2024 World Series
The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the New York Yankees 4-1 in the 2024 World Series, with Freddie Freeman named MVP after a record 12 RBI and a Game 1 slam.
The Los Angeles Dodgers won the 2024 World Series, defeating the New York Yankees four games to one to claim the franchise’s first championship in a full 162-game season since 1988. First baseman Freddie Freeman was named World Series Most Valuable Player after a run that reset the record book: he homered in each of the first four games and drove in 12 runs, tying a single-Series mark that had stood since 1960. The matchup paired the sport’s two richest, most decorated franchises on the game’s largest stage for the first time since 1981, and it drew the biggest World Series television audience in seven years.
| Fast facts | |
|---|---|
| Champion | Los Angeles Dodgers |
| Runner-up | New York Yankees |
| Dates | October 25–30, 2024 |
| Venue(s) | Dodger Stadium (Los Angeles); Yankee Stadium (New York) |
| Series result | Dodgers 4, Yankees 1 |
| World Series MVP | Freddie Freeman |
| Total attendance | 253,104 across five games |
The setup
The Dodgers arrived as the team the sport had spent a year building toward. In December 2023 they signed two-way star Shohei Ohtani to a 10-year, $700 million contract, the largest in North American professional sports history, then added Japanese ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto through the posting system and traded for starter Tyler Glasnow. Ohtani rewarded them with the first 50-home-run, 50-stolen-base season in Major League history — 54 home runs and 59 steals — and won the National League MVP award. Los Angeles finished the regular season 98-64 under manager Dave Roberts, survived a five-game National League Division Series against the San Diego Padres, and beat the New York Mets in six games in the League Championship Series, where deadline pickup Tommy Edman was named MVP.
The Yankees were built around their own historic bat. Aaron Judge led the majors with 58 home runs and won the American League MVP, and an offseason trade brought in outfielder Juan Soto, who gave New York a second middle-of-the-order force. Cy Young winner Gerrit Cole anchored the rotation once healthy. Managed by Aaron Boone, the Yankees went 94-68, edged the Kansas City Royals three games to one in their Division Series, and dispatched the Cleveland Guardians in five to reach their first World Series since 2009. Giancarlo Stanton took American League Championship Series MVP honors.
How it happened
The Series turned on its first swing. In Game 1 at Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles trailed by a run with two outs in the bottom of the tenth before Freeman, with the bases loaded, drove the first pitch he saw from reliever Nestor Cortes over the wall for a walk-off grand slam — the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history — and a 6-3 win. Game 2 followed the same script without the drama, Yamamoto and the bullpen holding New York to a 4-2 defeat as Freeman homered again.
The teams moved to Yankee Stadium with the Dodgers up 2-0, and Los Angeles refused to let the building shift the mood. A 4-2 Game 3 win, keyed once more by a Freeman home run, pushed the Yankees to the brink at three games to none. Facing elimination in Game 4, New York finally broke through: rookie shortstop Anthony Volpe hit a grand slam and stole two bases in the same game, and the Yankees battered the Dodgers 11-4 to extend the Series.
Game 5 looked, for four innings, like the start of a comeback. The Yankees led 5-0 behind Cole before the fifth inning collapsed into one of the strangest sequences in Series history. A dropped fly ball by Judge and a throwing error by Volpe helped the Dodgers score five runs, all of them unearned, to tie the game. Los Angeles kept coming and won 7-6 to clinch, erasing the largest deficit ever overcome in a World Series-clinching game.
By the numbers
| Game | Date | Score | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oct. 25, 2024 | Dodgers 6, Yankees 3 (10 inn.) | Freeman walk-off grand slam |
| 2 | Oct. 26, 2024 | Dodgers 4, Yankees 2 | Freeman homers again; LA up 2-0 |
| 3 | Oct. 28, 2024 | Dodgers 4, Yankees 2 | LA takes 3-0 series lead in New York |
| 4 | Oct. 29, 2024 | Yankees 11, Dodgers 4 | Volpe grand slam; NY stays alive |
| 5 | Oct. 30, 2024 | Dodgers 7, Yankees 6 | LA erases 5-0 deficit to clinch |
Per Baseball-Reference, 2024 World Series.
The record
Per Wikipedia and Baseball-Reference, 2024 World Series.
Honors
- Los Angeles Dodgers — 2024 World Series champions
- Freddie Freeman — 2024 World Series MVP
- Tommy Edman — 2024 NLCS MVP
- Giancarlo Stanton — 2024 ALCS MVP
- Shohei Ohtani — 2024 NL MVP
- Aaron Judge — 2024 AL MVP
Per Wikipedia, 2024 World Series.
The arguments
The debate over the 2024 champions begins with how they were assembled. Critics framed the Dodgers as a payroll superteam — a roster fronted by Ohtani’s $700 million deal, Yamamoto’s nine-figure posting contract and a series of deadline trades — and argued that a franchise able to out-spend the field had bought a title as much as won it. Supporters counter that Los Angeles won a full-length season for the first time since 1988 while navigating a rotation gutted by injuries, and that spending guarantees nothing in October; the Dodgers had reached the postseason repeatedly in prior years without finishing the job.
A second argument centers on the Yankees rather than the Dodgers. New York’s Game 5 unraveled through defensive miscues by Judge and Volpe, and one camp holds that the Yankees handed the deciding game away as much as the Dodgers seized it. Others point out that Los Angeles led three games to none before that inning and had already outplayed New York at the plate and on the mound, making the fifth-inning collapse a symptom of the Series rather than its cause. Freeman’s opening grand slam sits at the heart of a related question — whether one swing can define a championship — given that he then homered in the next three games and finished with a record-tying 12 RBI.
Why it matters
The 2024 World Series delivered the marquee pairing baseball had wanted for a generation and a Dodgers coronation that validated the sport’s most aggressive team-building experiment, cementing Ohtani’s arrival on the game’s biggest stage and lifting Freeman into the small company of players whose single-Series performances are measured against the record book. It ended with the Dodgers as the sport’s defining franchise of the mid-2020s and the Yankees still chasing their first title since 2009 — a divide that framed both clubs’ seasons for years afterward.