NEW YORK — Only Derek Jeter aced the assignment. The five-time Yankees champion stood atop the mound before Game 3 of the World Series on Monday and fired a strike with his ceremonial first pitch.

A generation ago, before a different Game 3 at a different Yankee Stadium, Jeter had instructed George W. Bush to do the same thing. The President of the United States took the advice of the Yankees shortstop, and the home team went on to sweep three games in the Bronx after losing twice on the road.

Everybody knows how that 2001 World Series ended. But it sure was a thriller, one of the best of the 120 editions of baseball’s premier event. This year’s began with the same promise – and now, just like that, it’s almost over.

Be careful what you wish for, Major League Baseball, because you just might get it. The New York Yankees! The Los Angeles Dodgers! Aaron Judge! Shohei Ohtani! A World Series matchup 43 years in the making! A walk-off grand slam in the opener!

It ain’t over until it’s… well, you know. But the Yankees haven’t led in this World Series since the moment Nestor Cortes threw that thigh-high fastball to Freddie Freeman with the bases loaded on Friday night. The Dodgers held them to one hit until the ninth inning of Game 2, and shut them out until the bottom of the ninth in Game 3.

The final score of both games was 4-2, but they haven’t felt very close – especially on Monday. Freeman drilled a two-run homer off Clarke Schmidt in the top of the first, and the Yankees never fought back until it was too late.

“When you play a series like this, you’ve got to be able to move on after the first game,” Schmidt said. “We took a punch there and we haven’t been able to respond yet.”

The word yet is doing a lot of work in that sentence. When a team takes a 3-0 lead in the World Series, there’s an overwhelming sense of finality. The last nine teams to do it all wrapped it up in four – every time since 1970, when Baltimore let Cincinnati have a game before dispatching the Reds in Game 5.

No team that lost the first three games of a World Series has ever stuck around for Game 6, let alone won it.

“Hopefully we can go be this amazing story and shock the world,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “But right now it’s about trying to get a lead, trying to grab a game and force another one.”

Indeed, getting a lead would be helpful. But the Yankees scored only at the end on Monday, almost incidentally – What’s that? A two-run, two-strike, two-out homer from Alex Verdugo? Maybe we have something here! Then Gleyber Torres grounded out, leaving Juan Soto on deck as the tying run.

For the Yankees, the game had a “Price Is Right” losing horn vibe from the moment Jeter left the mound. Schmidt threw the first real pitches, four straight balls, to Shohei Ohtani, who took the field for introductions with a contraption around his subluxed shoulder to keep it warm. Why not force an uncomfortable slugger to swing? Schmidt did try.

“Not nerves,” he said. “It’s more just like, you’re so geared up and you’re ready and excited to get out there, I just felt like I was a little too quick mechanically that inning. I wasn’t trying to avoid him. I was trying to go right at him.”

Walking Ohtani brought two more future Hall of Famers to the plate. Schmidt retired Mookie Betts, but it took seven pitches. Then Freeman smashed his daily home run. Maybe those famous Yankee Stadium ghosts were working a haunted house out of town. They sure didn’t spook the Dodgers.

“They’re announcing our lineup and they start chanting ‘Let’s go Yankees’ – and it kind of fired guys up, honestly,” said Dodgers reliever Daniel Hudson, who pitched for the 2019 Washington team that won all four World Series games on the road.

“It’s like, ‘This is freaking fun. This is what we work for the entire year, from spring training in February all the way through, because this is Game 3 of the World Series.’ And it is absolutely, 100 percent correct that if you can go out there and put up a crooked number in the first inning, it’s a huge momentum shift. Freddie hit that home run and you could feel the crowd just be like, ‘Pfffft.’ You could feel the air come out of it.”

The factor Hudson cited has been quite useful in helping teams sweep. Of those nine World Series sweeps in the last 50 years, eight winners clinched on the road. And in five of those eight instances, the team had a multi-run inning within the first three frames of Game 3:

1976 Cincinnati Reds: Scored 3 in top of the 2nd in New York (AL)

1989 Oakland A’s: Scored 2 in top of the 1st in San Francisco

1990 Reds: Scored 7 in top of the 3rd in Oakland

2007 Boston Red Sox: Scored 6 in top of the 3rd in Colorado

2012 San Francisco Giants: Scored 2 in top of the 2nd in Detroit

It’s like showing up to a birthday party, knocking on the door, decking the host and stealing all the presents. Schmidt opened the door.

“When you see a pitcher throw four balls to start the game, that’s a good sign for us, obviously, knowing that he doesn’t really have a good feel for it today,” Dodgers shortstop Tommy Edman said. “Being a cold game, windy and dry, it made sense that it was tough to pitch. But once we saw that, we just took advantage of it and made him throw strikes.”

Schmidt walked Edman to lead off the third, then missed a chance to pick him off first. Edman was off with the next pitch, advancing on a ground out to second by Ohtani and scoring on another canny at-bat by Betts, who blooped Schmidt’s ninth pitch to right for a single.

The Dodgers played smart like that all night; for their next run, in the sixth, Gavin Lux stole second right after Jake Cousins hit him with a pitch, then scored on a single. In between, Betts made a sliding catch on a tricky liner to right by Jazz Chisholm Jr., holding Giancarlo Stanton at second. Stanton would try, and fail, to score from there on a single.

“The base running from Tommy tonight, the stolen base by Gavin, that read by Mookie,” an admiring Freeman said later, “those are the things that win games in October.”

Pitching also wins in October, said Freeman, and while injuries have kept the Dodgers from forming a full rotation, their three starters have stifled the Yankees. They’ll try to close it on Tuesday with a bullpen game, as they did in 2020 when seven pitchers subdued Tampa Bay in Game 6.

Each team used seven pitchers on Monday, too, though the Dodgers’ Walker Buehler, at least, stayed for five dominant innings. Mostly, Boone and Dave Roberts chased matchups all night – smart strategy, perhaps, but not the best form of baseball.

In five different innings – the 3rd, 4th, 7th, 8th and 9th – Boone interrupted things with a trip to the mound. You wanted to remind him it’s a three-batter minimum, not maximum, for each pitcher. The relievers were mostly good, but it didn’t really matter because the Yankees hardly hit.

Anthony Volpe summed up their plight in the seventh. He nearly sliced a homer down the right field line, but the ball banged off the right field wall on the foul side of the line. When Volpe whiffed on the next pitch, he lost his grip on the bat, sending it whirling like a helicopter blade to the Dodger dugout.

Late in the game, it was so quiet that, from the loge level, you could clearly hear the sound of one man clapping – Betts, cheering on his teammates as they hit. MLB’s dream World Series is becoming a dud, but at least the Dodgers like it. They just want it to end as soon as possible.

(Top photo of Anthony Volpe: Robert Deutsch / Imagn Images)