If you think of sports as a television show, not a few fit guys running around and working out, Game 1 of the World Series was a terrible idea. Yes, the series is well-made, and the production value is solid by contemporary standards, but you can’t give away your best stuff in the pilot episode.
Fortunately, by the rules of our diminished but still shared reality, Game 1 was an extraordinary epic. After hitting the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history, Freddie Freeman pointed his bat skyward – instead of straight up, in the direction of the game-winner – he was simply vaporized – see Wally told everyone that no matter what else happens over the next several days, a baseball event is coming to a head. This night, and maybe next week, football can eat what we call crap in agronomy. For now, baseball is back.
Freeman’s magnum opus was a big swing on a crooked fastball from Nestor Cortes who was being asked to preserve a 3–2 Yankees lead in the 10th, and his only credit for that moment was that he hit a left-handed Had bowled the ball and was well rested in that sense. That he hadn’t pitched in a month. Freeman played an interesting game – good pitching, good defense, a fan Jeffrey Maier-style joining-It missed the opportunity to make the more marketable Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts heroes earlier, and provided something momentarily incandescent and infinitely more enduring. Freeman had no doubt that Cortez’s second of the two pitches he threw was a crude fastball; The first was a hooker to Ohtani that went past infielder Alex Verdugo. ran down the muddy field advancing Gavin Lux and Tommy Edman to second and third, before flipping into the stands and intentionally causing Bates to walk.
It was a delightful visual moment and, in the context of the narrative, completely irrelevant to the drama to come. It also saved us a much less dramatic Jazz Chisholm single and stolen bases, leading to a more or less winning performance in the top of the 10th. We’re keeping it here because no one will remember it on Monday. Hey, almost no one remembers it anymore.
The entire series won’t and can’t be like this, but the promise of this matchup was clearly seen in Game 1. You have to watch the entire 10th inning to understand the sublime buildup and ultimate magnitude of this moment, and you have to accept the fact that Fox’s designated supermen—Ohtani and Betts, Aaron Judge and Juan Soto—were reduced to little players in the end. . This was and always will be the Freddie Freeman game – Freeman, the wonky-ankleted first baseman who took time off from the job in September to help care for his seriously ill child, and who has been peg-legged most of the time. . Post season. In fact, the Fox broadcast team went as far as to say that when Betts was intentionally walked to load the bases, Freeman needed only to single and safely play his way to win the game.
Instead, he won the entire weekend, and maybe even the entire week. Now you’re all in, whether you’re a college football fan or an NFL fan. Even if, as is very likely, the rest of the series isn’t as good as it started, it has shown game after game what is possible even in a game where the game situation dictates that the biggest moment comes. There is no way to build for the best players. Everyone had to take their turn in the order and couldn’t be cut down the line based on reps, and unless Freeman made it better than the World Series, the unlikely hero was Chisholm, who got one of those runs in the top of the 10th. Stole the bases and scored on Anthony Volpe’s smash/groundout. There is no depiction of it in pre-production, literally and figuratively.
Perhaps Freeman is also impossible because his ankle is essentially a folded bag of corn chips, or because he’s not a screen-filling presence, or because his haircut was stolen from 1961’s Roger Maris. But the moment he created on Friday night crushed everything the producers, broadcasters and writers told us to interpret this series for. The chain now sells itself regardless of its big names; This is the first time Rob Manfred can reportedly be proud of the game he manages. This is baseball’s greatest moment in many years, and it all happened because Freeman, the most easily forgotten of the top three potential Hall of Famers in the Dodgers’ lineup, hit a tremendous home run with maximum yield in a huge moment on his first swing. He hit a run, made a gesture of enthusiastic celebration by getting punched by the bat, and later even shouted at his father in immense joy. In short, some unscripted and amazing baseball things happened, and while it can’t save baseball from its many levels of sexism, it is the game’s best moment for the entire fan base since Kirk Gibson in 1988.
If the people who do TV, or the executives put on this planet just to turn this game into a product, had their choice, all this wonder wouldn’t have been wasted on Game 1. Let us thank the galactic pixies that they don’t always get their way.