ARLINGTON, Texas -- Clayton Kershaw, Cody Bellinger, Mookie Betts and the Los Angeles Dodgers left the Tampa Bay Rays stuck in neutral to start the World Series.
Kershaw dominated for six innings, Bellinger and Betts homered, and the Dodgers chased a wild Tyler Glasnow in the fifth inning for an 8-3 win Tuesday night in the first World Series held at a neutral site.
A crowd limited by the coronavirus pandemic to 11,388 at Globe Life Field, the new $1.2 billion home of the Texas Rangers, marked the smallest for baseball's top event in 111 years.
"It's hard not to think about winning. It's hard not to think about what that might be like," Kershaw said. "Constantly keep putting that in your brain: tomorrow, win tomorrow, win tomorrow, win tomorrow. You do that three more times, and you can think about it all you want."
The three-time Cy Young Award winner allowed 1 run and 2 hits, struck out 8 and walked 1. He induced 19 swings and misses among his 78 pitches -- more than his three previous World Series starts combined.
"You can appreciate and totally see why he's heading to the Hall of Fame one day whenever he's done," Rays Manager Kevin Cash said.
Kershaw threw nine balls in the first, when he stranded a pair of runners, then threw just nine more over the next three innings.
"He had a game plan to try to really quiet down things from there, and he executed," said Kevin Kiermeier, who ended Kershaw's streak of 13 retired in a row with a fifth-inning homer that cut the Rays' deficit to 2-1.
Bellinger, the 2019 NL MVP who began the opener with a career .114 batting average in 12 World Series games, put the Dodgers ahead in the fourth with a two-run home run off Glasnow. Bellinger, whose seventh-inning homer put the Dodgers ahead in Game 7 of the NL Championship Series on Sunday, raised an arm triumphantly while Glasnow turned and watched the ball sail out.
Betts added his first postseason home run for the Dodgers, a solo shot in the sixth off Josh Fleming. He had 2 hits, scored 2 runs and stole 2 bases in the four-run fifth, when Corey Seager swiped one as Los Angeles became the first team to steal three bases in a World Series inning since the 1912 New York Giants in Game 5 against Boston.
"Stolen bases are a thing for me. That's how I create runs and create havoc on the basepaths," Betts said.
After helping Boston beat the Dodgers in the 2018 World Series, Betts was traded to LA before this season. The former AL MVP showed off his defensive skills in the NLCS with three terrific catches.
After a regular season played without fans, MLB resumed selling tickets with a limited amount for the NLCS at Globe Life and kept that up by allowing about 28% of capacity to be filled at the 40,518 capacity ballpark, where the roof was open. The crowd was widely dispersed throughout and was the smallest for the World Series since 10,535 attended Game 6 between the Pirates and Tigers at Detroit's Bennett Park in 1909, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
An overwhelming majority of fans wore Dodger blue.
"They're everywhere. They always come out," Kershaw said. "And so for as much as we would have liked it to have been at Dodger Stadium and the 56,000 chanting, after everything that's gone on this season, to have ... 11,000 people in the stands and the big Dodger fans, this is pretty cool and definitely helps us for sure."
Glasnow was chased after 4 1/3 innings after allowing 3 hits, 6 runs, 6 walks and 8 strikeouts. He threw a career-high 112 pitches and became the first to walk six or more in a World Series game since Edwin Jackson of St. Louis in Game 4 of 2011. Glasnow went to three-ball counts on 12 of 23 batters.
Los Angeles expanded its lead to 4-1 in the fifth, when Cash left Glasnow in to face left-handed-hitting Max Muncy with runners at the corners. Muncy hit a one-hopper to first baseman Yandy Diaz with the infield in, and Betts beat a strong but slightly offline throw with a headfirst slide past catcher Mike Zunino.
Will Smith finished Glasnow with an RBI single, and Chris Taylor and pinch-hitter Kike Hernandez followed with run-scoring singles off Ryan Yarbrough for a 6-1 lead.
