The Dodgers Bullpen won the World Series like no other.

Daniel Hudson boarded the team bus to the stadium for a trip the veteran pitcher has made more than a thousand times in his decade and a half, from early April to late October. There was something about this that surprised him.

It was starting pitcher Walker Buehler, who was less than two days off the field. great start to win Game 3 of the World Series, insisting that he would be available in the bullpen that night to take it all in Game 5.

“As soon as he said that,” Hudson says, “I just thought: Walker pitching tonight“

He could not then imagine what it would take for such a situation to happen.

The bus ride to the stadium led to a game unlike any before. The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the New York Yankees 7–6. win the World Series. The final score correctly indicates an even game. It doesn’t even cover what it actually entailed.

It was the biggest comeback ever seen in the clinch. This entailed a shameless breakthrough of the Yankees’ defense. This included a fielding error, throwing error, catcher interference and blocking. A second return after the first was required. He saw Dodgers manager Dave Roberts empty his bullpen of his best relievers, using almost every option available to him, and finally called for a stunning pick to close him out: Buehler. This required phenomenal luck and extraordinary endurance.

Any ideas for words that would fully convey this experience?

“No,” Hudson laughs.

He watched the game from the most important place in the stadium. It was the Dodgers bullpen in left field. Up 3–0 in the series, Roberts essentially threw a bullpen day in Game 4, deciding not to use his best pitchers and instead let others make amends. (It was Hudson who allowed a grand slam in the third inning: “Yesterday’s game sucked, I sucked yesterday, it was brutal,” he says. “But I knew we were going to come back.”) The gambit was designed. , to ensure the six members of the Dodgers’ A’s are ready to dominate Game 5. But things didn’t go as planned.

It turned out that it would not be possible to distribute these spares. Los Angeles starter Jack Flaherty was taken out of the game in the second inning, giving up four runs while recording just four strikeouts. This was the worst case scenario for the Dodgers. The day after throwing a scheduled bullpen game, they were now looking at an unscheduled game where all of their top pitchers were in good shape and ready for…an early deficit. However, the manager did not hesitate.

With the score 4–0, in the middle of the second inning, Roberts began calling on some of his best relievers.

“We didn’t expect to go to the bullpen this early, but it happened,” said left-hander Anthony Banda, the first man out of the bullpen. “The mentality doesn’t change. We’re just trying to go out there, minimize the damage, produce a zero and pass it to the next guy.”

The Dodgers went from Banda to Ryan Brazier to Michael Kopech. The deficit has never been reduced. (Actually this is grew upThey soon found themselves in a decidedly undesirable position: they used four pitchers to get through four innings and lost 5–0, a ​​larger deficit than any other. team has ever returned from a decisive game. Their lineup failed to produce a single hit against Yankees ace Gerrit Cole.

However, they insist it was not a guaranteed loss. The group says it believed it could still win. “We just needed this opportunity,” Hudson says. He watched from the bullpen as they pulled out one, and another, and another.

The Yankees were suddenly faced with an unfathomable situation. parade of mistakes. Their fifth inning would have seemed too unrealistically grotesque to be called a nightmare. Aaron Judge dropped a regular ball. Anthony Volpe failed to make a clean throw to third. Anthony Rizzo put a grounder behind first base only to realize he had no one to throw to: Cole had not backed him up on the bag. New York failed again and again and again, Los Angeles capitalized, and by the end of the fifth inning the score was 5–5.

Every Dodgers run was unearned.

Roberts ran his bullpen as if his team were in the lead. He didn’t stop when it came to a draw. He pitched the fifth inning to Alex Vecia and the sixth to Brusdar Graterol. The manager went through the list of his most trusted guys, one at a time, asking each for an inning. But the math there was worrying. There were six pitchers on this list. Roberts sent five of them into the sixth inning. He was running out of men. And the situation looked even more dire when Graterol got into a jam and gave up a run in the sixth. With the Dodgers suddenly trailing 6–5, Roberts called up his last trusted pitcher, Blake Treinen.

After the sixth inning, the manager did something else. He allowed Buehler to go out to the bullpen to begin warming up. The right-hander was slated to start a potential Game 7. He has never worked as a replacement in any MLB scenario. However, with his team losing by a large margin, with no guarantee of opportunity, he prepared to close out Game 5. His manager swore he didn’t seriously discuss it when planning the game.

“I didn’t see him come into the game,” Roberts said. “Obviously as the game went on we needed to keep the game close. Our guys were struggling, so I just felt like I was going to go all in at that point.”

Buehler wanted the ball—he’d wanted it ever since he mentioned the idea on a bus ride—and Roberts had no other real options.

“As soon as Walker came into the bullpen, I thought: He’s going to do it“,” says Hudson. “It was the look in his eyes… As soon as he came out, I knew he was going to finish this game if we got the lead.”

But it will take a lot for everything to go right. The Dodgers will need to score at least two runs in the final three innings. They’ll need Treinen to put up the best performance of his life, with the veteran right-hander not recording more than six strikeouts in a game in more than six years. yearsbut they need him to score seven runs in Game 5 of the World Series, and of course they need it to be scoreless. And they’ll need Buehler to pitch in his first major league appearance after a rocky regular season in which he struggled to recover from surgery. They’ll need something like a small miracle, then another, and finally another.

They got them. Hudson watched from the bullpen as these little miracles lined up. He saw the Dodgers score two runs. He watched Treinen struggle through seven huge strikeouts. He saw Buehler record the first save of his career. And then he ran out of the bullpen as one of the last men left so they could all celebrate the end of the season together.

This was also the end of Hudson’s career. The pitcher decided he would retire after 2024: After 15 seasons in the major leagues, littered with debilitating injuries and grueling rehabs, the 37-year-old Hudson knew it had to be that way. He announced his retirement from the champagne-soaked Championship club. And he walked away with memories of a final game he couldn’t describe.