NEW YORK – Only Derek Jeter has mastered the task. The five-time Yankees champion stood on the mound Monday before Game 3 of the World Series and fired a strike with his ceremonial first pitch.

A generation ago, before another Game 3 at another Yankee Stadium, Jeter had told George W. Bush to do the same thing. The President of the United States followed the Yankees’ shortstop’s advice, and the home team won three games in the Bronx after losing twice on the road.

Everyone knows how the 2001 World Series ended. But it was definitely a thriller, one of the best of the 120 editions of baseball’s premier event. This year started with the same promise – and now it’s almost over.

Be careful what you wish for, Major League Baseball, because you just might get it. The New York Yankees! The Los Angeles Dodgers! Aaron Richter! Shohei Ohtani! A World Series match that has been going on for 43 years! A walk-off grand slam in the opening game!

It’s not over until it’s… well, you know. But the Yankees haven’t led in this World Series since Nestor Cortes threw the thigh-high fastball to Freddie Freeman with the bases loaded on Friday night. The Dodgers held them to one hit until the ninth inning of Game 2 and shut them out until the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 3.

The final score of both games was 4-2, but they weren’t very close – especially on Monday. Freeman hit a two-run home run off Clarke Schmidt in the first, and the Yankees didn’t fight back until it was too late.

“When you play a series like that, you have to be able to keep going after the first game,” said Schmidt. “We took a hit there and couldn’t react yet.”

The word “yet” does a lot of work in this sentence. When a team takes a 3-0 lead in the World Series, there is an overwhelming sense of finality. The last nine teams to do it have done it in four – each time since 1970, when Baltimore dropped a game to Cincinnati before beating the Reds in Game 5.

Jim Palmer and the 1970 Baltimore Orioles were the last team to go three games without a win in the World Series and not defeat their opponent. It then defeated the Cincinnati Reds in five games. (AP photo)

No team that lost the first three games of a World Series has ever made it past Game 6, let alone won it.

“Hopefully we can tell this amazing story and shock the world,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “But right now it’s about getting a lead, winning a game and forcing another.”

In fact, it would be helpful to get a hint. But the Yankees didn’t score until the end on Monday, almost as an afterthought – What is that? A two-run, two-strike, two-out home run by Alex Verdugo? Maybe we have something here! Then Gleyber Torres failed on the ground, leaving Juan Soto to equalize.

For the Yankees, the game had a “Price Is Right” atmosphere from the moment Jeter left the mound. Schmidt threw the first real throws, four straight balls, to Shohei Ohtani, who walked onto the field for introductions with a device around his subluxated shoulder to keep warm. Why not force an uncomfortable club to swing? Schmidt tried it.

“No nerves,” he said. “It’s more like being so prepared and ready and excited to get out there. I just felt like I was a little too quick mechanically that inning. I didn’t try to avoid him. I tried to go straight at him.”

Walking Ohtani introduced two more future Hall of Famers. Schmidt retired Mookie Betts, but it took seven pitches. Then Freeman hit his daily home run. Perhaps these famous Yankee Stadium ghosts worked in a haunted house outside of town. They certainly didn’t scare the Dodgers.

“They announce our lineup and start chanting ‘Let’s go, Yankees’ – and honestly that kind of got the guys fired up,” said Dodgers reliever Daniel Hudson, who pitched for the 2019 Washington team that won all four World Cups -Series games won road.

“It’s like, ‘This is so much fun. We work on this all year long, from spring training in February all the way through Game 3 of the World Series.” And it’s absolutely 100 percent true that putting up a wrong number in the first inning represents a huge dynamic change. Freddie hit the home run and you could feel the crowd just saying “Pfffft.” You could feel the air coming out.”

The factor led by Hudson was very useful in helping the teams win. Of the nine World Series victories in the last 50 years, eight have come on the road. And in five of those eight cases, the team had a multi-run inning within the first three frames of Game 3:

1976 Cincinnati Reds: Scored 3 points at the top of 2nd place New York (AL)

1989 Oakland A’s: Scored 2 points first in San Francisco

1990 Reds: Scored 7 points in the top of 3rd place Oakland

2007 Boston Red Sox: Scored 6 points at the top of 3rd place Colorado

2012 San Francisco Giants: Scored 2 points at the top of 2nd place Detroit

It’s like coming to a birthday party, knocking on the door, dressing up the host and stealing all the presents. Schmidt opened the door.

“When you see a pitcher throw four balls early in the game, obviously that’s a good sign for us because we know he doesn’t really have a good feel for it today,” Dodgers shortstop Tommy Edman said. “As it was a cold, windy and dry game, it was understandable that it was difficult to pitch. But when we saw that, we just took advantage of it and made him throw strikes.”

Schmidt went with Edman to take the lead in the third round, but then missed the chance to take him out first. Edman missed with the next pitch, moved to second on a groundout by Ohtani and scored on another nifty strike by Betts, who fumbled Schmidt’s ninth pitch to right for a single.

Giancarlo Stanton of the Yankees is tagged out at the plate by Dodgers catcher Will Smith. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The Dodgers played so smart all night; On their next run, in the sixth, Gavin Lux singled to second after Jake Cousins ​​hit him with a pitch, then singled. In between, Betts made a sliding catch after a tricky liner to right by Jazz Chisholm Jr., holding Giancarlo Stanton to second. Stanton would try to score with a single goal from then on, but failed.

“The base that Tommy runs off tonight, the stolen base of Gavin that gets read by Mookie,” an admiring Freeman said later, “those are the things that win games in October.”

Pitching also wins in October, Freeman said, and while injuries have kept the Dodgers from forming a full rotation, their three starters have stifled the Yankees. They’ll try to close it out with a bullpen game on Tuesday, like they did in 2020 when seven pitchers beat Tampa Bay in Game 6.

Each team also used seven pitchers on Monday, although the Dodgers’ Walker Buehler remained dominant for at least five innings. For the most part, Boone and Dave Roberts chased matchups all night long—a smart strategy, perhaps, but not the best form of baseball.

In five different innings – the 3rd, 4th, 7th, 8th and 9th – Boone broke things up with a trip to the mound. They wanted to remind him that there is a minimum, not a maximum, of three batters for each pitcher. The relievers were mostly good, but that didn’t matter because the Yankees barely hit.

Anthony Volpe summed up their plight in the seventh. He nearly hit a home run down the right field line, but the ball bounced off the right field wall on the foul side of the line. As Volpe whiffed on the next pitch, he lost control of the bat, sending it spinning like a helicopter blade toward the Dodgers’ dugout.

Towards the end of the game it was so quiet that from the box you could clearly hear the clapping of one man – Betts, cheering his teammates on as they batted. The MLB’s dream World Series is getting boring, but at least the Dodgers like it. They just want it to end as quickly as possible.

(Top photo by Anthony Volpe: Robert Deutsch / Imagn Images)