The craziest World Series game ever

ESPN said it eloquently:

For 6 hours and 39 minutes, Game 3 of the World Series played out like a fantastical dreamscape of baseball, filled with tension and drama and madness, with happenings the game had never seen before and won’t ever see again.

The Dodgers won in 18 innings on Freddie Freeman’s walk-off homer – and that’s the sensible part! Here’s the craziness:

Little-used reliever Will Klein got the win. He pitched four innings of one-hit ball after having pitched only 15 innings all year. He was probably either going to win it or lose it, because the Dodgers were out of pitchers, except for Ohtani and Yamamoto, who had pitched a complete game two days earlier. Talk about an unlikely hero! Klein’s lifetime ERA is 5.16 in the majors, and was 5.33 in the minors and 4.86 in college.

Yamamoto’s earlier complete game didn’t seem that important at the time, but looking back on it, it was good that he gave the bullpen a rest.

Everyone has run out of superlatives to describe Shohei Ohtani. He reached base nine times. In his first four at bats, he had two homers, a ground rule double and a boring old regular double that somehow stayed in the park. The Jays finally got tired of that crap, and just walked him in all of his subsequent five at bats, the first four times intentionally, with the last time not intentional in theory. (Wink, wink! It took only four pitches, all well out of the zone.) Ohtani is just the second player in Major League history with four extra-base hits in a World Series game, and the first since 1906. He is the first player to reach base nine times in a post-season game, breaking the previous record of seven. No man had reached base nine times in any game, regular or post-season, in the integration era. Even Danny “Suits” Sparrow has to be looking down with envy at that game. ¹

I don’t know how many people made it to the end at the watch parties in Toronto, where the game stretched nearly to three in the morning.

By the end of the game, the Jays had replaced four starters for pinch runners, and those pinch runners basically had to stay in to play the equivalent length of a regular game. In essence, the Jays had to play the extra innings without their best hitters not named Vladimir. The four guys who stayed in the game after pinch-running went a combined 1-for-14 (.071), while the four players consigned to the bench had gone 6-for-15 (.400).

Footnote 1: Of course, Danny “Suits” Sparrow never got nine plate appearances in a game because an intentional walk couldn’t keep him from scoring. If you walked him intentionally, he would just steal the next three bases, thus ending the game in his first at bat in extra innings. The only defense against him was to walk the batters in front of him to clog up the bases. And even that didn’t work if there were no outs, because the two guys in front of him would take the rare “intentional caught stealing” so Danny had a clear path.

There’s a cute story behind that strategy. When I was living in Norway, my dad and my youngest son spent one summer with me. They were always looking for fun ways to pass the time when I was at work, so I re-wrote the software for the APBA computer baseball game to add Danny “Suits” Sparrow as a player, basically making him capable of a homer every at bat. When my son and my dad drafted their teams, my son got the first pick, naturally drafting Grandpa Danny. My dad therefore had to figure out how to defend against the one opponent he could not defeat – himself, as pictured in his own stories. Talk about karma! The intentional walk didn’t work since Suits would steal the next three bases, so he had to devise the double intentional walk to clog the basepaths in front of Suits. My son then countered with the intentional caught stealing with one or no outs, forcing my dad to counter with the triple intentional walk when there was already one out. It worked like a chess game, because my dad had to figure out when to start walking batters. As I noted above, there was no defense if there were no outs, because the double intentional caught stealing would leave Suits free to steal all the bases and score.

Mind you, they were playing a game with all-time greats, so the situation with one out would occasionally force my dad to walk three guys so he could take his chances pitching to 1941 Ted Williams with the bases full!

I don’t remember exactly how many of those computer games my dad won that summer, but it wasn’t many. His record was something like 3 wins and 159 losses. Every once in a while somebody like Lefty Grove would give up only the four runs created by Suits, and dad’s team would score enough to win. (And Suits did get caught stealing occasionally in the computer game. Even the highest steal rating in the APBA game didn’t assure 100% success,and I couldn’t figure out how to override that with a hack.)

In the final stats, Suits did not end up with a homer in every official at bat. APBA had a quirky thing built into the software where, in certain base situations, certain pitchers could reduce a homer to a double. By a complete coincidence, the final stats almost perfectly duplicated one of his stories, where he claimed to finish a season with 650 walks, 47 homers and a ground-rule double. (Needless to say, the home fans in Philly booed him and threw things on the field when he hit the double, but he calmed down the crowd by agreeing to take a pay cut.)