I think we can all agree we got cheated last night, and to be technical about it, it was still last night—at least on the West Coast where the nice people live—when Freddie Freeman hit the 609th pitch of Game 3 of the 2025 World Series into the darkness beyond center field. We stayed up as a nation through 399 minutes of magnificent, tortuous, agonizing, and weirdly theoretical baseball (except, of course, for you contemptible candypants weenies who "needed your sleep" or whatever other weak-tea excuse you used to justify your sloth), and we were this close to Los Angeles manager Dave Roberts having to make the most agonizing choice in managerial history.
Whether to bring in Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the pitcher who just threw a complete game 48 hours earlier, for the 19th inning that never happened. It would have been a dangerous, valorous, stupid, and entirely noble move made possible only because Yamamoto himself volunteered to do so. It was a total hero play by the only person who could have made it given the context. It would have been the event of not only this baseball season but this calendar year, even if he'd been battered.
Instead, Freeman ruined everything by attacking a thigh-high sinker from Brendon Little and sending it beyond the limits of dead center field, giving the Dodgers a 6-5 victory that will be remembered for years, or at least until we watch Roberts and Toronto manager John Schneider try to navigate the shards of their two pitching staffs in Game Four.
It was a game that legitimately had everything imaginable except an outfielder stealing a home run, and if Daulton Varsho could have jumped a little higher we would have had that, too, plus the Yamamoto Conundrum that would have kept us all warm and giggly through the long dreary winter ahead. It was the zenith of all known baseball because it offered everything imaginable while still depriving people who like to read their novels from back to front the joys of five extra Shohei Ohtani at-bats. It gave us brilliant throws in triplicate to strike down bold runners trying to break open a game that stayed sealed through the entire second half of this unscheduled doubleheader. It gave us bunts that worked only to have them foiled by the outs that rendered the strategy inert. It gave us managerial machinations that involved emptying both bullpens and telling tomorrow's grand plans to piss off because tomorrow is for suckers, only to have the absolute wreckage of Game Four prevented by Freeman's keen eye on Little's undifferentiated sinker-that-didn't.
It gave us, and we'll give you a moment here to lie to yourselves and imagine you knew who this was, Will Klein.
If anyone was responsible for this game going all night, it was Klein, a tall righthander who has pitched 22 total innings for three teams, whose only recognizable feature until last night was a badger that sleeps on his face while he pitches, and a high-powered and barely tamed fastball that always seemed to be headed straight for the backstop. He came in as the Dodgers' 10th pitcher, the last resort of last resorts after the nearly-as-anonymous Edgardo Henriquez powered through the scoreless 13th and 14th innings—and he mesmerized the Blue Jays for the last four innings, desperately navigating through 15 Blue Jay hitters then waiting for Freeman to become the game's glorious denouement. Klein is golden forever—not bad for someone who used to play for the A's.
Then again, if anyone was responsible for this game going all night, it was Ohtani, who reached base nine times, a preposterous five by intentional (and unintentional intentional) walks. The two homers he did hit way back yesterday afternoon were enough proof, if proof were needed, that Schneider would pitch to him only at gunpoint and would be right to do so. And for everyone who considers that cowardice, well, eat a heaping bowl of flying death. Baseball is a daily puzzle that requires multiple players to perform deeds in concert and in a palatable order to achieve the one thing everyone wants: to go home. Ohtani is, when he is on one of his benders, the highlight film that removes all strategic thought because he hits baseballs to Prague and throws them through catcher Will Smith's sternum. Ohtani is great fun and every bit as magnificent as he has been advertised since the moment he was paroled from Anaheim, but he would be at least a tiny bit less fun if the other team weren't allowed to occasionally make the Dodgers win games without his direct input. Sometimes a game's highlights are in the mere endurance of watching, hour after grinding hour. And but us no buts, children. If we wanted your opinion on this matter, consider this the opinion you've been assigned to have.
This game was about the relay throws that cut down Blue Jays runners who surely would have broken the game open during twilight hours, and it was about the pickoff and the infield throws that shorthopped the first basemen. It was about the 31 hits, 19 walks, and 29 strikeouts. It was about the walk that was a pickoff and the double play that wasn't because of a flappy shin guard. It was the 28 players who reached base without scoring from the eighth through the 17th innings before Freeman's heavenly jack, and it was about the many relievers from these two underwhelming bullpens who threw 10 1/2 scoreless innings between them before Little's disobedient pitch to Freeman cleared out Dodger Stadium on one of those rare nights when it wasn't already cleared out by the sixth.
It was all the things baseball is and can be when left to its own devices and performed by teams that blink rarely and never in an inopportune moment. The managers did nothing to make cheapjack second guessers turn purply and rage-fueled. It was damned near perfect, we tell you.
In fact, the one thing this game did not give us, the Yamamoto Moment, would have been almost too good. That would have been the crowning achievement of a perfect night of baseball—the second longest postseason game in minutes, and the most wonderful in developments. If not for the Fox promos that promised us entertainment vehicles designed to make us emigrate and Joe Davis' almost psychosexual attraction to fruit plates, we'd have had nothing to complain about at all. But at least we'll always have the hypothetical Yamamoto Conundrum—the most missed opportunity in our long history of missed opportunities.
