If you’re a baseball fan — and presumably most people reading this are — Game 7 of the 2025 World Series was like the best buffet you’ve ever been to. There were no hotel pans full of lukewarm highlights sitting atop Sterno cans. This one had dramatic home runs, crazy defensive plays, a series of starting pitcher relief cameos, and even some questionable baserunning for flavor. Even Will Smith’s 11th-inning home run, which was the eventual difference, might have only been the fifth-most exciting moment in one of the best World Series games I’ve seen in my near half-century of existence.

We certainly started off with an entertaining matchup of starting pitchers. For the Dodgers, we got Shohei Ohtani, the player who has defined the 2020s. While Tyler Glasnow’s three-pitch save in Game 6 didn’t disqualify him — he appeared later in this game — Ohtani is tricky to use as a relief option since the Ohtani DH rule only works when he’s starting. On the other side, Max Scherzer got the start for the Blue Jays, and while the future Hall of Famer is nearing the end of his career and is no longer an ace, I wouldn’t dare get between Mad Max and a Game 7.

Ohtani started things off in the first with a liner to center, advancing to second on a Smith grounder after a terrific diving play by Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to prevent the Dodgers from getting two on with no one out. Ohtani then advanced to third on a Freddie Freeman fly out, but he was stranded after a Mookie Betts groundout to Andrés Giménez. Read the rest of this entry »

The Fall Classic has traveled near and far, but wherever they are, the Dodgers have relied heavily on Yoshinobu Yamamoto to lead the team to victory, and on Friday night he delivered once again. Following a three-game swing in Los Angeles, the World Series returned to Toronto for Game 6. And though back in their home and native land, the Blue Jays fell to the Dodgers 3-1, meaning Canada’s team will face L.A. in a decisive Game 7 on Saturday night.

The faster we’re fallin’, we’re stoppin’ and stallin’,
We’re runnin’ in circles again.
Just as things were lookin’ up, you said it wasn’t good enough,
But still, we’re tryin’ one more time.

Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman had the first seven batters he faced looking like they might be in over their heads. His splitter was working exactly as intended — presenting as a center-cut fastball, then diving in too deep for the hitter to make contact — and leading to a ton of swing-and-miss. As he worked deeper in the game, Gausman mixed in his slider more, which earned him some quick outs on weak contact. For the most part, he cruised through his six innings and 93 pitches. For the most part. Read the rest of this entry »

For the first time all season — indeed, the first time since Game 5 of last year’s Division Series against the Padres — the Dodgers are facing elimination. A win on Friday night in Toronto will continue their season, forcing Game 7 of the World Series, while a loss will end it, making the Blue Jays champions for the first time in 32 years. Since their 18-inning victory in Game 3 late Monday night local time (and Tuesday morning for much of the continental United States and Canada) on Freddie Freeman’s walk-off home run, the Dodgers have looked as though they’re sleepwalking. They were thoroughly outplayed by the Blue Jays in both Games 4 and 5, with rough performances by their starters, relievers, hitters, and fielders. For Game 6, Los Angeles will turn to Yoshinobu Yamamoto, hoping he can continue his tremendous October run and extend the season for one more night.

During the National League Championship Series, the Dodgers rotation absolutely dominated the Brewers, posting a 0.63 ERA and 1.88 FIP in 28 2/3 innings, but in the World Series it’s been a different story, as those starters have been touched for a 4.88 ERA and 4.55 FIP in 31 1/3 innings. To be fair, some of those runs are attributable to manager Dave Roberts’ trying to squeeze a few more outs from Blake Snell in Games 1 and 5 and Shohei Ohtani in Game 4 instead of handing clean innings over to an increasingly erratic bullpen. The damage from those attempts — both starters combined to record only two outs (both by Snell in Game 5) and bequeath seven baserunners, all of whom later scored, to three different relievers — blew those three games wide open. Yamamoto not only has produced the Dodgers’ only quality start of the series, but also the only relief from their relievers, as the 27-year-old righty spun a four-hit complete game on 105 pitches in Game 2, his second time going the distance in as many turns. If that wasn’t bad-ass enough, he warmed up in the top of the 18th inning of Game 3, ready to relieve Will Klein if needed.

As you’ve probably seen by now, Yamamoto’s three-hit complete game in Game 2 of the NLCS was the first by a postseason starter since the Astros’ Justin Verlander went the distance against the Yankees in Game 2 of the 2017 ALCS. Yamamoto is just the sixth starter with multiple complete games in a single postseason during the Wild Card era, and the first in 24 years to go back-to-back at least once. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the third article I’ve written about cleat cleaners. So far as I can tell, that’s three more articles than anybody else. As a result, I have spent the past two seasons completely in the tank for cleat cleaners. I’m incapable of turning on a game without assessing the situation on the mound. What color is the cleat cleaner? Can I tell which brand it is from the shape? Most importantly, how dirty is it? It’s rare to get a shot of a pitcher using the cleat cleaner, but you can still tell whether it’s being used. The evidence is right there in front of your eyes. The cleat cleaner will be filthy. The weird rubber mat that cleans cleats with cleats of its own is now staked as firmly in my heart as it is to the backslope of the pitcher’s mound.

That brings us to Monday night (and Tuesday morning). Game 3 of the World Series was a thrilling, exasperating showcase for baseball. More importantly for our purposes, it also gave the cleat cleaner a chance to shine – or to do whatever the opposite of shining is because you’re completely covered in mud – on the game’s biggest stage.

The cleat cleaner does not normally get much time in the limelight. Pitchers most often avail themselves of it right before the start of the inning. They throw their warm-up pitches, circle around to the back of the mound, take a few calming breaths, clean their spikes, then climb up to the summit and set themselves. If the broadcast has come back from commercial in time, this routine is rarely considered worth documenting. At any given time, only one shot can make it onto your television, and at least as far as directors are concerned, there’s almost always something more interesting to show than a man cleaning his shoes. Even when we do get a shot of the pitcher cleaning his cleats, we rarely see the actual cleat cleaner. The camera usually shows the pitcher from the waist up. In fact, we got one of those shots in the very first inning on Monday night. Here’s Max Scherzer using the cleat cleaner before he faces Shohei Ohtani to start the game.

Hmm. That wasn’t very satisfying, was it? As usual, you can’t see Scherzer’s feet at all. Rather than force you to take my word for it that he was using the cleat cleaner, I’ve recreated his lower half utilizing an innovative new CGI technology known as iPhone Video of Me Wearing Jeans and Baseball Cleats in My Bedroom.

Now you get it. From that shot alone, Game 3 was already a victory for all of us cleat cleaner fanatics. We actually got to see someone using the cleat cleaner during the World Series. But the cleat cleaner was just getting started. This was an 18-inning game that featured a staggering 609 total pitches. That’s not just the highest total of the season; it’s 137 pitches more than the game with the next-most pitches (Game 5 of the ALDS between the Tigers and Mariners). And each individual pitch wreaks havoc on the mound. For an example, we need look no further than the very first pitch of the game. Here’s Tyler Glasnow getting ready before he warms up for the first inning. He absolutely tears in to the mound.

The mound is made out of clay, and before every game, the grounds crew shapes and tamps it into smooth perfection, then covers it with a layer of soil conditioner. Some pitchers like the pitching rubber to be flush with the dirt, but most want to be able to wedge their cleat into a hole next to the rubber. Glasnow belongs to the latter camp, and he’s not hesitant about dredging a trench in order to get things just how he likes them. The clay goes flying every which way, and then he spanks his foot onto the mound in order to dislodge it from his cleats. All this happened before Glasnow even started his warm-up tosses. By the time the game actually started, the picture-perfect manicured mound was nothing but a cherished memory. And with every single pitch, the cleats grab some more clay and send it flying. Here’s a closeup of the very first pitch of the game. I’ve added some arrows to help you notice individual clods of mud.

You can see a small clod go flying when Glasnow raises his front foot. More clods go flying when he pushes off with his back foot. Some fall off from above when he whips it around. Others go skittering across the mound when he lands. And this is just the tabletop. We can’t see whatever destruction he causes at the front of the mound when his front foot lands. This is just one pitch, specifically the first pitch of the game, when the mound and the cleats are at their most pristine and least likely to stick. But cleats are designed to grab hold of the earth. That’s their whole job, and like so many of us, they have trouble letting go. Once there’s clay on the cleats, the remaining clay on the mound wants to stick to it too. It builds up.

If you’ve even played a game in rainy conditions, you know that it’s really uncomfortable to have your cleats fully packed with mud. It’s not just that you can’t get as much traction. It’s also that mud and clay make your shoes really heavy. You feel stuck. If you’re a pitcher, your entire delivery depends on balance, and all of a sudden, you’re trying to perform your carefully rehearsed, repeatable delivery with your balance completely out of whack. That won’t do, so you head to the cleat cleaner and make a deposit.

The cleat cleaner is exactly like the bottom of a shoe. It’s just a flat surface full of spikes designed to grab hold of big chunks of earth with maximum efficiency. If you forgot your spikes one day, you could absolutely strap the cleat cleaner to the bottom of your sneakers. It would work just fine, and you’d certainly turn some heads. When you consider the similarity between them, you realize that the relationship between the cleat cleaner and the cleat is as one-sided as you can imagine. In that sense it’s truly a selfless tool. It’s like watching a chimpanzee grooming another chimpanzee, but instead of eating the bugs it finds, it just settles them into its own fur. One day, grounds crews will invent an even bigger cleat cleaner, but until then, we get to watch the dirt build up all game long. Here’s a GIF that shows the cleat cleaner during the first pitch of every half inning during Game 3.

It sort of looks like one of those time-lapse videos of a swarm of ants devouring a piece of fruit from a nature documentary. Scherzer did a number on the cleat cleaner in the third inning, and Mason Fluharty, who replaced Scherzer in the fifth, tracked in a bunch of mud after firing his warm-up pitches. By the 15th inning or so, you can barely even see the top. It’s just a pile of mud.

It’s not just that the cleat cleaner gets completely full. Look at the havoc inflicted over the entire area. The Dodgers logo fades into nothing. Clods of clay are absolutely everywhere. That happens all over the field. Here’s a still from the 18th inning. The low angle allows you to see that the entire home plate area and much of the grass in its vicinity is covered in crumbs of mud.

After the game, the grounds crew has to remove every one of those crumbs. The home plate area and basepaths need to be perfectly smooth, and an accretion of clay would kill all the grass. They rake, they scoop with shovels, they pick them up by hand, sometimes they vacuum. And then they have to refill all the divots, which requires a tremendous amount of tamping, also by hand. It’s hard work. The tamp is a heavy tool. You raise it, you slam all that heft down into the earth, and you do it again until the ground is flat.

But that’s after the game. For the most part, the grounds crew just has to watch as the damage to the field that they just spent all day perfecting accumulates during the game. And this was an especially long game. For comparison, here’s a split-screen between the first pitch of the game and the 609th. On the right, you can see the few crumbs that Glasnow scattered across the top of the mound while excavating and warming up, but that’s it. The field is a lush, perfect carpet.

By the last pitch of the game, it’s a war zone. The left side of the frame is pockmarked and scarred. It’s covered in shrapnel. Every one of those little dark spots you see is a clump of clay that someone’s cleats yanked straight out of the field and then deposited elsewhere. I turned the contrast way up just to illustrate just how many of these clumps get spread out across the field over the course of the game.

It’s a whole lot, especially around the mound, because pitching deliveries are violent. They have hard starts and stops that send the clay flying all over the place. But the real dark spot is around the cleat cleaner, and by the 12th inning, I had noticed that it was in shambles. It was almost completely full of mud. I was ecstatic (and not a little sleep-deprived). The cleat cleaner was doing what so many of us try and fail to do for our whole lives. It achieved its full potential. Every once in a while, the grounds crew will come out and replace the cleat cleaner when it gets completely full, especially on a rainy day.

That didn’t happen on Monday. The cleat cleaner just kept getting more and more full. By the 14th inning, you could barely see its spikes at all. The clay was just piled on top of it. It was literally being buried. Here it is in the 17th inning. If the clay weren’t so much darker in color than the soil conditioner, you might not even know it was there. It’s just a lump of earth.

This is what it looks like when a cleat cleaner dies a hero. It’s cleat cleaner Valhalla. It was all downhill from there. Pitchers kept trying to clean their cleats, but the device was so completely buried that they tended to pick up just as much dirt as they deposited. The problem was, the game was still going on, and as it was the 17th inning of the World Series, they kind of needed to be at their best. That brings us to Will Klein.

Klein was pitching the game of his life. He threw a total of 5 1/3 major league innings during the regular season and had made just one appearance during the postseason. He had never once thrown more than three innings in a single outing over his five years in professional baseball. And on Monday, he delivered four scoreless innings of one-hit ball. It was a fairytale, except that his glass slipper was completely swamped in mud. During the 18th inning, cameras caught Klein going to the overloaded cleat cleaner three times, and because he was still slipping during his pitches, each time was a bit more violent than the next.

With two outs, after falling behind Tyler Heineman, 2-1, Klein decided that going Mortal Kombat on the helpless cleat cleaner was bringing diminishing returns. He finally gave up and went back to the old methods. As organist Dieter Ruhle played the theme from The NeverEnding Story, Dodgers ball boy Branden Vandal raced out to the mount with the trusty baseball standby of a couple of taped-together tongue depressors. The right-handed Klein cleaned off his left cleat himself, then realized there was no way to clean off his right cleat with a glove on his left hand. He handed off the tool to Vandel and leaned on the ball boy’s shoulder while the latter scraped off the accumulated clay and dirt with vigor. Klein gave Vandel a tap on the shoulder to say, “That’s clean enough,” and Vandal hustled back to the dugout. The righty retook the mound and struck out Heineman to end the frame.

Anything goes in the playoffs. Klein is a perfect example, a young player being asked to perform far beyond any reasonable expectation under the most intense pressure of his entire career. As it turns out, if the game goes long enough, the same gets asked of the cleat cleaner.

In the aftermath of Monday’s Game 3 loss (well, really it ended up being almost as much Tuesday’s Game 3 loss, at least on the East Coast), I encountered an unexpected sentiment floating around on the internet, and I’d like to unpack it.

Somewhere around the 32nd inning of that game, I noted that Toronto’s lineup had been shortened quite dramatically by a series of in-game substitutions.

I am amazed the Jays have lasted this long after taking out their second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-best hitters, in two cases for guys who absolutely cannot hit even a little. The Dodgers should've been walking Guerrero every time up too

— Michael Baumann (@baumann.bsky.social) October 28, 2025 at 2:35 AM

I meant this as nothing more than a statement of fact; George Springer got hurt mid-game, and Bo Bichette had to be removed because he came pre-injured and is currently running like the “before” clip in a commercial for a physical therapy practice. Toronto manager John Schneider’s options were quite limited. Read the rest of this entry »

Game 5 of the World Series was a rematch between two pitchers, Blake Snell and Trey Yesavage, who each left Game 1 of the series unhappy with their form. That game devolved into a bullpen battle, and surely neither starter wanted a repeat of that. With the series tied at two, whichever pitcher bounced back better was likely to send their team to Toronto with a 3-2 lead and the inside track on the title. Both starters went deep into the game, but in the end, the Blue Jays got the best of Snell. They snuck in a few runs early, broke through late, and held the Dodgers at bay en route to a 6-1 victory that put them a win away from their third championship in franchise history.

For the first three rounds of the playoffs, Snell went directly at hitters, overwhelming them in the strike zone and pitching deep into games as a result. He tried a new strategy to begin the World Series, though. The Blue Jays present a maddening problem to opposing pitchers. They look for pitches to drive early in the count, and they take big, extra-base-seeking swings when they can. They’re also frustratingly patient outside of the strike zone. In Game 1, Snell tried to work the edges of the zone early, only to pay the price in baserunners and pitches. He limited the damage for a while, but wore himself out and gave Toronto far too many free baserunners in the process.

On Wednesday, he had a new plan. A direct approach had served Snell well all month. Going away from it did him no favors. He’d been so afraid of Toronto’s power that he dinked and dunked himself out of the game. No more of that. Snell’s first pitch of the game was a fastball, belt high to Davis Schneider. It was a statement pitch. Schneider turned it into an exclamation point, tucking it 373 feet over the wall in left. Read the rest of this entry »

When Bo Bichette sprained the posterior collateral ligament of his left knee on September 6 in a home plate collision with Yankees catcher Austin Wells, both the ramifications of his injury and the upcoming World Series were mere abstractions. Bichette remained in that game, postgame X-rays ruled out a fracture, and at the time a cut on his left shin appeared to be the worst of the damage he sustained. While the Blue Jays were not only atop the AL East at the time but also positioned as the league’s top seed, the team — as you’ve heard a million times by now — hadn’t played in a World Series since 1993, and hadn’t won a postseason game since 2016.

Seven weeks later, Toronto is matched up against the defending champion Dodgers, and after missing the final three weeks of the regular season and the Blue Jays’ first two playoff series, the 27-year-old Bichette has been shoehorned into the lineup, albeit under significant limitations. An experiment with him playing second base for the first time in six years has largely worked, and on Tuesday night, Bichette — slotted as the designated hitter with George Springer sidelined by “right side discomfort” following a violent swing in Game 3 — contributed a key hit in a 6-2 victory that helped the Jays rebound from their 18-inning loss the night before and even the World Series at two games apiece.

Bichette’s hit came during Toronto’s four-run seventh inning. Leading 2-1 thanks to Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s third-inning homer off Shohei Ohtani, the Jays opened the seventh with a single by Daulton Varsho and a double by Ernie Clement, spelling the end of the two-way superstar’s night on the mound. Lefty Anthony Banda took over for Ohtani, allowed an RBI single to Andrés Giménez, collected a pair of outs that nonetheless brought home Clement with the Blue Jays’ fourth run, and intentionally walked Guerrero. To the chagrin of every Dodgers fan, manager Dave Roberts then called upon right-hander Blake Treinen, who entered having allowed 14 earned runs in 11 2/3 innings over the past seven weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

After a marathon Game 3 on Monday night (and into Tuesday morning), both the Blue Jays and the Dodgers were hoping for length from their starters in Game 4. The Dodgers looked more likely to get it. Toronto starter Shane Bieber lasted just 3 2/3 innings in Game 4 of the ALCS, his most recent start. In fact, he went more than five innings just once over his past four starts, running a 4.96 ERA over that stretch. Los Angeles starter Shohei Ohtani, well, he’s Shohei Ohtani. He had gone exactly six innings in each of his last three starts. He had allowed just three total runs over his past five appearances for an ERA of 1.01. Had Ohtani gone just six innings and no more on Tuesday night, Game 4 might have gone very differently. Instead, the Blue Jays offense exploded for four insurance runs in the seventh inning, and with a convincing 6-2 win, they pulled the World Series into a 2-2 tie.

After the prolonged weirdness of Game 3, Game 4 looked much more familiar. The starters struggled a bit early, then settled down. One team asked a little too much of its starter, then paid the price for bringing in the wrong reliever. You know, like a baseball game. The momentum certainly looked to belong to the Dodgers. They were at home, they’d won two in a row, and they had Ohtani lined up to pitch coming off some of the best performances of his unbelievable career. After a swing during Game 3 resulted in an injury that walks like an oblique strain and talks like an oblique strain and is currently being referred to as right side discomfort, the Blue Jays were without George Springer, both their leadoff man and their best hitter during the regular season. They had taxed their bullpen more thoroughly on Monday, and they had endured the psychic toll of losing that 18-inning marathon. Luckily for the Blue Jays, momentum is mostly a construct.

The Dodgers kicked off the scoring in the bottom of the second. After a one-out walk by Max Muncy, Tommy Edman ripped a single up the middle. Knowing that Daulton Varsho’s surgically repaired right arm is particularly weak, Muncy didn’t hesitate, charging around second (and nearly slipping and falling when he tried to stick the landing on a pop-up slide into third). It’s always a little bit fun to be a baserunner on the base that you’re entrusted to defend. You’re in your normal spot, but the perspective is totally different. It’s kind of like when you were a kid and your parents let you bring your sleeping bag into the living room so that you could go camping in your own house.

Sorry, where were we? The Dodgers had runners on the corners with one out, and Enrique Hernández did what Enrique Hernández does in October. He lifted a sacrifice fly into right field to give the Dodgers a 1-0 lead. The first time through the lineup, Bieber had allowed one run, one hit, and two walks. He had struck out no one. Three of the Dodgers’ seven batted balls were hard-hit.

But Ohtani was about to run into his own trouble. He only had one strikeout the first time through the lineup, and his velocity was down compared to his regular season average (though manager Dave Roberts would say during an in-game interview that Ohtani was intentionally throttling back). He hadn’t allowed much hard contact, but that changed quickly. In the top of the third, Nathan Lukes tomahawked a high fastball into right field for a one-out single. Ohtani then hung a sweeper high and right over the middle to Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who is not, strictly speaking, the kind of person to whom you want to hang a sweeper high and right over the middle. Guerrero unloaded on the cement mixer. The vicious swing sent his helmet rattling around atop his head and the baseball beyond the left field wall to give the Blue Jays a 2-1 lead:

Both pitchers started to figure it out. Ohtani allowed just one baserunner from the fourth inning to the sixth, at one point striking out four straight Blue Jays swinging. Bieber allowed just two baserunners from the third to the fourth, but he ran into trouble in the sixth. Freddie Freeman led off with a laser down the first base line that Guerrero couldn’t quite corral on the short hop. Will Smith followed up with a sharp lineout to center. After a couple hard-hit balls, manager John Schneider came out to the mound, but Bieber convinced him that at just 80 pitches, he was good to stay in the game. Teoscar Hernández immediately made him look like a liar, sending the 81st pitch into center for a line drive single. The Dodgers had runners on first and second with one out, and Schneider came back for the ball.

Left-handed rookie Mason Fluharty appeared for the third time in the series, and he slammed the door on the potential rally, inducing a fly out from Muncy and striking out Edman swinging. That closed the book on Bieber, who finished the night with one earned run over 5 1/3 innings. Despite walking three, allowing eight hard-hit balls, and striking out just three, he allowed just four hits and would end up with the win.

Ohtani’s night ended soon after Bieber’s. Varsho led off the seventh with a single to right field, and then Ernie Clement ripped a double off the wall in left center. Varsho hesitated for a moment as he rounded second base to make sure that the ball wouldn’t be caught, and ended up at third. Roberts called on Anthony Banda to get the Dodgers out of the jam. Although he’d retired 11 of the past 12 batters before the seventh inning, Ohtani’s night was over (at least, as a pitcher).

With runners on second and third and no outs, the Dodgers brought their infield in. The Blue Jays just needed to get the ball into the outfield to score a run. Andrés Giménez did just that, reaching out on a slider and dumping a single into left. The Blue Jays led 3-1 and still had runners on the corners. After Isiah Kiner-Falefa lined out (temporarily into a double play, until the call was overturned on replay), Schneider sent Ty France up to pinch-hit for the left-handed Lukes. France knocked in a run with a weak inside-out grounder to second base. That closed the book on Ohtani, who was credited with four earned runs over six innings. He struck out six, while allowing six hits and one walk. The Blue Jays had tacked on two big insurance runs to bring their lead to 4-1.

With a pair of right-handed hitters in Guerrero and Bo Bichette due up and the game threatening to get away from the Dodgers, Roberts intentionally walked Guerrero and pulled Banda. To the dismay of Dodger fans everywhere, he called upon Blake Treinen, who came into the game with a 9.00 ERA this postseason. Bichette greeted him with a rocket off the left field wall to score Giménez, and Addison Barger followed up with a single into left to score Guerrero. The haters said he couldn’t do it, and they were right. The Blue Jays led 6-1:

From there, Chris Bassitt held the Dodgers scoreless in the seventh and eighth. Louis Varland made things interesting, allowing Edman to cut the lead to 6-2 on an RBI groundout before retiring the final two Dodgers. Four Blue Jays – Guerrero, Lukes, Barger, and Clement – finished the night with two hits, while the Dodgers combined for just six hits total. They’ll still have home advantage in Game 5. With two-time Cy Young Blake Snell lined up to face rookie Trey Yesavage, they’ll have the starting pitching advantage as well. But after four games, this World Series is looking mighty even, and it’s now assured to end back in Toronto.

I honestly have no idea how many tag plays take place over the course of the average baseball game, but whatever that number may be, it felt like Game 3 of the World Series quadrupled it at the very least. We saw seven players thrown out on the bases. We saw challenges on plays at all four bases. We saw baserunning blunders, huge throws, and perfect relays. We saw aggressive sends that turned out well, and aggressive sends that led to players being thrown out at the plate by laughable margins. We saw pop-up slides that flew too close to the sun. We got a tutorial on the home plate blocking rule. We saw maybe the first ever umpire-induced pickoff. We saw the next day’s starting pitcher pull up with a leg cramp while running the bases in the bottom of the 11th inning. We saw multiple players get tagged out by a glove that caught them squarely in the Jonas Brothers. We saw the game’s 469th-fastest runner come in as a pinch-runner for the 606th-fastest runner. I could keep going.

At this point, I should mention that the litany you just read may or may not be my fault. Somewhere around the seventh inning, Meg Rowley asked me whether I might like to write about anything I’d seen during the game. I said there had been a couple interesting tag plays, so maybe it would be fun to write about them. Go back and reread the first sentence of this article. That’s when I wrote it, in the seventh inning, before like a dozen other absurd baserunning plays happened. This is how the baseball gods punish hubris, and there’s no way to delve into all these plays in one article. Even if there were, I wouldn’t be in any shape to write it, because I watched the entire 18-inning game and got like four hours of sleep last night (read: this morning). Instead, we’ll be taking a jogging tour of the tag play highlights, pointing out a few fun facts and then skating on to the next destination. Read the rest of this entry »

John Schneider loves intentional walks. He intentionally walks Aaron Judge more than anyone else. He intentionally walked Cal Raleigh with the bases empty in the ALCS. So he must have felt very strange when the first two games of the World Series passed without a single intentional walk of Shohei Ohtani, a man who has been intentionally walked repeatedly this postseason even though he was mired in a deep slump early on. Now that he’s hotter than the sun, Schneider was no doubt ready to go to his preferred tactic as soon as the situation presented itself.

And oh, did it present itself! Yesterday, the Dodgers and Blue Jays played 18 innings to settle Game 3. Ohtani opened the game with a double, a home run, another double, and another home run, the last hit a game-tying solo shot in the seventh. That second homer set up a perfect storm. Extra innings with the Dodgers batting in the home half meant that Ohtani represented the tying run every time he came to the plate the rest of the way, and you don’t have to roll out the red carpet for Schneider; he’s always ready to deploy some tactics. Ohtani had five more plate appearances in the game; Schneider intentionally walked him in four of them. I did the math to see whether those were good decisions, and how much they affected the outcome of the game. Read the rest of this entry »