Has anyone noticed that this year's World Series features the best regular-season team against the third-best regular-season team? It certainly beats hell out of last year's Series, when the eighth-best regular-season team had the pleasure of beating the 11th-best regular-season team.
Right away, then, the Yankees vs. the Dodgers has something going for it above and beyond the ultimate outcome. Above and beyond even ankle-challenged Freddie Freeman seeing and raising Kirk Gibson in Dodger and baseball lore when he walked it off with an ultimate grand slam — in the Game 1 bottom of the 10th.
Already the World Series has everything real baseball fans crave, from comedy to drama and back to the absurd. Even if both teams had to grind their way through a small pack of also-rans to get to where the Dodgers could overtake the Yankees, 6-3, to start their 11th World Series against each other.
"Never throw a slider to a cripple," lamented Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis (the Menace) Eckersley after the legless Gibson pinch-hit for Dodger reliever Alejandro Peña in Game 1 of the 1988 Series. After Friday night's 11th-hour dispatch, Yankee manager Aaron Boone might have been tempted to lament, "Never throw a first-pitch fastball to the near-cripple you preferred to face over Mookie Betts."
"When you're 5-years-old with your two older brothers and you're playing whiffle ball in the backyard," Freeman said postgame, "those are the scenarios you dream about — two outs, bases loaded in a World Series game. For it to actually happen, and get a home run and walk it off to give us a 1-0 lead, that's as good as it gets right there."
They plus the Yankees only had to go through the flotsam and jetsam to make this Series possible in the first place. The Dodgers had to get through the fifth-best Padres and then the 10th-best Mets to get here. The Yankees had to get through the 12th-best Royals and then the sixth-best Guardians to get here. Is that any way to treat the long season's champions?
Most of the cream rose to the top regardless of the current postseason system; the second-best regular-season team (the Phillies) got dispatched by the Mets early enough. (A 3-1 division series dispatch.) Forget the old and getting-tired cliché about short series and what the lessers can do with them.
Phrase it another way, if you dare: four division winners were also shoved to one side and sent home for the winter a lot earlier than they hoped to be sent. One was the season's second-best Phillies, of course. The other three: the season's fourth-best Brewers, sixth-best Guardians, and 11th-best Astros.
In a saner time and place, the Astros, the Braves, the Brewers, the Guards, the Mets, Orioles, the Padres, the Royals, and the Tigers would have been told, quote, "Thank you all for helping make the regular season one whale of a great run, but now it's time to say goodbye and wait till next year, because something's still bloody wrong with stirring up the thrills, chills, and spills of fighting to the last breath to finish . . . in second or third place."
That's just in divisional terms. Now put it in overall terms. There's something bloody worse with stirring up the thrills, chills, and spills of fighting to the last breath to finish anywhere from fourth to 13th place. Bloody worse about the Dodgers and the Yankees being rewarded for their regular-season efforts by being made to get through their far lessers first.
It's nothing but wonderful that there are going to be baseball stars in abundance for this Series. Betts vs. Juan Soto. Freeman vs. Giancarlo Stanton. Shohei Ohtani vs. Aaron Judge. Even Commissioner Pepperwinkle isn't unaware that there's history blowing in the wind here. "Joe DiMaggio and Jackie Robinson played against each other in a Yankee/Dodger World Series," he's told The Athletic. "So did Mickey Mantle and Sandy Koufax. This one is a continuation."
Well. If you're going that way, so did Yogi Berra and Don Newcombe. So did Whitey Ford and Duke Snider. So did Reggie Jackson and Tommy John. So did Don Mattingly and Fernando Valenzuela. The latter pair were part of the last Series between these two franchises, at the end of a season whose postseason experiment nobody predicted might seed today's mishmosh.
Dodgers starting pitcher Jack Flaherty and Yankee starter Gerrit Cole matched shutouts, mostly, until the bottom of the fifth, and a one-out triple (Kiké Hernandez) leading directly to a sacrifice fly down the right field line (Will Smith). Then Flaherty made the only bad mistake of an otherwise superb mound outing, with one on (Soto, leadoff single) and one out (Judge, swinging strikeout), feeding Stantion a 1-2 curve that landed in the lower zone region Stanton happens to love. It flew into the left field bleachers before Flaherty could finish thinking, "Oh, you-know-what!"
A 2-1 score wasn't really liable to remain static between these two. Sure enough, once the sides were into each other's bullpens, Soto misplayed Ohtani's eighth-inning double into allowing Ohtani to third, ending one Yankee reliever's (Tommy Kahnle) outing, and Betts whacked successor bull Luke Weaver's 1-2 changeup for a game-tying sacrifice fly.
The game went to the 10th and the Yankees managed to pry one out of Dodger reliever Blake Treinen by way of a one-out single (Jazz Chisholm, Jr.), a stolen base (Chisholm, second), a free pass (Anthony Rizzo), another theft (Chisholm stealing third), and a run-scoring force-out (Chisholm home, Rizzo out at second).
Every Yankee fan in the house who thought their heroes had it in the bag with a one-run lead for the bottom of the tenth got disabused soon enough. Jake Cousins might have gotten rid of inning opener Smith with a fly out to right, but then he walked Gavin Lux and surrendered an infield single to Tommy Edman.
Oops. Cousins gave way to Nestor Cortes, a Yankee who hadn't pitched since September. Lux and Edman took third and second on Ohtani's long foul fly out, with Alex Verdugo making what might have ended up the play of the night as he lunged for the ball, caught it, then rolled over the fence before his momentum ended, allowing Lux and Edman's advances.
Still. It put the Yankees an out away from winning it. That's when Boone decided he was in far safer hands putting the Mookie Monster aboard to load the pads and hope Cortes could get Freeman and his still-ailing ankle to whack a game-ending grounder or swing into a game-ending strikeout.
"I know everybody's focused on Ohtani, Ohtani, Ohtani," said Cortes postgame. "We get him out, but Freeman is also a really good hitter. I just couldn't get the job done today." Cortes threw Freeman a fastball toward the inside of the zone — exactly where Freeman was looking for the pitch, knowing Cortes's heater can ride like a horseman when thrown right.
The only place this one rode was into the right field bleachers.
Cortes threw the pitch he wanted to throw but, as he said postgame, didn't get it elevated enough in the zone to keep Freeman from detonating it. Among other things, it caused a lot of Yankee fans to wonder why Weaver, who'd been rested well enough, didn't get to work a second inning, or why sidearming left-hander Tim Hill wasn't even a topic against the left-handed swinger.
Freeman held his bat like the Statue of Liberty holding her torch straight up, until he was several steps up the first base line, then dropped it to take his trip around the pillows. Give us your tired, your not-so-poor, your not-so-huddled but standing-O Dodger Stadium mass yearning to breathe the World Series championship.
He became the fifth man in Series history to end a Game 1 with a home run, joining Gibson plus Adolis Garcia (Rangers, last year), Dusty Rhodes (1954 Giants), and Tommy (Ol' Reliable) Henrich (1949 Yankees). But he's the only man to end any World Series game with a slice of salami.
"When you get told you do something like that in this game that's been around a very long time — I love the history of this game, to be a part of it, it's special," Freeman added. "I've been playing this game a long time, and to come up in those moments, you dream about those moments. Even when you're 35 and been in the league for fifteen years, you want to be a part of those."
Even when you've had a season pockmarked by injuries (hand, ankle) and compromised by your alarm as your youngest child fights Guillain-Barré syndrome. That was then: Max Freeman's father admitting, "It just puts everything in perspective . . . I would gladly strike out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game 7 of the World Series 300 million times in a row than see that again."
This was now: Max Freeman on the way to a full recovery according to the family's doctors, and his father standing top of the heap for World Series Game 1 home run hitting. And just about everyone around baseball seemed to agree it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
You might care to note, too, that every one of those teams getting a Game 1-winning home run went on to win the Series in question. The '49 Yankees in seven; the '54 Giants in a four-game sweep; the '88 Dodgers in five; last year's Rangers in five. These Dodgers did their part to join them in Game 2, beating the Yankees 4-2, riding the best pitching outing of Dodger starter Yoshi Yamamoto's life (his only blemish: a solo homer by Juan Soto), and getting the runs on bombs from Teoscar Hernández and Freeman (back-to-back in the third), and National League Championship Series MVP Tommy Edman (leading off the second).
The only scare was Shohei Ohtani, having a fine postseason otherwise, appearing to jam his left shoulder on a hard slide trying to steal second during the Game 2 seventh. Call a partial subluxation, the Dodgers said since that Ohtani is well enough to be in the Game 3 lineup in New York. If he falters, the Dodgers have the depth to shuffle the lineup, maybe even toward keeping Freeman enough off his still-balky ankle to perform DH duty alone.
But no pressure, you understand.
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