LOS ANGELES — There are no medals for mettle. Certainly not in the $300 million payroll megacoastal superpower division.
So, that the Yankees did not have a hangover early in Game 2 from what occurred the previous evening, and that they pushed the Dodgers to the final out of Saturday night’s Game 2, that would all be valuable if everyone were getting Dairy Queen now and going back to fourth grade Monday.
Ultimately, the Dodgers came back not once, but twice late to win Game 1 — or what the Yankees couldn’t do in Game 2. And whatever surge the Yankees offered in the ninth inning Saturday did not erase that, for the first eight innings, the Dodgers were the far superior team en route to a 4-2 win and a two-games-to-none lead.
“They’re gonna enjoy a nice flight to New York tonight, and rightfully so, they’re up two-oh,” Anthony Rizzo said. “The Dodgers have played really well and you can’t take anything away from them. But the look in everyone’s eyes in here makes me feel this is far from over.”
Rizzo was part of the 2016 champion Cubs who rebounded from down three-games-to-one in the World Series to win it all. So he knows there is a road back, saying, “a win Monday changes the narrative.” If they can take Game 3, the Dodgers have a bullpen game the next day and then the Yankees have Gerrit Cole in Game 5.
The Yankees can also take heart that the Dodgers may not have the presumptive NL MVP — or may have him in a more compromised state —after Shohei Ohtani sustained what the team called a subluxation of his left shoulder when he jammed his hand into the ground while being caught stealing in the seventh inning.
What was expected to be the Yankees’ main advantage in the rotation, wasn’t. Jack Flaherty pitched Cole to a draw in the opener and Yoshinobu Yamamoto badly outpitched Carlos Rodon in Game 2.
The ability to go homer for homer and star for star and long lineup for long lineup with the Dodgers? Not quite.
The Yankee plan in the offseason, remember, was Yama-Soto. But after the Yankees landed Juan Soto in a trade, Yamamoto decided he preferred teaming with Ohtani. The Yankees wanted Flaherty and Tommy Edman at the trade deadline and the Dodgers acquired both — Edman’s lefty mashing continued with one of the three homers off Rodon.
Managing? Aaron Boone’s decision to not have Tim Hill go after Freddie Freeman in the 10th inning of Game 1 only looked more dubious when Hill got Freeman to pop to short as part of his four-up, four-down outing in Game 2. Boone had picked Nestor Cortes, who surrendered the walk-off grand slam to Freeman in Game 1.
Follow The Post’s coverage of the Yankees in the postseason:
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Still, as devastating as it is to lose just one out away from winning a World Series game, the Yanks stabilized Game 2 early with Soto’s homer matching Edman’s to make it 1-1 going to the bottom of the third. But Teoscar Hernandez hit a two-run homer and Freeman followed with his fourth homer in his last four World Series games (dating to the 2021 champion Braves) and the Yanks did not get another hit until the ninth inning.
Central to that silence is that Aaron Judge continued to be missing in October, going 0-for-4 with three more strikeouts. The 120th World Series mainly was hyped around the two biggest stars, but now Ohtani might be lost physically while Judge continues to insist he is not lost mentally. He did agree that he must Rise and stop chasing out of the zone. These Yankees are not built technically sound or well-rounded. They win with the long ball and that means having Judge at his fullest power — but so far the Dodgers have the edge there too, in further defusing Judge.
“No one said it’s going to be easy,” Boone said. “It’s a long series, and we need to make it a long series now.”
Indeed. The only way the Yankees can win this series is to get it back to Los Angeles, which means the 27 innings in The Bronx must be a lot better than what the Yankees offered over two days at Dodger Stadium.
