Typically, Game 3 is a pretty crucial one in the World Series. One team will either go up 2-1 or 3-0. The three-game lead is nearly insurmountable. A 2-1 deficit isn’t impossible to overcome, but it’s so much worse than being up in that situation. Naturally, both the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays know this, so they treated Game 3 like an absolute must-win contest. And after a historic amount of time, one team walked away with a crucial series lead.
Dodgers win a historically long World Series contest
A normal baseball game is nine innings. Last night, for around six hours, the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays played 18 innings before LA walked it off. That’s two full games of baseball. Only once has a World Series game ever gone that long before, and it’s weirdly connected to this game.
It happened in Los Angeles in 2018, and it was also Game 3. The Dodgers faced the Boston Red Sox and walked off on a Max Muncy home run. Muncy is still on the team and played every inning last night. That game ended 3-2, and this one was 6-5, although every bit of scoring, save for the final run, occurred in the first seven innings.
Shohei Ohtani cranked a game-tying home run, his second of the game, to knot it at five runs in the seventh. From then on, the offenses went silent. This was partly due to Ohtani never even getting a chance to hit. The Blue Jays intentionally walked him in all but one at-bat in the remainder of the game. The only time they didn’t intentionally walk him was a four-pitch walk that never came close to registering strikes. It was an unintentional intentional walk, so to speak.
Blue Jays helped Ohtani
In doing so, the Blue Jays helped Ohtani to a historic stat line. He does that from time to time, but there have just been so few games like the one Ohtani had last night. Ohtani is just the second player to record four extra-base hits in a World Series game. He’s the fourth to reach base nine times in a game. Few players even get nine at-bats in any game, let alone making it every single time.
Per MLB, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said, “He’s the best player on the planet, and he was on the heels of a huge offensive night. And [Blue Jays manager John Schneider] smelled that and wasn’t going to let Shohei beat him at all.” Fittingly, or perhaps unfortunately for the Blue Jays, Ohtani is going to follow that up by starting on the mound today. He’ll try to have a great game from the other side and give the Dodgers a 3-1 series lead.
Freeman the Hero
But the hero of the night was Freddie Freeman, who made it two consecutive World Series with a walkoff home run. He walked off Game 1 last year against the New York Yankees in extras with a grand slam. Freeman is the only player to have two walkoff home runs in World Series history.
The teams had 19 combined pitchers, which was the most in a game in postseason history. There were 609 pitches thrown, almost 50 more than in any other playoff game since the turn of the century. One of those pitchers was Clayton Kershaw, who might’ve pitched for the final time. He’s retiring at the end of this series, and he came in in the 12th with the bases loaded and two outs.
After a full count and a couple of foul balls, Kershaw induced a weak ground ball from Nathan Lukes, and Tommy Edman’s glove flip recorded the out and kept the game tied so the Dodgers could eventually win it in the 18th.
