The Los Angeles Dodgers won the 2024 World Series with a 7-6 victory over the New York Yankees in the Bronx on Wednesday, capping an impressive showing in the matchup between baseball’s two biggest and star-laden teams.

The 4-games-to-1 win in the best-of-seven series is the Dodgers franchise’s eighth World Series title, second in five years and first since the pandemic-affected 2020 season. had not won Major League Baseball’s Fall Classic since 1988 and before that 1981, when they defeated the Yankees.

The Dodgers did it in dramatic fashion tonight, coming back from a 5-0 deficit after three innings against a Yankees team whose bats finally woke up chasing Dodgers starter Jack Doherty. The Dodgers tied the game in the fifth with the help of three Yankees errors, then fell behind again 6-5 before a two-run eighth inning got the job done, with starter Walker Buehler closing the door on the Yankees with the save in the inning. ninth. New York was trying to win its 28th World Series.

Los Angeles won the series with contributions beyond star trio Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, all previous MVP winners (Ohtani is a shoo-in for this year’s NL MVP award, having hit 54 home runs and to have stolen 59 bases – becoming baseball’s first 50-50 player). Utility players like Tommy Edman, a trade-deadline pickup, and Kiké Hernandez provided key hits throughout the postseason, while a patchwork pitching staff without starters Clayton Kershaw or Tyler Glasnow kept the Yankees’ bats, including the MVP- to- of the AL. but Aaron Judge, Juan Soto and Giancarlo Stanton largely stayed at bay, especially with runners in scoring position.

Freeman, like Ohtani who battled through injury, picked up the World Series MVP award and scored two of the Dodgers’ runs tonight, giving him a World Series record 12 RBIs. He didn’t homer on Wednesday, but this year he did become the first player in history to homer in six consecutive World Series games dating back to his Atlanta Braves days; his Game 1 walk-off grand slam in this World Series seemed to deflate the Yankees for the next two games, a hole that proved too deep to climb out of.

The Yankees had avoided the first World Series sweep in 12 years with a must-win in Tuesday’s Game 4, when their bats came alive against the Dodgers’ all-reliever rotation to win 11-4. Those Dodger bullpen games had previously been successful in the playoffs against the San Diego Padres and then the New York Mets.

Judge singled in that Game 4 and then homered as part of a three-run first inning tonight, his first of a postseason in which he went 8-for-46 with 20 strikeouts.

A five-game World Series will certainly be a disappointment for Fox, which has seen ratings rise for the series featuring two of MLB’s most storied franchises in the country’s biggest media markets and was hoping for a tantalizing Game 7. The World Series through the first Four games averaged 14.9 million viewers across Fox’s streaming services, Fox Deportes and Fox Sports, the best numbers since 2017. Game 4, which required the Yankees to win, drew a whopping 16.7 million viewers.