Luke Weaver Shuts Down Dodgers in Game 4 to Continue Improbable Rise

The Yankees’ 31-year-old closer seemed to be nearing the end of his MLB career last year. A change he kept secret from the team over the offseason turned him into an elite reliever.

Weaver has a 1.93 ERA with 15 strikeouts and one walk in 14 postseason innings. / Wendell Cruz-Imagn Images

New York Yankees catcher Austin Wells called for 139 pitches from six pitchers Tuesday in World Series Game 4. Each one arrived like dishes off the menu of a restaurant to a food critic. Some turned out exactly as planned. Some were overcooked, some undercooked. I had something very specific in mind when asking Wells which offering was his favorite out of the 139.

“Fastball. Mookie,” Wells said with a big smile.

Bingo. The house speciality.

Before the Dodgers went into full-on punt formation, letting a World Series game—a possible World Series clinching game—get away like loose change through sofa cushions, Game 5 hung in the balance when Yankees manager Aaron Boone thrust his closer, Luke Weaver, into the game to face Mookie Betts as the tying run in the seventh inning.

What happened in that confrontation and what it means for Game 5 and whatever baseball is left in this series could spin the World Series in a very different direction. The Yankees would win Game 4 by the camouflage score of 11–4. But don’t kid yourself: the Weaver vs. Betts at-bat was enormous. And Weaver won it in a very big way.

“I came in today ready for a great game,” Weaver said. “I wanted to leave it all out on the field. It's the last game before they get to do some business. We don't want to lose. I want to be able to live with myself and put my head on the pillow that I gave it everything.”

New York led 6–4 when Boone summoned Weaver to face Betts with Tommy Edman on second base. The count stood at 2-and-2 after Weaver tried two fastballs and two cutters off the outside corner of the plate. Wells, the rookie catcher, noticed something in Betts’s body language.

“He was doing this,” Wells said, mimicking how Betts, in taking two of those pitches, was leaning out over the plate with his head and torso.

“I know he’s trying to take the ball the other way, especially with the runner on second base,” Wells said.

Wells called for an elevated four-seam fastball on the inner lane. Many catchers prefer not to risk an inside pitch late in the game to a hitter who can tie the score with one swing. Wells bucked convention, not on a whim but on his observational powers. Weaver heard the call on his Pitchcom device and never doubted it.

“He's looking for the ball away, trying to shoot it that way,” Weaver said. “It's his strength. And he has an ability to put the bat on the ball. And a lot of times put some velo behind it.

“I’ve got to be convicted to the pitch. I mean, it's such an easy pitch to—I did it early in the at-bat—to kind of yank. You don't want to hit somebody, but you know, you've got to be in that lane. And the human element sometimes can play a role, especially in a big moment where you feel like you’ve got to be really relaxed and fluid.

“And the conviction has to be like, all or nothing going in there. I think there was such a calmness to give it a second shot, like, hey, we're not doing this again. It's all or nothing. I was able just to stay behind it. [Wells] had mentioned staying behind it—like always throwing right through him. Yep. And that's a huge cue for me when I'm really trying to establish those lanes on the plate.”

Weaver let loose with a 96.6 mph laser just above the top of the strike zone and in the inner lane he wanted. Betts took a massive cut and whiffed.

“It’s Mookie Betts,” Wells said. “He doesn’t swing through fastballs. But when Weave gets his fastball up there, it explodes. Nobody hits it.”

Betts’s hands are so fast that he is as likely to hit a home as he is to swing through a four-seam fastball. He had 23 of each all year. Betts had seen 774 four-seamers and struck out swinging on only seven of them. Basically, Betts is so hard to get a fastball past that he fans on a four-seamer roughly once every full moon.

“That was one that I just look back at,” Weaver said, “and I'm like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s sweet. That was nice.’”

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It was the third time Betts faced Weaver in the series. In Game 1, Betts dug out a low two-strike changeup for a sacrifice fly. In Game 3, Betts chased a 2–0 cutter and grounded into a double play.

“It’s a hard pitch to execute in general, just arm side up and in,” Weaver said of his Game 4 fastball. “I mean, I know what he's trying to do. He's a great hitter. He's trying to get out over the plate and drive it and do his thing. And he did a great job with the changeup in Game 1 to get that sac fly.

“And then yesterday I knew I had to find a way to get the ball to the right spot. And obviously, trying to get the double play, and obviously it worked out well. But tonight was just … you can't just be predictable.”

Betts reacts after striking out against Weaver in Game 4. / Brad Penner-Imagn Images

Weaver went back out for the eighth. He retired the insanely hot Freddie Freeman on a flyball. Nobody strikes out Freddie these days, not even Weaver. Freeman joined Lou Gehrig (1928) on Tuesday as the only players to hit four home runs in the World Series without striking out. 

But then Teoscar Hernandez and Max Muncy were no match for Weaver. Like Betts, they, too, struck out. So fully intending was Weaver to go back out for the ninth and finish off what would have been a seven-out save that he ran past Boone on the dugout steps without allowing his manager to speak to him. Yes, he blew off his manager so that Boone had no option but to leave him in.

“I'm trying to keep my cool,” Weaver said. “I mean, I'm trying to keep my calm and not overdo anything, but he looked at me as if he was going to ask me something and I just said, ‘Nope.’ I felt a little rude about it, but I think it’s a moment that I think we can move past because I was like, ‘Don't ever ask me that again.’”

I asked Weaver if pitching coach Matt Blake had to corral him.

“No, I went right to where I'm going to sit,” Weaver said. “I mean, I went right, so you knew where I was going to be.”

Boone and Blake read the body language. Weaver had no intention of going anywhere.

“Oh yeah, they got the message,” Weaver said. “I was like, ‘Yeah. That's awesome’—in a nice way. ‘I'm going back out.’ So, I wanted it. I wanted it all day. I thought about it all day.”

Weaver said from the moment he arrived at the ballpark he was prepared to go three innings in a game which the Yankees stared into the face of elimination. Thanks to the causal strategy of the Dodgers, it wasn’t necessary.

Los Angeles manager Dave Roberts was committed to staying away from every one of his six best relievers in a deficit situation. So, he took a 6–4 game and left it in the hands of the last man on his staff, Brent Honeywell. The Yankees battered Honeywell for five runs.  By leaving the game with Honeywell, Roberts caused these dominoes to fall:

• Boone pulled Weaver from the game, leaving him fresh for Game 5 rather than spent by getting seven outs.
• Judge blasted a hard RBI single off Honeywell, perhaps just the kind of slump-busting swing the Yankees have been seeking.
• Alex Verdugo (RBI grounder on a lengthy at-bat) and Juan Soto (ringing double) joined Judge in confidence-building at-bats to take into Game 5. 

Punt formation gave the Yankees a full-throttle Weaver (he threw only 21 pitches) and way more confidence up and down the lineup.

“In my head, it was three innings,” Weaver said, “but obviously, it's nice to not have to go through it. Yeah, that’s the best-case scenario. I mean, our offense came through. We knew they would, right? It was only a matter of time.

“But I’m ready to go three tomorrow if I have to. We'll sleep when we need to, but we'll recover and do those things, but we're good right now.”

Wells, left, and Weaver have proven to be a strong battery. / Brad Penner-Imagn Images

Until this year, Weaver, 31, had bounced among six organizations with a 27–42 record, a 5.14 ERA and no saves. Everything changed this winter for the journeyman.

“I always struggled with consistency of my leg kick,” he said. “I felt like the way I moved, the slope would always create this like reaction, and it would always create, more than anything, stress on my arm and just like bad feedback. And so, I always told myself if I could just throw flat footed, like you just wind up like you're playing shortstop …”

Last winter he set up a net at the end of his Florida driveway, marked off 60 feet 6 inches and plopped down a bucket of balls. First, he stood on one leg “and found the way you see where I flow with my leg over my other leg.”

“Then I threw and threw and threw.”

All winter it was just Weaver throwing into a net like this—with no leg kick.

“But what I noticed every time I threw was I felt a clean, efficient throw,” he said. “I felt like it looked different. I felt like it marked off every category I could look at for me personally as a pitcher. Movement, consistency, durability, recovery the next day. And I just said, you know what? What do I have to lose? Like I've done everything. I've tried everything.”

He didn’t tell Boone or Blake what he was up to. When he started throwing with his abbreviated delivery in spring training, they were shocked—and not too happy.

“I went into camp and I blindsided 'em and I did feel bad that I did that because I didn't communicate it,” Weaver said. “But I was so focused, and it never once crossed my mind like, I'm gonna tell somebody about this.

“Because every single day I was just in this bubble and my driveway throwing into a net and just immersed into what I was doing. And it was just … The level of confidence kept growing and growing and growing and the joy of feeling good and feeling like, ‘Oh man, I can throw this ball wherever I want.’

“And then from there it was about, ‘Hey, I don't have to worry about my arm when I wake up every day. I don't have to worry about, ‘Am I gonna have it today?’ and all those many things. And I look at it now, it’s the healthiest I've ever felt. I didn't have a problem the entire year.

“It's the hardest I've ever thrown. It's the most consistent I've been in the world. I mean, all the many things, right? We see it across the board. I’m sitting there and I’m going, ‘Holy smokes.’ This is how I envisioned my career, right? This is what we want out of our career. It came pretty late, but late's better than never.”

I reminded Weaver about another guy who became famous for pitching in the World Series with a no leg-kick delivery: Don Larsen. I asked Weaver if he got the historical reference.

“I don't,” he said. “I would love a few seconds.”

I told him about the perfect game Larsen threw in the 1956 World Series—for the Yankees against the Dodgers.

Weaver may not be perfect, but he’s close. Since getting his first save Sept. 4, Weaver is 4–0 with a 1.08 ERA over 25 innings. He is the Yankees’ best weapon. Anybody who can blow up Betts with a fastball is a piece you want on the game board when the season is on the line. The Dodgers and Betts had an opportunity to take him off the board for Game 5. They punted.

“This,” Weaver said about pitching in the World Series, “is beyond infinity, beyond anything you could think. Like, it’s Buzz Lightyear stuff. It’s been awesome. I mean, we're playing some tight games throughout the postseason, and that's high, high stress. But high opportunity, right? It's like everything you want.”

The journeyman who spent the winter throwing pitches into a net in his driveway sits behind ace Gerrit Cole as the Yankees’ best option to get the series back to Los Angeles. He is rested enough to get more than three outs again. Thanks to that eighth-inning explosion made possible by the Dodgers’ cooperation, the Yankees’ clubhouse was full of confidence after Game 4. You could feel it. You could see it. It was written in the team’s itinerary posted in large letters clubhouse monitors: “Win tomorrow. Fly Thursday.”