Bullpen’s unreal effort helps brings Yankees back to life in World Series

In an elimination game, Luis Gil served up a two-run homer in the first inning and a leadoff double in the second. The phone rang in the bullpen, Mark Leiter Jr. the first to step on the mound to warm up.

Leiter, his arm ready, did not actually jog into the game until the seventh inning. The Yankees did not require just near perfection from their bullpen, but flexibility, too.

The group came through brilliantly to keep the season alive.

On a night the underbelly of the Dodgers’ bullpen was dented, Tim Hill, Clay Holmes, Leiter, 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.

“It’s incredible to be a part of and watch,” Holmes, who recorded four outs without being touched, said of the bullpen’s effort. “These games, it’s going to take everybody.”

It took that quintet, which combined to allow one hit and one walk in five scoreless innings, to finally tame the Dodgers’ offense.

The best attack in baseball hit Gil (four innings, four runs) Tuesday and hit plenty of Yankees pitchers in the first three games but could not solve a Yankees relay race that began with Hill.

The lefty 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 a run scored when Gleyber Torres’ toss to Anthony Volpe was too high to complete a double play.

With Freeman on first, Holmes entered and needed one pitch to retire Teoscar Hernandez. He remained sharp through a 12-pitch sixth inning in which he punched out Kiké Hernandez and Max Muncy.

“That’s a good lineup. Not a lot of chase over there,” said Holmes, whose 2024 postseason ERA is 2.31. “It’s one of those things where you’ve got to attack in the zone, and you got to throw your best stuff.”

Leiter, five innings after getting ready in a hurry, replaced Holmes for the seventh.

“That’s a tough one. It really is,” Leiter said of a night in which he got warm and then had to stay warm. “I think that that’s a really hard thing to do in general … but I do believe that the playoffs presents a different aspect, where you are expecting that a little more, because every inning could be the leverage inning. Every moment could be the turning point.”

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He declined to allow the Dodgers’ lineup to find its turning point. 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.

Weaver replaced Leiter and blew heat past Mookie Betts to send the game into the eighth, where 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 final frame.

If Weaver, who last recorded seven outs on May 4, had to get through parts of three innings again, so be it.

“I said it in my head — ‘I said it in my head,’ I guess I thought — I came into today ready to throw three innings if need be,” the affable Weaver said. “I wanted to leave it all out on the line.”