Against the best offense in baseball, the Yankees asked their bullpen for 15 outs.
Some drama and surely some exhaustion followed, but those 15 outs were recorded.
On a night the Los Angeles bullpen was dented, Tim Hill, Clay Holmes, Mark Leiter Jr., Luke Weaver and Tim Mayza were the Yankees’ biggest advantage in the 11-4, survival-turned-blowout in Game 4 in The Bronx on Tuesday.
The quintet combined to allow just one hit and one walk in five scoreless innings in which they struck out seven, finally taming a Dodgers offense that did damage against Luis Gil (four innings, four runs) Tuesday and plenty of Yankees pitchers in the first three games.
The relay race began with Hill, who inherited a runner on first base in the fifth and allowed a single to Shohei Ohtani — the last Dodgers hit of the game.
Hill pitched well enough to escape the jam, getting a pair of ground balls from Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, but his defense let him down.
Gleyber Torres fielded Freeman’s grounder and flipped too high to Anthony Volpe at second base, costing a split second that proved crucial when a would-be double play became a fielder’s choice that scored a run.
With Freeman on first, Holmes entered and needed just one pitch to retire Teoscar Hernandez.
He remained sharp through a 12-pitch sixth inning in which he punched out both Kiké Hernandez and Max Muncy, Holmes’ postseason ERA down to 2.31.
Leiter — who had begun warming up as early as the second inning — did his job in the seventh.
He struck out Will Smith and walked Tommy Edman, which brought up Ohtani as the tying run in a two-run game.
Ohtani swung through a nasty, full-count splitter, the kind of splitter that reminded why the Yankees traded for Leiter at the deadline.
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Weaver then replaced Leiter and blew heat past Betts to send the game into the eighth, when the Yankees closer breezed through Freeman, Teoscar Hernandez and Muncy.
Weaver appeared to be Aaron Boone’s choice for the ninth — which would have meant a seven-out appearance — but the Yankees’ offense exploded for five runs in the eighth, which made Mayza a rare October mop-up man (if a mop-up man could exist in a World Series game).
Mayza pitched a clean ninth, and the Yankees could exhale — and thank a unit that helped extend the World Series one more day.
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