Walk-off World Series Game 1 more than lived up to the hype

LOS ANGELES – About an hour after Freddie Freeman came the closest to a perfect baseball game, he stood near home plate and tried at Dodger Stadium, where he had just ended Game 1 of the World Series with an extra-inning grand slam it Explain what just happened. Over 10 innings and 3 hours and 27 minutes, the game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees evolved from a pitchers' duel to a hitting and baserunning exercise to strategic theater to an indelible highlight in the 120- year-long history of the World Series. Baseball at its finest comes in many forms. This game somehow managed to pack them all into one.

The final result – Dodgers 6, Yankees 3 – doesn't exactly scream classic. It's misleading. On Friday night, the 52,394 people who were lucky enough to witness Game 1 in person saw the rare swarming sporting event, only to find that it had been surpassed. The two most famous baseball franchises, true elites of their shores, fought. And then, with a single strike, on a 93-mph first-pitch fastball from Nestor Cortes, Freeman delivered the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history, 36 years after Kirk Gibson had famously done the same thing to hobble the bases.

“Look at this game,” Freeman said, and began recounting everything that had transpired. Four innings of shutout baseball. The Dodgers scored a run on a sacrifice fly. Giancarlo Stanton countered with a massive two-run home run. The Dodgers hit back by holding off Yankees closer Luke Weaver. The Yankees appeared to be pushing ahead on a Gleyber Torres home run, but when a Dodgers fan reached over the fence to catch it, it was ruled interference, which was confirmed by replay. New York tagged Los Angeles' leading reliever, Blake Treinen, for a run in the 10th. And the tension in the bottom of the 10th: a walk and an infield single to lead off Shohei Ohtani, whose foul to left moved runners to second and third and Yankees manager Aaron Boone opened a base to intentionally walk Mookie Betts. Freeman will face Cortes, who hasn't thrown a pitch since September 18th.

“Moments of switching back and forth – that’s what makes classics,” Freeman said. “And I think we created one tonight.”

The tens of millions of viewers in the United States, Japan and around the world know they saw it. Great baseball can be filled with both good (Jazz Chisholm Jr. steals second and third before scoring in the 10th inning) and bad (he was able to do it because of Treinen's slow throw). It can include great defense (Dodgers shortstop Tommy Edman saves a run in the sixth by holding a grounder in the infield) and unsightly defense (both Yankees corner outfielders turn doubles into triples).

“Some people think a slugfest is a good play,” Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy said. “Some people think a pitchers’ duel is a good game. I don't know it. I think if you just add a little bit of all the elements, it’s pretty fun.”

This game had a lot to offer. Even before the first pitch, there was tension among the starters: Gerrit Cole and Jack Flaherty, two right-handers who grew up in Southern California. The Dodgers had desperately tried to sign Cole when he was still a free agent, and the Yankees tried to trade for Flaherty in July but then backed out, and the two men, now playing against their former suitors, spent the first innings to cheer each other up.

Stanton's sixth-inning home run and his subsequent look – not to mention Flaherty's forlorn face after realizing his mistake – left the Dodgers behind 2-1 and marked the beginning of intrigue between Boone and Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. who had left for Flaherty for the third time through the order and paid dearly. Boone turned to Weaver in the eighth after Ohtani hit a double from the top of the wall and advanced to third base thanks to New York's sloppy defense. He was well placed strategically, but couldn't stop the Dodgers from tying the score.

Two innings later, it could have been Ohtani again or Betts or anyone else in the Dodgers' fearsome top-to-bottom lineup. Choosing Freeman, the 35-year-old first baseman, was as extraordinary a solution as one could imagine.

“I was hoping Mookie would get a hit to take the pressure off him,” said Freeman's father, Fred, to whom Freeman ran after the home run and clasped his hands through the net that surrounded the field. “Then they went for a walk with him. And I said, 'Oh, Freddie, Freddie, Freddie.' And then the first pitch.”

Freeman has been painful to watch over the past month. Not just because he hadn't had an extra-base hit in the Dodgers' first 11 playoff games. Freeman is clearly in pain. His sprained ankle throbs. His body hurts. He's an eight-time All-Star, a future Hall of Famer and a World Series champion with Atlanta in 2021. He's already had a brutal year, with his three-year-old son Max suffering from severe illness Guillain-Barré syndrome . Freeman continued to fight through the pain, hoping that the five days off since the NLCS would do enough good for his body to do something memorable.

His triple in the first inning, as he hobbled around the bases, showed he was prepared. Nobody knew that an even better finale was coming.

“He's a superhero in my eyes, really, honestly and truly,” Dodgers reliever Anthony Banda said. “Seeing how he got through the injury and the rehab he did and the time he put in and trying to get healthy and get back on the field and do everything he did can – that speaks volumes about him as a player.” And as a person, he cares about the organization, and that’s what drives us all.

That's true for everyone on the field Friday, including the Yankees, who now have to recover from as severe a blow to the knee as can be. The good news is that there is still plenty to play for, countless opportunities for the Yankees to do so, and that the standards have risen from high to stratospheric for the rest of the series.

To suggest that any of the games, however many there are, can compete with Game 1 is unfair – unless it's the kind of series where the magic happens all the way through, where two teams are so good, so poised, so ready for the moment and so eager to win that the hype is merely an accelerator. Maybe Game 2 on Saturday evening will continue where Game 1 so clearly delivered.

“The end,” Dodgers center fielder Kiké Hernández said. “I mean, it doesn’t get any better than that.”

That's actually the case because Hernández forgets one thing. When it comes to the Dodgers and Yankees, the 120th World Series, this clash of the titans that has so much more great baseball in them, that's just the beginning.