As the Yankees go down 3-0 in the World Series, the buzz is killed by silent bats

NEW YORK – They’re playing a baseball game between the lines, but they’re launching an assault on the senses between every pitch, every inning and every sustained pause in the action in this World Series.

Whether it’s celebrities calling for more noise from Ken Jeong in Los Angeles to Flavor Flav in the Bronx, or blaring sirens and pounding organs, Yankee Stadium and its Dodger counterpart turn the volume up to 11, ostensibly to turn on the masses to speak and fill in the gaps in the music. a game that can offer a lot of it.

But on Monday night, in Game 3 of the World Series, the Yankees’ continued futility inspired another, very different auditory sensation.

Silence.

After a fifteen-year wait, World Series baseball returned to Yankee Stadium, and 49,368 fans filed into the stadium eager for an exciting moment, the kind that commands an average price of nearly $2,000 on the resale market.

But the Yankees once again proved able to provide juice organically, reducing their expensive lineup to a series of clappers and failures — and now this World Series is about to end almost as quickly as it began.

They play Game 4 on Tuesday night, but after allowing just four hits and putting out 26 in a 4-2 loss and falling into a 3-0 Series hole, that potential coronation almost feels like a given for the Dodgers. .

The Dodgers are simply better than the Yankees, at least for now, and while there’s certainly plenty of anger to direct at presumptive AL MVP Aaron Judge — now 1 for 12 with seven strikeouts in this Series — the hand-wringing feels increasingly futile.

GAME 3: Dodgers one win away from the World Series championship

The Yankees scored seven runs in three games.

They are now hitting .186 (19 for 102) in this series, and in a postseason environment that is no longer friendly to starting pitchers, they have not challenged the Dodgers’ top weapons. In Game 3, it was Walker Buehler’s turn: he didn’t give up a hit until the fourth inning, struckout five in five innings and only needed 76 pitches.

After Jack Flaherty’s five-hit performance and Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s one-hit, 6 ⅓-inning gem in Game 2, the Yankees are 8 for 51 (.157) against the upstart Dodgers.

In Game 3, the atmosphere was grim and almost inevitably off.

A flat pregame set from Bronx native Fat Joe did little to appease the crowd. Minutes later, a Freddie Freeman rocket into the right field stands made it 2-0 before the Yankees could even get an at-bat.

In the seventh inning, a fan tried to get the crowd excited about an important pitch for Mookie Betts. There were few takers, and when reliever Tim Hill ripped the pitch for ball four, his expletive reverberated far into the upper reaches of the stadium.

Welcome back to the World Series?

“We haven’t been here in 15 years,” said first baseman Anthony Rizzo. “I understand the fans, it’s been a long time in the making. I also grew up a Yankee fan. The way we look at it is we’ve reached the World Series and we expect to win it and that’s still our expectation.

“But it is certainly not a hole we want to be in.”

The Yankees have dusted off the worn-out vows to compete that every team uses in a 3-0 hole. Manager Aaron Boone said: “Hopefully we can tell this great story and shock the world. But right now it’s about trying to get a lead, take a game and force another one and go from there.

“But we have to get one first.”

It was quickly clear that this wasn’t going to happen in Game 3, like a prize fight that was clearly over after one round, yet scheduled for nine. Freeman’s two-run homer brought an air of inevitability to the proceedings. Even when the Yankees put five runners on base in the sixth, seventh and eighth innings, it felt likely they would leave them all behind, and they did.

Still, the total score in this series is just 14-7, with Freeman’s walk-off Game 1 grand slam that stole away a Yankee victory, Game 2 solo homer and two-run Game 3 path accounting for half of the score of the Dodgers.

So close and yet so far?

“The first match was for us. They won it. They had a historic hit,” said Alex Verdugo, whose two-run home run with two outs in the ninth broke up the Dodgers’ shutout. “In the second game we got caught in one inning and we couldn’t bounce back. That’s the fault of the crime.

“If we don’t score, we put a lot of pressure on the pitchers to be perfect against a really good Dodgers lineup.”

Maybe a Dodgers bullpen game is an elixir. On the other hand, the Dodgers clinched the pennant with a bullpen game in NLCS Game 6, and their high-leverage relievers are relatively rested thanks to the performance of their starting pitchers.

With the help of the Yankees’ ineptitude, which caused a sleepy continuation of this long-awaited night. In the bottom half of the seventh, a loud Metallica guitar riff prompted the fans to stand up. It was 4-0, but Rizzo had just singled and Dodgers reliever Daniel Hudson made his first appearance in the series.

Unfortunately, pinch hitter Austin Wells – 1 for 10 this World Series, 4 for 42 this postseason – was staring at a 96 mph pitch for strike three.

The rally short-circuited. The trek to the exit had begun and large parts of the expensive seating area were deserted by the time Verdugo hit his home run.

Certainly quiet enough for fans’ frustration to be heard. Not that the Yankees are in a position to dwell on that.

“That’s all noise,” Judge says. “The fans are here to cheer us on and support us. But we have work to do. Everything beyond that is just noise.”

Or rather: silence.

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