Freddie Freeman Forever

Thoughts on the greatest baseball game I've ever attended

(Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)

Hi friends-

I have four thousand things to say about last night’s game but almost no words to figure out how to say those things.

Last night felt like a dream. It felt like an exorcism. It felt so close to the Kirk Gibson game from 36 years ago that the script writers might have circled a little too close to the nose.

There have only been two World Series walk-off home runs in MLB history when a team was down to its final out. Gibson in Game 1 of 1988. Freddie Freeman in Game 1 last night. Both homers landed in the right field pavilion at Dodger Stadium. Both were hit by men on one leg.

I was six years old during the 1988 season, and had not yet been to a Dodger game. As I have shared with you guys, I took my six-year-old niece, Emmie, to the game last night. I talk to Emmie every day and would take her to anything. This was different. I took her last night because she started playing t-ball in the spring and loved it so much she asked to play t-ball again in the fall.

But there’s a bigger reason I was so desperate for her to go: I missed the Gibson homer in person and I didn’t want that for her. Of course, what I mean to say is that I missed seeing the Dodgers win the World Series in person, and they wouldn’t return to the Fall Classic for another 29 years. And the way the Dodgers have been crashing out of the playoffs lately, there was (and still is!) absolutely a scenario where they don’t win another championship for 29 more years (just ask Cubs or Red Sox or Guardians fans how that goes).

I didn’t want that for Emmie. So in some ways yesterday felt like I got to rub a lamp and a genie popped out and gave me a do-over to take a six-year-old me to see the Dodgers in the World Series.

I didn’t actually think that a Dodger would go full Gibson and hit a last ditch walk-off homer to win the game. I was just hoping Emmie would have fun and could tell her future niece that her auntie had taken her to the World Series.

Even before Freeman’s 10th inning heroics, the game was so more exciting than the NLCS. It felt like the two best teams were battling their two biggest dogs on the mound. We were expecting a slugfest but got a pitcher’s duel. It felt good and it felt right.

Gerrit Cole’s fastball didn’t have as much life as usual, but he still flummoxed the Dodgers and held them to one run through six innings. Jack Flaherty rebounded from a rough start in Game 5 of the NLCS to match Cole out for out. We were sitting as far as one could get from home plate in Dodger stadium, but it looked to me like Flaherty had the best curveball he’d had all season. My assessment was an understatement. He threw that knuckle curve 17 times and got 12 swings and misses on it. That’s a 70.6% (!!!) whiff rate, and the most whiffs he’s gotten on that pitch in a game in his whole career.

Of course, one of those curves that was not missed was the pitch Giancarlo Stanton hit to Mars to give the Yanks a 2-1 lead in the sixth. But let’s be clear here: Flaherty didn’t hang it. That pitch wasn’t a mistake at all. Stanton is one of the best home run hitters who ever lived and he’s on an absolute heater right now and there’s nothing to do in a situation where a guy hits a low curveball harder than any ball that’s ever been tracked in the World Series in the Statcast era (from 2015-to the present), except curse and tip your cap.

This is why we watch baseball. This is what an epic at-bat in an epic World Series game between two storied franchises should look like.

The whole game was laced with the underlying tension of uh, there are six future Hall of Famers taking swings, and yet each team is having to scratch out one run at a time with their fingernails. At any moment, through all ten innings, any player on either team could take one swing and give their team the lead.

It was awful.

It was glorious.

The Dodgers tied it up in the bottom of the 8th on an unearned run when Juan Soto misplayed a Shohei Ohtani double into a triple and Mookie Betts hit a sac fly to drive him in, but the problems for the Yankees began in the 7th.