Yankees World Series failure started and ended with fundamental issues

A few years ago, Mookie Betts was playing balls off the wall in Dodgers spring training camp, a team official remembers. He was working on gathering, spinning and making one-hop throws to second base when he let out a giant “bleep” as one throw skittered off-line.Another outfielder participating saw it as no big deal, took one more ball and was done.

Betts took about 25 more, the executive recalls, because for Betts “nothing is good enough.” When asked how often even during the season Betts practices balls off the wall, the official said, he “works on that [bleep] every day.” And then in a text message added, “Every day!!!” In the losing Yankee clubhouse early Thursday morning, Nestor Cortes, who knew nothing of this story, said, “Baseball comes down to execution, right? If you don’t execute and the other team does it better than you, then they’re obviously going to win.And that’s what we ran into in the series, where they execute a lot of plays.

And I’ve said since Game 1 and 2, it felt like they did everything right.They have Mookie Betts in right field and every ball off the wall, he kept it to a single, and just stuff like that, it’s like you can’t capitalize on them and when we made [mistakes] they capitalized, so that’s massive.” The Dodgers won four World Series games with a .206 average, seven homers and 25 runs.

The Yankees won one World Series game with a .212 average, nine homers and 24 runs.On a piece of paper — where too much of the Yankee front office continues to reside — this was an even World Series.

On the field, the Yankees blundered away Games 1 and 5. By the end of Wednesday night, with the Dodgers being handed gift after gift to rally from a five-run deficit to win the clincher, 7-6, you could have convinced me the Emmy for best comedy of the fall season should go to the Yankees’ defense — on Fox.They played perhaps the worst fielding inning in World Series history in the fifth of Game 5, allo...