Sliding home to score: Pete Alonso of the New York Mets in the game against the LA Dodgers (Los Angeles, October 14, 2024)
Four teams are still in the race to win the World Series in North American professional baseball. The New York Yankees and the Cleveland Guardians will play for the American League (AL) champion, while the National League (NL) championship will be decided between the New York Mets and the Los Angeles Dodgers. The home team won game one in the best-of-seven series on Sunday evening (local time) at Dodgers Stadium in L.A. 8-0. While the Dodgers were a hot candidate for a place in the World Series throughout the entire regular season, the Mets played their way into the playoffs from a very deep hole. At the beginning of June, when the season was two months old, the Mets had eleven more losses than wins on their record. But then they got their act together and had an almost epic duel with the Brewers from Milwaukee at the beginning of October, which was decided by a three-run home run by Mets first baseman Pete Alonso in the eighth inning of the all-important third game. Alonso, who set a new MLB rookie record with 53 home runs in 2019, had previously been in a veritable performance slump since September 19th with just five hits in 41 at bats.
What followed for the Mets was a dramatic best-of-five series in the NL Division Series against the East Coast rival Philadelphia Phillies, which went to the Mets by a score of 3-1. Game two in particular, the Phillies’ only win, was hard to beat in terms of excitement: after a total of seven lead changes, rightfielder Nick Castellanos won the game 7-6 for Philadelphia with a walk-off single. In games three and four, the Mets outclassed the Phillies by a total of eleven runs to three. Game three went 7-2 to the Mets, game four 4-1. Once again it was Alonso who scored the decisive four runs in the fourth game for the Mets with a “grand slam” home run. The L.A. Dodgers, on the other hand, prevailed 3-2 against the San Diego Padres in a toxic series. Players, managers and fans repeatedly clashed. In game two, Dodgers supporters threw balls at Padres left fielder Jurickson Profar. As we all know, they are hard as rocks. Meanwhile, Padres’ third baseman Manny Machado also took measurements and threw to Dodgers’ team manager Dave Roberts, but missed him clearly.
Things were much more civilized in the AL Division Series between the New York Yankees and the Kansas City Royals as well as the Cleveland Guardians and the Detroit Tigers. The Royals around their young star and short stop Bobby Witt Jr. had previously surprisingly beaten the highly favored Baltimore Orioles 1-0 and 2-1 in the Wild Card Series. In four close games against the Yankees, it was only enough to win 4-2 in the second game; the rest went 6-5, 3-2 and 3-1 to the team from the Bronx district of New York. Starting pitcher Gerrit Cole delivered a strong seven innings in the fourth game, giving up just one run on six hits and four strikeouts. Veterans Gleyber Torres, Juan Soto and Giancarlo Stanton were responsible for the three Yankees runs. In the AL Championship Series, the Yankees – with 27 titles, by far the most successful team in modern MLB history, which dates back to 1901 – meet the Cleveland Guardians, who are in a close series against the surprise team of the season, the Detroit Tigers 3:2 after games in the AL Division Series.
Tragic hero of the Tigers: Tarik Skubal. The 27-year-old starting pitcher delivered an outstanding performance in game two with seven scoreless innings with just three hits and eight strikeouts. In the decisive fifth game, team manager Andrew Jay “AJ” Hinch trusted Skubal again. But in the fifth inning with the score tied at 1-1, Lane Thomas punished one of Skubal’s few marginal throws with a “grand slam” home run. The Tigers never recovered from the 5-1 deficit. They lost the decisive game 7:3.
