LOS ANGELES – About an hour after the closest thing to a perfect baseball game, Freddie Freeman stood near home at Dodger Stadium, where he just ended Game 1 of the World Series with an extra-inning grand slam, and tried to explain why that just happened. Over 10 innings and 3 hours, 27 minutes, the game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees morphed from a pitchers’ duel to a hit clinic and baserunning to strategic theater to become an indelible highlight among 120 years of the World Series. Baseball at its finest comes in many forms. This game somehow manages to cram everything into one.
The final score — Dodgers 6, Yankees 3 — didn’t scream classic. It is misleading. On Friday night, the 52,394 souls who were lucky enough to witness Game 1 in person saw a rare sporting event that so many people have only just discovered. The two most famous franchises in baseball, the original elite on the coast, are at war. And then with one swing, the first-pitch 93 mph fastball from Nestor Cortes, Freeman managed to deliver the first walk-off grand slam in the history of the World Series and limp around the base 36 years after the famous Kirk Gibson did the same.
“Look at this game,” Freeman said, and he started listing everything he had opened. Four innings of shutout baseball. The Dodgers manufactured a run on a sacrifice fly. Giancarlo Stanton countered with a two-run home run. The Dodgers are punching back with a run from Yankees closer Luke Weaver. The Yankees seemed to be going ahead on what appeared to be a Gleyber Torres home run, only to be interrupted when a Dodgers fan reached over the fence to snag, which was confirmed by replay. New York tagged Los Angeles’ best reliever, Blake Treinen, for a run in the 10th. And the tension from the bottom of the 10th: a walk and one infield to bring up Shohei Ohtani, who fouled out to the left advanced runners for second and third, opened the bases for Yankees manager Aaron Boone intentionally walked Mookie Betts, giving Freeman a matchup against Cortes, who had not thrown away since September 18.
“The back-and-forth moment — that’s what makes it a classic,” Freeman said. “And I think we made one tonight.”
Tens of millions of viewers, in the United States and Japan and around the world, knew he did. Baseball bigs can be loaded for good (Jazz Chisholm Jr. stole second and third before scoring in the 10th inning) as badly (he was able to do so because of Treinen’s slow delivery). It can include great defense (Dodgers shortstop Tommy Edman saves a run in knocking six by keeping a grounder in the infield) and unsightly (two of the Yankees’ wide outfielders double play into a triple).
“Some people think a slugfest is a good game,” Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy said. “Some people think a pitcher’s duel is a good game. I don’t know. I think if you just add a little bit of all the elements, it’s pretty fun.”
This game has a lot. Before the first pitch, there was already tension for the starters: Gerrit Cole and Jack Flaherty, two right-handers who grew up in Southern California. The Dodgers have tried hard to sign Cole when he was a free agent, and the Yankees tried to trade for Flaherty in July only to back down, and the two men, now playing against one-time suitors, spend the first round of one- each other’s ears.
Stanton’s sixth-inning home run and subsequent staredown – not to mention Flaherty’s forlorn face after realizing the mistake he had made – left the Dodgers trailing 2-1, and marked the beginning of scheming between Boone and Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who had left Flaherty for the third time through ordering and paying dearly. Boone returned to Weaver in the eighth after Ohtani doubled over the wall and advanced to third thanks to New York’s sloppy defense was strategically sound but failed to prevent the Dodgers from tying the score.
Two innings later, it could be Ohtani again or Betts or whoever, really, in the Dodgers’ scary top-to-bottom lineup. That is Freeman, 35-year-old first baseman, as exceptional denouement as imaginable.
“I was hoping Mookie would get a hit to take the pressure off him,” said Freeman’s father, Fred, to whom Freeman ran after the home run, interlocking his hands through the netting that surrounds the field. “Then they walked him. And I was like, ‘Oh, Freddie, Freddie, Freddie.’ And then drive first.”
Over the past month, watching Freeman has been painful. Not just because in the Dodgers’ first 11 playoff games they haven’t collected an extra-base hit. Freeman was clearly sick. his ankles are wobbly. His body hurts. He’s an eight-time All-Star, a future Hall of Famer, a World Series champion with Atlanta in 2021. He’s had a brutal year, with his 3-year-old son, Max, suffering from a war. Guillain-Barré syndrome. Freeman continues to play through the pain, hoping the five days since the NLCS will do his body good enough to do something memorable.
His first-inning triple, with him hobbling around the bases, showed he was primed for it. Little did anyone know that a better finale was yet to come.
“In my eyes, he’s a superhero, really, honestly and truly,” Dodgers reliever Anthony Banda said. “Seeing him go through an injury and seeing the rehab he’s put in, the time he’s come in and just trying to get back to health, get back on the field, do everything he can — that speaks volumes about him as a player. And as a person, he really cares about this organization.
That’s true for everyone on the field there, including the Yankees, who now have to recover from as knee-buckling a gut punch as they can throw. The good news is, there’s still plenty of baseball to be played, countless opportunities for the Yankees, and the standard set for the rest of the series has gone from lofty to stratospheric.
To suggest that any game, even if there are still many, can match Game 1 is not fair – unless this is a series where the course of magic throughout, where both teams are very good, so equal, so ready for the moment, so eager. to win, that hype is just an accelerant. Maybe Game 2 on Friday night continues where Game 1 is clearly posted.
“It’s the end,” Dodgers center fielder Kiké Hernández said. “I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that.”
That’s right, because Hernández forgot one thing. When it comes to the Dodgers and the Yankees, the 120th World Series, this is a battle of titans who have a bigger baseball in them, it’s just the beginning.