Former New York Yankees left-handed pitcher Nestor Cortes will live on in baseball infamy forever.

Cortes, now with the Milwaukee Brewers after an offseason trade, was on the mound in the bottom of the 10th inning of Game 1 of the 2024 World Series.

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With one out and two men on, Cortes was called upon to face the top of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ order.

He got Shohei Ohtani to fly out. Then, the team intentionally walked Mookie Betts.
With bases loaded and two outs, it was all up to Freddie Freeman.

I think you know what happened next.

Freeman’s walk-off grand slam in Game 1 of the World Series set the tone for the rest of it. He ended up hitting three more home runs over the next four games, and the Dodgers took care of business, winning in dominant four-games-to-one fashion.

Cortes feels like it should have gone much differently, though.

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In a conversation with The Athletic’s Tyler Kepner, Cortes said he felt as if the Yankees actually should have won the series, saying they were “the better team.”

“We had done enough to win that game,” Cortes said. “They can talk whatever they want to talk, but we win Game 1 — which we should have — we lost 2 and 3, we win Game 4 and we should have won Game 5. Then we go back to LA up 3 to 2.

“So people can say it slipped away from us, people can say we made a lot of mistakes, which we did. But at the end of the day, we were the better team. I see it that way, and I’m sure everybody in that clubhouse sees it that way. The reality (could have been) going back to LA leading 3-2. It didn’t happen that way and they deserve all the credit in the world, they won the World Series. At the moment, they showed they were the better team.”

The Yankees did dominate in Game 4 and had a 5-0 lead in Game 5. But at the end of the day, it was the Dodgers that always found ways to close out games.

Cortes and the Yankees can believe they were the better team. But no matter how they feel, it’s the Dodgers who will live on as the 2024 World Series champions.

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