Fight for Glory: 2024 World Series
April 15, 2025
STREAMING REVIEW:
Apple TV+;
Sports;
Not rated.
Two legendary franchises. Countless superstars. A matchup for the ages. And yet the story of the 2024 World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees will ultimately be defined by two iconic moments.
The first is Freddie Freeman’s walk-off grand slam in the 10th inning to win game one for the Dodgers.
The second, more of an extended sequence, really, is the bizarre top of the fifth inning in game five that erased a 5-0 Yankees lead and paved the way for the Dodgers to clinch the championship.
The tension and triumph is captured brilliantly by filmmaker R.J. Cutler in the three-part documentary Fight for Glory, a recap of the five-game series that takes viewers behind the scenes for additional insights into the key plays that decided the outcome.
Major League Baseball’s annual championship main event was ideal for the marketing fortunes of the league: a classic East Coast vs West Coast matchup that reignited a historical rivalry.
This marked the 12th time the Dodgers played the Yankees in the World Series, and the fifth time since moving from Brooklyn in 1958, but the first time since 1981.
And remarkably, the fact that Fight for Glory centers on those two teams wasn’t due to such historical considerations, but because these were the two teams that just happened to get through the tournament.
The particulars aside, the annual World Series film, and that’s basically what this is, just using an episodic format, almost always digs into some of the more personal stories of the players, mostly those of the winning team, with a goal of showing how much sacrifice and dedication it takes to win a championship.
In Fight for Glory, most of the personal stories come from the families of Dodgers players Freddie Freeman and Mookie Betts, with cameras checking in on them before, during and after the games. With the access and interviews the documentary team got, it really makes one wonder how much footage Cutler accumulated, particularly from the Yankees side of things if they had won.
Freeman’s story is especially heartfelt. Losing his mother to cancer as a child and bonding with his father over baseball, Freeman became one of the top players in the league. The 2024 season was especially rough for him, as he had to leave the team for an extended period to tend to his young son, Max, who had fallen gravely ill. In one clip, Freeman confesses that if his son’s condition didn’t improve, he would have sat out the rest of the season or longer.
Well, Max did improve. With his son on the road to recovery, Freeman returned, only to badly sprain his ankle in the final week of the regular season, limiting his effectiveness in the first few rounds of the postseason.
Which makes it some sort of karmic retribution on behalf of the baseball gods to put him at the plate in game one to hit that grand slam, his first of four homers in the five games en route to series MVP honors.
Each chapter of Fight for Glory runs about 50 minutes each. The first episode focuses just on game one, setting the stakes for the series. Episode two covers games two and three, both won by the Dodgers to put them up 3-0 and needing just one more win to secure the title, but at a cost. In game two, Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani, who became the first MLB player ever with at least 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in the same season, injured his shoulder, limiting his effectiveness at the plate.
Episode three summarizes games four and five. Game four was a blowout for the Yankees, taking advantage of a depleted Dodgers pitching staff that had to pick and choose when to use its best arms. That set the stage for a dramatic game five, as no World Series in which a team went up 3-0 had ever reached a game six.
That trend looked like it was on the verge of changing, with the Yankees taking an early lead and their ace, Gerrit Cole, on the mound. And with Yankee sluggers such as Aaron Judge starting to heat up, the Dodgers didn’t have much margin for error if the series dragged on.
And so the tide turned with that unforgettable top of the fifth inning. The sequence of events ended up generating so many memes that the phrase itself, “Top of the Fifth,” was appropriated for a line of merchandise celebrating the Dodgers’ win.
While a 4-1 series win might suggest some dominance by the Dodgers, the individual games were a lot closer than the final result might indicate. One or two plays going the other way could have led to the Yankees lifting the Commissioner’s Trophy, but luck for the most part just happened to break toward the Dodgers’ direction. Such is the nature of baseball, a game of euphoric highs and bitter lows that are often cruel enough to make fans want to swear off following the sport (at least until the next season begins).
So, obviously Dodgers fans will probably love Fight for Glory the most, while Yankees fans may not want to relive certain things. Thus, it’s a fair question how well it will play for people who aren’t specifically fans of those two teams, though casual viewers and baseball fans in general should enjoy it
While there’s not a lot to quibble with in the presentation, the documentary does play the theme from The Natural over the video of Freeman’s grand slam. It’s such an obvious choice for the musical direction that it’s surprising to see it from such an otherwise high-quality production. There were already enough YouTube videos doing the same thing.
On the other hand, Fight for Glory uses the perfect music for its end credits, a beautiful bit of nostalgia that anyone who grew up loving baseball in the 1980s will instantly recognize.
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