A former New York Yankee is trying for some revisionist history when it comes to the team’s 2024 World Series loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Pitcher Nestor Cortes said in a new interview that he believes the Yankees were the better team despite losing to the Dodgers in five games. Cortes, now with the Milwaukee Brewers, pointed out that, in his mind, the Yankees blew two games in the series, including the Game 1 loss in which he gave up a walk-off grand slam to Freddie Freeman.
“They can talk whatever they want to talk, but we win Game 1 — which we should have — we lost 2 and 3, we win Game 4 and we should have won Game 5,” Cortes told Tyler Kepner of The Athletic. “Then we go back to LA up 3 to 2. So people can say it slipped away from us, people can say we made a lot of mistakes, which we did. But at the end of the day, we were the better team.
“I see it that way, and I’m sure everybody in that clubhouse sees it that way. The reality (could have been) going back to LA leading 3-2. It didn’t happen that way and they deserve all the credit in the world, they won the World Series. At the moment, they showed they were the better team.”
Cortes arguably has a point that the series was closer than the five-game length would indicate. The Dodgers only outscored the Yankees by one run over five games. However, that is slightly slanted by New York’s 11-4 victory in Game 4. The Yankees never led in Games 2 or 3, while the Dodgers had a lead at one point in every game of the series.
Cortes does own up to his role in blowing Game 1, a scenario many argued he should have never even been put into. He is correct that the Yankees made a number of mistakes, including a litany of them in Game 5. The bottom line is that the Dodgers were far more effective at limiting their mistakes than the Yankees were, and that is one of the marks of a good team that was playing better baseball.
It is also risky to assume the rest of the series plays out exactly the same even if the Dodgers close out Game 1. Both managers may have navigated games slightly differently, especially since the Dodgers avoided using their best pitchers late in Game 4 as the Yankees ran up their margin of victory.
Comments like this from losing teams are a tale as old as time. Had the Yankees played a cleaner series, perhaps they would have won. They did not, and over a five-game series, it’s tough to dispute that both teams got the outcome they deserved.
