitching calls to Gleyber Torres’ careless defense to Anthony Rizzo’s bizarre baserunning to even Carlos Torres’ strike zone. This time, the Dodgers hit three early home runs to set the tone.
The Yankees were limited against Yamamoto to a bomb of a home run by free-agent-to-be Juan Soto, who’s only guaranteed two more games in his Yankees tenure, which has been a blast. But that talk’s for another day. If the Yankees are going to pull a major comeback down 2-0 in games, they need to start winning the rotation battle big. So far, it isn’t happening.