Twenty-seven outs.
As blue-clad fans filed into sports bars and other entertainment venues throughout the Southland on Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 29 — or settled in front of their televisions — they knew that all that stood between their beloved Los Angles Dodgers and World Series glory is 27 outs.
The paramount question, though, is whether those 27 outs will come Tuesday or whether the Dodgers and their fans will have to wait until Wednesday or beyond.
Game 4 of the 2024 World Series between the Dodgers and the American League champion New York Yankees got underway shortly after 5 p.m. Tuesday, with L.A. boasting a commanding three games to none lead. One more win — 27 outs — and the Dodgers will be champions for the eighth time.
And the excitement around Southern California has reached a fever pitch.
At Legends, a sports bar in Long Beach, fans packed the joint – with some still spilling out onto Belmont Shore’s Second Street – hoping to get a glimpse of the game on the big screens.
“This is the best day of the year – this doesn’t happen all the time,” said Juan Carlos Jimenez, at Legends on Tuesday. “I really hope we win today, a 4 sweep. The way we’re playing right now I even think we can do it back to back.”
So-far unstoppable Dodgers star Freddie Freeman got the party started with a first-inning home run as the Blue Crew took a 2-0 lead.
Watch parties, sports bars and living rooms filled with roars in response.
The excitement around the Dodgers has been palpable throughout the region the past couple of weeks as the National League champions survived a fraught series against the division rival San Diego Pirates and then dispatched the New York Mets to win the pennant — and advance to the World Series.
With each step, the excitement has crescendoed. The misery of past world series failures have slowly melted away. Pessimism, a not uncommon feeling among longtime fans accustomed to heart back, faded into hope. That hope is at its acme.
All that’s left are 27 outs. And then, champagne bottles will pop. Beer will spray. Fireworks will light up the Los Angeles skyline. And thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands, or even more — will get ready for a parade. At last.
A parade to coronate the Dodgers has been a long time coming — about 36 years.
For more than a decade, the Dodgers have been a juggernaut. They’ve made the postseason the last 12 years, winning the National League West all but once during that span. And the season they fell short of the division title, in 2021, they still won a then-franchise record 106 games — a mark they broke a year later, when they won 111 games.
The Dodgers have also made the World Series four times during that span, including this year. But they only have one Commissioner’s Trophy to show for it. And that trophy never had much luster because of circumstances outside of the Dodgers control: They won the World Series in 2020, a year in which the COVID-19 pandemic shortened the regular season from a 162-game marathon to a 60-game sprint. Fans were absent from the stands for most of the postseason, though a smattering were allowed during the National League Championship Series and the World Series, both of which were played at a neutral site in Texas.
That ring elicited euphoria among fans, to be sure. But there was no parade, no chance for fans to shower the team with adoration and gratitude. And for many non-Dodgers fans, the championship carries an asterisk.
The last time the Dodgers won the World Series in a full season, meanwhile, was in 1988. That World Series, against the superior-on-paper Oakland Athletics, could soon be forever linked to this year’s, should the 2024 blue crew finish the job. During Game 1 of the 1988 Series, the underdog Dodgers were down 4-3 in the bottom of the ninth inning. There was one man on, two outs and future Hall of Fame closer Dennis Eckersley on the mound. Out of the tunnel and up the dugout steps emerged Kirk Gibson, the Dodgers’ hobbled MVP.
Despite having two bad legs, Gibson worked the count full. Then, on the eighth pitch of the at bat, Gibson swung at a backdoor slider — and sent the ball into the frenzied right field stands. The Dodgers won 5-4. And they would go on to brush aside the demoralized A’s in five games.
On Friday, this current Dodgers team also found themselves down a run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning.
They weren’t the underdogs this time, per se, with most experts predicting the battle of the MLB bluebloods would go seven games. But things were less than ideal.
They had the bases loaded, sure, but their last hope was also a hobbled hero: First baseman Freddie Freeman, who has been playing with a severely sprained ankle for the better part of a month. He stepped to the plate having only had one extra base hit all postseason — a triple earlier that night.
Freeman swung at the first pitch. It went high and far into the night, landing in almost the same spot as Gibson’s home run 36 years before. The crowed erupted, also like 36 years before. And television announcer Joe Davis, somehow keeping a level head amid the chaos, marked the moment by quoting the words the late, great Dodgers announcer Vin Scully used in describing Gibson’s walk-off blast: “She is … gone!”
And with that, the pessimism faded a bit more and the hope swelled.
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The Dodgers then beat the Yankees in Games 2 and 3, setting the stage for Tuesday night.
A lead and 27 outs is all that stands in the way of the Dodgers winning it all.
Yet, even though the Yankees have struggled offensively this series — and, at times, have looked dejected and demoralized — they are still the Bronx Bombers. They are still at home. And they will feel confident that they can win Game 4 on route to becoming the first World Series team to overcome a 3-0 deficit.
For Dodgers fans, that’s enough for some nervousness. Sure, the Dodgers won the last time the two teams met in the World Series, in 1981, the year of Fernando Valenzuela, who died days before the start of the 2024 World Series.
But most of the 11 previous meetings between these two iconic franchises have ended in Misery for the Dodgers. The Yankees beat them in back-to-back World Series in 1977 and ’78. The 1977 Series was the year Yankees legend Reggie Jackson — Mr. October himself — launched a record three home runs in one World Series game.
And in the 1940s and ’50s, when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn, the Dodgers’ inter-borrough rivals beat them in the World Series six times. The Dodgers won only once, in 1955, only to lose to the Yankees the following year — during which Brooklyn became victim to the only perfect game in World Series history.
So it’s not surprising that the Dodgers’ were mockingly called by their fans and others as “Dem Bums.”
And even for those Dodgers fans who weren’t alive for those past devasations, the highlights have been a staple of World Series television coverage for so long, it amounts to generational trauma.
But if the Dodgers can win one more game the L.A. faithul — fans at Legends, Cosm and other sports bars, as well as those in their living rooms across Southern California — will experience euphoria wash over them:
With 27 more outs, the Dodgers will be World Series champions again.
And Los Angeles will get a parade.
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