I don’t know exactly what it is we just watched. From almost the very first pitch, Game 5 was unrelenting, and it didn’t let up for five hours and seventeen minutes. Even now, I’m afraid it might not be finished — if I turn the feed back on, the Astros and Dodgers might be in the 81st inning. It doesn’t feel right that the game is completed. It also very much needed to end, because it was becoming a matter of survival. I don’t mean that as a figure of speech.

I’m still not entirely sure that was a good baseball game, in one sense of the word. It was driven by homers, some of them silly, and I wouldn’t call the pitching quite sharp. Each of the bullpens was an absolute nightmare, after the starters threw a combined 8.1 innings, and the overall aesthetics left something to be desired. It wasn’t a game marked by its crispness. The only thing that stopped it from being the longest-ever nine-inning baseball game is that it had to progress to the tenth. The allotted nine innings weren’t enough. They should’ve been enough.

But they weren’t enough, and for that reason, and for so many others, that was a good baseball game, in the other and more obvious sense of the word. Every baseball game asks two things: that you play, and that you play to the end. Every game has a winner, and every game has a loser, and as with any such competition, the drama’s a product of probability swings. Game 5 had more than almost any other World Series game on record. On several occasions, it seemed like it was over. The winning run scored on the game’s final pitch, which was pitch number 417. Hopes were dashed, over and over and over again, as the World Series went completely off-script. That was a contest that spiraled out of control.

As with Game 2, it’s an impossible assignment to do the game justice through writing. We are mostly just fortunate that this series has been so evenly matched. But Alex Bregman won it with two outs in the bottom of the tenth. Here are the times the game seemed over before that.

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In the top of the fifth inning of Saturday’s Game 4, Cody Bellinger faced Charlie Morton and struck out. This was nothing too terribly weird — for a good long while, Morton was dominant, and the Dodgers could hardly muster a threat. Bellinger was just another hitter put away. Yet the strikeout meant Bellinger was 0-for-13 in the World Series, with eight whiffs. It’s true that, in circumstances like these, people can make far too much of small-sample underperformance. It’s also true that, in circumstances like these, players can get into their own heads. Bellinger has never played under any greater pressure. It almost wouldn’t be possible.

In the top of the seventh inning, Bellinger drilled a one-out double, and he scored the tying run on Logan Forsythe’s two-out single. Later, in the top of the ninth inning, Bellinger drilled a tie-breaking double, scoring Corey Seager with nobody out. The inning got only larger from there, and the Dodgers knotted the series. If Bellinger didn’t have the team’s two biggest hits, he had two of the top three or four.

But let’s quickly go back to the strikeout. The count was 1-and-2, and Morton came after Bellinger with an inside breaking ball. Bellinger attempted a mighty swing.

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The stat wars are over, and the bodies are buried. Some teams still run more numbers than others, and not every organization has made the same analytical investment, but by and large, the baseball industry has embraced the analytical revolution. We don’t need to go into this. I don’t want to go into this. Baseball has leaned so hard into the numbers that, if anything, it’s created an accidental problem of homogeneous thought. Intellectual diversity might currently be at a relative low. Did you hear about the new GM? He’s just like every other GM. That’s a stupid joke that doesn’t refer to anyone, but it could also refer to almost everyone. This entire paragraph is old hat by now.

Every baseball team has numbers coming out of its ears. Every baseball team has employees with ideas of how the team could be better. The new separator is buy-in. Let’s say you’ve got a player. Let’s say the team thinks it could help the player improve. Will the player be responsive? Does the player trust the people delivering the message? We’ve entered an era of middlemen, of organizations concentrating on finding or developing better communicators. Everyone has the data. The best teams get the players to listen.

At the end of July, right up against the deadline, the Dodgers traded for Yu Darvish. The Dodgers had ideas. Yu Darvish listened.

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The simplest, fundamental truth about closers is that none of them are perfect. Mariano Rivera, Trevor Hoffman, Lee Smith, Craig Kimbrel — they all blow saves, and they all take losses. Give them enough time and the bad outings will even pile up. It was Rivera who took the loss in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series. Maybe the best playoff pitcher in history took one of the most devastating losses in memory. Baseball perfection is on a relative scale. All that baseball actually guarantees is that somewhere, somehow, sometime, it’ll piss everyone off. No one is safe from the baseball menace.

No closers are perfect. No closer ever has been perfect, and no closer ever will be perfect. But there’s another fundamental truth about the position. By public perception, closers are binary, black and white. There are the closers — the overwhelming majority of them included — who’ll just never earn trust. The closers who make fans roll their eyes and say “here we go again” when they come in and throw their first ball. Fans have no patience with closers. There’s little tolerance for hittability or wildness. In that sense, it can be a terrible job. There’s limited praise, and limitless blame.

Then there’s the lucky few. It’s a rare breed, but there are closers who’re considered automatic. Closers you don’t even feel you have to watch that intently, because success is a foregone conclusion. Why closely watch a baseball game that’s already over? These closers have all blown saves, each and every one of them, but they retain the perception of invulnerability. Maybe it’s more of an illusion, but one can’t deny its existence.

Kenley Jansen is one of those invulnerable closers. In the same way that Rivera was one of those invulnerable closers, Jansen comes in and basically throws one pitch, and after five or ten or fifteen of them, he gets to go change his clothes. Kenley Jansen is effectively bulletproof. Wednesday night, Kenley Jansen blew a save.

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Being expressive is half of Yasiel Puig’s whole thing. The Dodgers would love for him to be great, and the fans would love for him to be great, but if Yasiel Puig were great, he’d be just another great baseball player. That is, if he were great and great only. But there’s more to him, for better and for worse. Puig’s own expressiveness might be linked to personality traits that make him, shall we say, draining company, but fans don’t have to be around Puig for hours on end, every day of the week. They just get to watch him entertain. Puig is a highly-skilled professional entertainer.

He goes about his business with uncommon flair, eschewing baseball’s standard and pervasive stoic self-seriousness. It’s not that Puig is in any way lacking for intensity; it just has a different way of bubbling to the surface. Over these past few weeks, we’ve grown acquainted with Yasiel Puig’s tongue. Sometimes it’s hanging out of his mouth, and sometimes it’s licking the end of the barrel. Puig is also notorious for his bat flips, regardless of whether the ball’s leaving the yard. Puig has his own style of playing defense. He has his own style of running the bases. You know, in short, when it’s Puig that you’re watching even if you can’t see the name on his jersey.

Puig has even brought his own flavor to patience. You might not think there’s such a thing as taking a pitch in a particularly expressive way. Puig would disagree with you, and there’s a mountain of evidence from just these playoffs alone. Puig has shown some demonstrative takes for years, but this month, he’s reached a new level, as he’s been more patient than ever. Puig has one of the lower swing rates in the playoffs. He has one of the higher rates of pitches per plate appearance in the playoffs. Though he went 0-for-3 last night, he worked two counts to 2-and-0, and the other to 3-and-0. Puig has swung at the first pitch just three times in his last 54 opportunities since re-joining the Dodgers lineup in late September. One of those was a check-swing foul where the bat met the ball by accident.

This might be a bit of a slog. You’re welcome to leave at any time. But, I watched every pitch that Puig has seen this year in the playoffs. I’ve identified 16 different forms of demonstrative takes. This ignores the regular, boring, featureless take. There have been some of those. There have been many of the others. Watch as Yasiel Puig makes a show of doing nothing.

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People have spent a lot of time defending playoff Clayton Kershaw. This has taken place because other people have spent a lot of time attacking playoff Clayton Kershaw. To the defenders, Kershaw is anything but unclutch. He’s been a victim, a victim of randomness and a victim of sample size. To the attackers, Kershaw hasn’t shown up. Not often enough, not like normal, regular-season Clayton Kershaw. There’s that fact of the 4.40 playoff ERA. That’s where Kershaw was for his career when he woke up Tuesday morning. It’s a number that one could dismiss, but it’s not a number that one could deny. When Kershaw had pitched, there were too many runs. Forget about any weaknesses or character flaws. The argument against playoff Kershaw was simple. The stats were right there.

The Dodgers would tell you that Kershaw was redeemed in the 2016 NLDS. That’s when he came out of the bullpen on one day of rest to close out the Nationals. Kershaw himself wasn’t satisfied. There’s only one way for Kershaw to be satisfied — he needs to win the World Series. He’s internalized all the playoff runs he’s allowed. He’s tired of the frustration, and he’s tired of the defeats. There’s one thing to be done to put it all to rest. Win it all, and it’s all taken care of. The history could finally be buried and dead.

Kershaw hasn’t erased the history just yet. Not for himself. The World Series wasn’t decided by Tuesday’s Game 1. But in the biggest game Kershaw’s ever thrown, nearly every pitch was sharp, and the Astros could come up with no answer. Kershaw drove the critics backward, forcing them to wonder if maybe he’s no pumpkin after all. Kershaw struck out 11 Astros hitters. He became the first pitcher to do so all season long, and he needed only 83 pitches. In 11 previous playoff games, the Astros had struck out against the opposing starter just 35 times combined. Kershaw rendered the league-leading lineup helpless, yielding three hits and a run, without a single walk. Kershaw was Kershaw, on October 24.

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Jose Altuve is short. Relative to the standard major-league baseball player, Jose Altuve is a little man. You’ve heard about this. Very recently, you’ve heard about this! Jose Altuve is short. Aaron Judge is gigantic. The two just went head-to-head in the ALCS, and they’ll do it again a few weeks from now, when MVP voting results are released. Altuve was already an anomaly, by just getting to the majors in the first place. Then he became one of the most valuable players in the sport. Trod ground, yet fertile. It remains a challenging thing to fully appreciate.

Let’s talk about that shortness. What does it mean? Now that Altuve’s in the majors. Forget about scouting biases, or how hard it was for Altuve to get noticed. That’s all behind him. He’s clearly more than proven himself. He’s amazing! How, though, is his game different from the usual one? Every so often there might be a ground ball or liner that’s just out of Altuve’s reach. So it goes. But there’s also an effect on his hitting. Two effects, I suppose, one of which is obvious, and the other one less so.

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This should be a great World Series in large part because it’s so hard to separate the two pennant winners. The Dodgers won 104 games, but the Astros won 101. The Astros outscored their opponents by 196 runs, but the Dodgers outscored theirs by 190. The Dodgers have the possible advantage of rest, but the Astros have the possible advantage of momentum. The Astros got a midseason bump from adding Justin Verlander, but the Dodgers got a midseason bump from adding Yu Darvish. Say, the Astros might have found something by using Lance McCullers out of the bullpen. But the Dodgers have also found something by doing the same with Kenta Maeda.

When I rated all the playoff teams three weeks ago, I found the Dodgers looked the best, but the Astros were right on their heels. There’s just not much of a gap, no matter where you look. As such, I don’t think one could pick a clear favorite. Maybe you give the edge to the Dodgers, just because they could play one extra game at home. Or maybe you give the edge to the Dodgers, just because they could get the better strike zone. That’s one of the only real differences here. Technically, such a difference shouldn’t even exist, but we know that zones aren’t perfectly called or consistent, and the Dodgers have a history.

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