The last time the lasting historical footprint of a World Series was left by the losing team was the night of Carlton Fisk's waved-in homer in Game 6 of the 1975 series. The one before that came when the Chicago White Sox tanked the series for the sake of gamblers in 1919. In both those series, the team that won, Cincinnati and Cincinnati respectively, have been rendered afterthoughts after the fact. Such is our addiction to narrative; nothing is ever truly new—not even Terry Rozier.
Now that the World Series is heading back to Toronto and the Blue Jays are closing in on the title nobody believed them capable of claiming, the Dodgers may be vying to join that list of overwhelming and historic losers. It was the Dodgers that won Game 3, or Games 3 and 3A, the 18-inning masterwork that ended with Freddie Freeman's homer just before midnight. That game gave us a lifetime of reminders about the joys of baseball; everything that has happened since has conspired to make it a quaint little curio.
For all the marvelous circumnavigations that game provided, it has done the Dodgers remarkably little good since. And after getting smothered by the spectacularly named Trey Yesavage—say it "yes-savage" and you will be correct twice—in Game 5, the biggest spenders in the game and the team with the biggest name in the sport, are staring down the possibility of losing to the plucky little Canadian upstarts, who rank a paltry fifth in total payroll. Shohei Ohtani may be the sun in the game's solar system, but Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has been the eight planets and the Kuiper Belt throughout the playoffs. More to the point, he has seemingly never made an out.
That's been the story. But Game 3? Or the second Game 3? In the grander scheme, it looks like both a hilarious inconvenience and a spectacular outlier—a series of bizarre happenings and almost-happenings marked mostly by the number of people who complained afterward that they didn't see the game because they had to go to bed, or couldn't wrest the remote from their children, or were watching Monday Night Football and so couldn't be bothered. Game 3 will deserve its legendary status, but it will be legendary in part because of how many people couldn't make it to the finish. But it is the great white elk in a series dominated by Canadian moose. The rest of the series, with the exception of Yamamoto's dominant Game 2, has been Toronto's plaything. Even if the Dodgers rally and win Games 6 and 7, it won't be because of the emanations and residual vibes that came from Game 3. It will be a series in which the road team won six times and Clayton Kershaw got to go out a winner through no fault of his own.
Other than the first seven innings of Game 3, the Dodgers are hitting .177 in this series. Remove Shohei Ohtani's production from the equation and that number is still .177. Their vaunted starting rotation has been downright Yesavaged, Yamamoto excepted, and their already iffy bullpen has been outperformed by Toronto's iffy bullpen, and that includes Will Klein's brush with greatness. An honest assessment of the series' potential MVP candidates starts not with Ohtani but with either Guerrero or, more improbably, Addison Barger. The Jays have just been better.
It's not over, of course, and Ohtani remains the game's pre-eminent cheat code. Good on him for that, too, because he has done the hardest thing in sports—captivate a reluctant audience without saying a single word. But in the more mundane matter of winning another ring, even Shohei Ohtani can only be two players. He was effectively removed from Game 3 as a hitter, albeit after going 4-for-4, because Toronto's manager John Schneider got tired of hitting himself in the face with a teakwood cutting board and chose the less embarrassing option of putting Ohtani on by way of five straight walks. Ohtani was then betrayed by the Dodger bullpen in Game 4. In a genuinely objective world, Ohtani should also have been walked intentionally in the seventh inning of Game 3, when he hit his second home run of that game, but hindsight is often just the view from one's hinder. If Schneider had walked Ohtani then, the series would have ended last night and we wouldn't have anything to remember save the Blue Jays being better when the moments demanded them.
This isn't about Ohtani, though. It's more about how money is less of an advantage when the other team has it too, and how games tend to sort themselves out by their own rules. Toronto dominated Games 1, 4, and 5, and has been on balance the better team by all the measurements save Best Cartoon Character In A Starring Role. If the Jays win on either Friday or Saturday, this will end up as the World Series in which Shohei Ohtani did everything everyone already knew he could, which is more than it seemed possible for any one player to do, and the Blue Jays won anyway. It would also remind casuals that Vlad really is one of the game's great players, but it might otherwise be a series little noted nor long remembered except on Yonge Street at 4 a.m., when the mounties come and start herding the drunks off toward their day jobs at the hedge fund. Game 3 may well become the story people end up telling about this series, even if it won't be the one that is most true.
