Nestor Cortes Unbelievably Claims Yankees Were Better Than The Dodgers

The 2024 World Series was not close. The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the New York Yankees in five games, including starting the series by going up three games to none. An injured Freddie Freeman hit a Grand Slam to win game one, dominated games two and three and came from behind down 5-0 in game five to win the series.

Nobody who watched the series unfold would say the Yankees were the better team. Except, apparently, for one of the pitchers who was integral in helping New York lose.

Nestor Cortes became an instant part of baseball history when he gave up the Grand Slam to Freeman. An iconic moment that demonstrated why the Dodgers depth of top-level talent made them so difficult to beat. Especially relative to the Yankees' comparatively thin lineup. Get Shohei Ohtani out, you still have to face Freddie Freeman afterward. 

Traded to the Milwaukee Brewers after the season, Cortes recently spoke to The Athletic about how the series played out, and somehow, remarkably, claimed in the interview that the series actually showed the Yankees 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."

If only the Yankees had played better and not lost all the games they lost, they'd have won. Incredible.

Los Angeles, CA - October 25:  Freddie Freeman (5) of the Los Angeles Dodgers hits a walk off grand slam in the tenth inning to defeat the New York Yankees 6-3 and win Game 1 of a World Series baseball game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on Friday, October 25, 2024. (Photo by Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)

Nestor Cortes, Yankees, Coping Extremely Hard With World Series Loss

Cortes' remarks raise one question: did he actually watch the World Series? 

There is no rational argument to be made that the Yankees were the better team. None. Does Cortes think that "should have won" games actually makes one team better than the other? That blowing leads is not part of what the "worse" team does? 

Even if you take Cortes' absurd version of events at face value, which you absolutely should not, the series still would have been three games to two. That's not the four required wins. So in his alternate history version of events, the Yankees would still have had to win another game at Dodger Stadium. Since we're engaging in hypotheticals, would New York have been the "better" team had they held a 3-2 series lead and lost two in a row?

But more importantly, this is not how baseball works. You don't get to say you were the better team because "we should have won." And it's a guarantee that Cortes is wrong about yet another part of his remarks: nobody in the Dodgers' dugout believes the Yankees were the better team. Because they weren't.

To further discredit Cortes more than he discredits himself, we can also look at the one Yankees win. In game four, the Dodgers jumped out to a 2-0 lead on yet another Freddie Freeman homer. Per Cortes, an early lead apparently means that the team with the lead "should have won." So his 3-2 claim is already wrong, because the Dodgers "should have won" game four.

Additionally, here were the pitchers Los Angeles used, which helped give the Yankees their one win of the series: 

• Ben Casparius
• Daniel Hudson
• Landon Knack
• Brent Honeywell

The Yankees scored 11 runs off those four pitchers, the worst on the Dodgers' staff, and 13 total runs the rest of the series combined. Four of those 13 came in the first inning and a third of game five against Jack Flaherty. Dodgers pitching, missing Tyler Glasnow, Clayton Kershaw, Gavin Stone and any number of other important contributors, dominated the series. 

And then, of course, there's the fact that Cortes himself gave up the grand slam to Freeman. Something he downplayed to focus on his second outing.

"Nobody remembers my second outing," Cortes said about game three. "But I dominated my second outing. Dominated Ohtani, struck him out. Dominated Freeman. Obviously, it didn’t matter at that moment, but I came back and did what I had to do, which was my job: get people out."

If only Cortes was given the respect he deserves for giving up a game-ending Grand Slam and succeeding in a lower-leverage situation. If only the games had played out differently, the Yankees would have won. But they didn't, because they weren't the better team. Nestor Cortes just can't stop coping about it.