It's still hard to believe that the fifth inning of Game 5 of the World Series actually happened. The Dodgers were looking to take the series. The Yankees? They were just looking to hang onto their lives and be the first team to force a Game 6 in the Fall Classic. Gerrit Cole was on the mound, the Dodgers were five runs behind. Hope for LA seemed to be waning, if it wasn't gone entirely.
And then Aaron Judge dropped a fly ball — and you know the rest.
It was a staggering display of incompetence on almost all fronts, and even though the Yankees took the lead back on a Giancarlo Stanton pop fly, the Dodgers responded with two of their own while the best of LA's bullpen (and Walker Buehler) shut down the scoring for New York after the sixth inning.
It was shocking for everyone except Yankees fans, apparently. During an appearance on Foul Territory, Max Muncy said that the "energy was in the stadium was very weird. It was almost like they were waiting for [...] the mess up to happen. As soon as it started happening, the energy got real weird, and we kinda just took that and ran with it. We knew we weren't gonna lose the game at that point."
Max Muncy rubs salt into Yankees' fans wounds with comments on "weird energy" at Yankee Stadium
In their postmortem from Yankee Stadium, the Jomboy crew — arguably the faces of Yankee fandom — even said, "No Yankee fan was surprised."
Dodgers fans have experienced their fair share of disappointment in their own team when it comes to their shortcomings with situational hitting and an inability to capitalize on momentum (just look at Game 3 of the NLDS against the Padres, when the Dodgers lineup rendered Teoscar Hernández's third inning grand slam useless by failing to score a single run afterwards), but this is especially brutal for Yankees fans. To know that your team could just completely bail out and hand a win away in an elimination game, to the point that the opposing team can tell that you're waiting for it to happen? Brutal.
The Yankees are probably trying to shake this off and get onto their offseason, but they're not going to hear the end of this for a long time; not even just from opposing fans, but their own.