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The Dodgers were the best team in baseball last season.
Right?
They had the best overall record during the regular season, then stormed through the postseason before defeating the New York Yankees in the World Series by a rather convincing margin of four games to one.
But there’s at least one person who isn’t convinced that the Dodgers were even the best team in that series. And he’s convinced that others aren’t convinced as well.
Perhaps not surprisingly, that person was a member of the 2024 Yankees. It’s Néstor Cortés, who pitched for New York in 2019 and 2021-2024 before being traded to the Milwaukee Brewers during the offseason.
Speaking from spring training about last year’s World Series, Cortés told the Athletic of the Yankees, “We were the better team.”
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Within the same quote, however, Cortés also said of the Dodgers, “At the moment, they showed they were the better team.”
Obviously, some context is needed.
Cortés was mainly a starting pitcher over the last four seasons but came out of the bullpen during the World Series after missing the previous rounds of the postseason because of an elbow injury. The left-hander will most likely be remembered in L.A. as the guy who gave up a walk-off grand slam to Freddie Freeman in the bottom of the 10th inning of Game 1, turning a 3-2 Yankees lead into a 6-3 Dodgers victory.
After a 4-2 L.A. win in Game 2, Cortés made his final appearance with New York in the fourth and fifth innings of Game 3, facing five hitters and allowing no runs and no hits with one strikeout.
New York lost the third game 4-2 but routed the Dodgers 11-4 in Game 4, then built an early 5-0 lead in Game 5. But the Yankees — in particular, their defense — fell apart in the fifth inning, allowing the Dodgers to tie the score on their way to a championship-clinching 7-6 win.
Former Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly, who did not play in the postseason because of an injury, stated in an interview days later that the series “was just a mismatch from the get-go” and that the Yankees might be considered the “eighth- or ninth-best playoff team” from last fall.
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All of which led to this assessment by Cortés months later:
“They can talk whatever they want to talk, but we win Game 1 — which we should have — we lost [Games] 2 and 3, we win Game 4 and we should have won Game 5. Then we go back to L.A. up three to two.
“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 L.A. leading 3-2.”
But, he added, “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.”
So the Dodgers were the better team at one particular moment — which just happened to be the World Series — but the Yankees actually were the superior team in the grand scheme of things?
Cortés might have a hard time convincing anyone in L.A. that’s the case.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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