From the first day of spring training to the last, there is nothing more common in every camp than the pitcher’s fielding workout.

Day after day. The routine. The monotony. And within all the different permutations of these drills, nothing more is practiced than the ground ball to first, the pitcher coming over to cover. It is designed to ensure that the most basic games are performed correctly.

So fittingly it executed these 2024 Yankees – perhaps the most technically flawed team to ever get this far.

In a slapstick fifth inning in which the Yankees played all of their biggest hits — or, more familiarly, errors — they still might have survived if Anthony Rizzo and Gerrit Cole had completed a Baseball 101 game. But in the biggest initial World Series blunder since perhaps the ball going past Billy Buckner, both committed errors of omission.

And with that, the Yankee season is over, capped off in a 7-6 World Series Game 5 loss that lifted the Dodgers to their eighth title and sent the Yankees to an offseason of regret.

“You look at what has haunted us all year and it could have been some plays that could have been made and weren’t made, or situations that we could have gotten out of and we didn’t,” Nestor Cortes said.

The Yankees lost the first game of the World Series and the last game of the 2024 MLB season because they are bad at baseball. In those two games they handed outs and 90 extra feet like the nicest Santa Claus in the world. They lacked not so much talent as technique – and that only cost them history.

Because there’s a stew of stubbornness, ruthlessness and pride in getting the routine right in baseball. The Yanks talked about embracing each other, but they never fully embraced the need to fix everything that was wrong with them. Instead, in a losing clubhouse, several Yankees talked about “mistakes” that doomed them as if they couldn’t be prevented by the team. Since mid-February. And actually longer than that.

After all, these Yankees are doing a wash and repeating the cycle of how they lose in the postseason during the Aaron Judge Era. Their fundamental problems are overcome against inferior AL Central opponents, but when October’s difficulty increases, the Yankees crumble.

The Yankees were 31-9 (.775) against the AL Central (including postseason) this year and 71-65 (.522) against everyone else. They have played seven rounds against the AL Central in the playoffs since 2017, including two to win the AL pennant this year, and have advanced through all seven. They’ve played eight rounds against everyone else and won just one, the 2018 one-game wild card against the A’s, who belong spiritually (if not geographically) in the AL Central.

They won one World Series game this year – Game 4, when the Dodgers didn’t throw one of their most important pitchers: the AL Central of strategies. The Yankees were to the Dodgers what the Guardians were to the Bombers in the ALCS: a team that came tantalizingly close to winning every game, yet was eliminated in five games against a superior opponent.

“It comes down to what it always comes down to: you have to limit mistakes,” Judge said. “You don’t give your opponent a chance to breathe.”

The Yankees nearly built an oxygen tent to revive the Dodgers as they played with both halves of their 2024 personality in the Finals.

They’re at their best when they’re hitting home runs and Judge is playing well — as Judge says, the Yankees do that so often. And Judge hit a two-run homer in the first inning, Jazz Chisholm followed with a stunner and Giancarlo Stanton led off the third with his team-record seventh postseason homer. Judge also made a brilliant defensive play, robbing Freddie Freeman of an RBI double with a backhanded catch just before hitting the left-center field wall in the fourth inning.

This allowed Gerrit Cole to maintain a no-hitter and the Yankees to maintain a 5-0 lead.

But as Judge says, so go the Yankees. He dropped a routine fly to center with one on and none out in the fifth. He said there was no reason for his first mistake this year. Anthony Volpe then spiked a ball that Chisholm couldn’t bring in to third base and the bases were loaded with no outs. However, Cole struckout Gavin Lux and Shohei Ohtani and delivered a squibbed grounder to first base.

Rizzo said he fell back because of the English on the ball, but by attacking him he could have made the play without help. Cole said he initially broke like he was trying to grab the grounder — which wasn’t really that close to him — and that set him on a bad path to covering first… and he just quit. Neither of them reached the bag. Betts did it. An inning-ending groundout became an RBI single instead.

Afterwards, Rizzo and Cole apologized to each other. Boone would say that perhaps Cole’s exhaustion during the inning limited his energy to reach the bag. The routine does not become routine. The Yankees are the Yankees of 2024.

And yet Cole could have limited it to one run. But World Series MVP Freddie Freeman hit a two-run single and Yankee killer Teoscar Hernandez hit a two-run double to tie the score. The volume and energy drained from a crowd of 49,263 who believed the Yankees were on the verge of making history and becoming the first of 25 teams to finish in third place in the World Series and force a Game 6 .

The Yankees would actually take a 6-5 lead in the sixth, but it was an inning in which they had three walks and no hits. They walked eight from the second through the eighth inning and that was the only one to score. They went 1-for-10 overall with runners in scoring position.

Luke Weaver was on the mound for two sacrifice flies in the eighth that put the Dodgers ahead – helped of course by another Yankee error, a catcher’s interference against Austin Wells.

Thus concluded the story of the 2024 Yankees – beneficiaries of a favorable draw, talented enough to reach the World Series, but once again not technically sound enough to beat a heavyweight opponent.