The Greatest Game I've Ever Seen?

COOPERSTOWN, New York — It is 33 degrees in Cooperstown on this quiet Sunday morning, and a ghostly fog hovers over Otsego Lake, and I’m sitting on the Otesaga Hotel veranda where pretty much every single baseball Hall of Famer once sat. Sandy Koufax sat in the very chair where I’m sitting. 

Baseball echoes are everywhere. 

I’m hoping they’ll guide me as I try to tell the story of Game Seven, the greatest baseball game I’ve ever seen.

Wait, was it the greatest game I’ve ever seen? Or is that just bleary early-morning recency bias kicking in? I saw Game 7 in 2016, when Rajai Davis hit the impossible home run and then Jason Heyward (who went 0-for-5 in the game) gave his St. Crispin’s Day Speech during a rain delay.

I saw Game 6 in 2011, when impossible things just kept happening, time after time — silly things, heroic things, remarkable things — and David Freese created a legend that he, apparently, has never quite felt worthy of. 

I saw Game 3 in 2001, with Ground Zero still smoking, when the Yankees seemed dead, and then they rose from the dead, and Jeter hit the home run, and everyone sang New York, New York again and again, and would have all night if not for a New York cop with a megaphone telling everyone to go home.

I’ve seen a lot of great baseball games. We all have.

But there was something about this Game Seven between the Dodgers and Blue Jays that felt, I don’t know, more personal, more tense, more supercharged. Maybe it is because the game inspired feelings that felt lost. Maybe it’s because every play, even the supposedly routine ones, crackled with “Wait, did that just happen?” energy. Yes, it did happen. Too much happened. The night was a blur. Trying to tell the story feels like trying to cage a wild tiger. 

But that’s what we’re here to do. Cage the wild tiger.

Let’s begin with Yoshinobu Yamamoto and see where it might lead us.

Yoshi Yamamoto was probably on his way to being the greatest pitcher in the history of Japanese baseball when he signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers for the largest pitcher contract in baseball history. This is worth mentioning again because, in so many ways, Yamamoto felt like an afterthought as this Dodgers season began. In the afterglow of last year’s championship, Los Angeles went the route of musical supergroups like Asia and The Highwaymen and the Traveling Wilburys. They signed every star they could find and hoped that the staggering weight of talent would create beautiful music.

Yamamoto wasn’t exactly forgotten … but the hype that had followed him from Japan numbed. Rōki was the new thing. Shohei was the big thing. Kershaw was back. Mookie moved to shortstop. Freddie’s gigawatt smile glowed. Even astronomers have trouble counting all the stars in Los Angeles. Yamamoto was one of the brightest stars — he was the Dodgers’ best pitcher all season, and it wasn’t close — but he didn’t have an identity, a nickname, a oneness that made him stand out against the sky.

And then he did. This postseason, Yamamoto did what nobody thought possible — he woke up Gibson and Spahn and Feller and brought back the starting pitcher. The game had turned away from starters because of the bounty of 100-mph relievers and the sobering numbers of facing a lineup for the third time. But on October 14, in the National League Championship Series, Yamamoto threw a complete game against the Brewers. It was the first postseason complete game since the worldwide pandemic.

Six days later, against the Blue Jays in Game 2 of the World Series, Yoshi did it again. The first World Series complete game in a decade.

But even that is not what secured his legend. No, it was two days after that second complete game that Yoshinobu Yamamoto, for the first time, became the Dodgers’ brightest light — yes, even brighter than Shohei, at least for a moment — and he did it without throwing a pitch. That was the day the Dodgers and Blue Jays played 18 grueling innings, and the Dodgers were about to run out of pitchers. Los Angeles’ manager Dave Roberts admitted to an exhausted nation that he was looking for a position player to take the mound.

And Yamamoto sent his interpreter over to Roberts to say, yes, he was ready to pitch again.

Like he was Christy Mathewson or Grover Alexander or Old Hoss Radbourn.

Yamamoto didn’t have to pitch — a bearded wonder found in the bullpen attic named Will Klein threw four scoreless innings to save the day for Los Angeles — but the story was set: This guy would do anything to help the Dodgers win. Friday night, he threw six-plus brilliant innings to keep the Dodgers in this series.

Saturday night, Yamamoto took the mound again in the bottom of the ninth with the score tied and runners on first and second. There was just one out. He hit Alejandro Kirk with a pitch to load the bases. Canada, the whole country, was tilting and vibrating and clanging like a slot machine about to pay out.

Daulton Varsho stepped to the plate for the Toronto Blue Jays.

The name “Daulton Varsho” is an amalgamation of two Major League Baseball players. Varsho comes from his father, Gary, a Wisconsin native who, for eight years, knocked enough pinch hits and played good enough outfield defense to keep finding his way onto major league clubs. And Daulton comes from one of Gary’s favorite teammates, Darren Daulton, a hard-living catcher who swung for the fences.

Daulton Varsho carries more than a little bit of both men in his baseball life. He began his career as a catcher … and instead, against all odds, he became the greatest defensive center fielder in the world. As a hitter, he swings with an uppercut, much like his namesake, and as such, he misses a lot. But he only rarely puts the ball on the ground. 

In this moment, with the bases loaded and one out, Daulton Varsho needed to hit a fly ball off an exhausted Yoshi Yamamoto.

This was great baseball theater.

There’s something about great baseball theater, though, that is easy to forget: It’s only great theater to us neutrals watching without prejudice. To Dodgers fans watching this moment with fear and desperation, to Blue Jays fans watching with fear and expectancy, this isn’t theater. This is torture. This is agony. For them, there are only pounding hearts and raging stomachs and a small voice screaming against the wind that, hey, it might turn out OK, maybe, possibly.

We had already traversed so many oceans to get here. The Dodgers had started a worn-out Shohei Ohtani, and even before he threw his first pitch, you just knew he wasn’t right. He took a long time just getting to the mound, holding up the game for three or four minutes. Each warm-up pitch looked like one of the twelve labors of Hercules. The surprise was not that Bo Bichette took him deep in the third inning to give the Blue Jays a 3-0 lead. The surprise was that Shohei, the king of baseball, even made it to the third inning.

After Bichette’s homer, the Blue Jays’ win expectancy jumped to 83% which, honestly, felt low. It did not seem in that moment like the Dodgers — with their pitching staff in shambles, their bats already packed away for the winter and the ballpark crackling with Canadian cheer — could possibly come back and win this game. 

But all during this World Series, the impossible has become routine, and the Dodgers picked and poked at the lead. In the eighth inning, while trailing 4-2, Max Muncy faced the Blue Jays’ 22-year-old prodigy, Trey Yesavage. Muncy is 35 years old but seems much older; it feels like he’s been playing with the Dodgers since the Steve Garvey days. He has hit more postseason home runs than any Dodgers player ever, but he had looked entirely helpless in this World Series.

He mashed a home run that made the score 4-3.

Then, in the ninth inning, with all eyes on Shohei Ohtani in the on-deck circle, Toronto’s closer Jeff Hoffman threw a hanging slider to Miguel Rojas. I imagine that Hoffman knew it was a mistake pitch the instant he threw it, but I also imagine that he wasn’t panicked about it. Miguel Rojas had hit one home run off a righty all year. He came into the game without a single hit for almost a month — his bat had gone so silent that Dave Roberts stopped playing him.

Rojas turned on this ball and crunched a 105.3 mph laser to left.

Why do I give you the exit velocity in a moment like this?

Because Miguel Rojas had NEVER BEFORE hit a 105-mph laser. Never. The highest exit velocity for Rojas since Statcast™ began tracking such things was a 101-mph routine ground ball he hit off Camilo Duval last June. Miguel Rojas is a defensive marvel and a bunting savant; he does not have the bat speed to hit a baseball 105 mph. 

And yet he did. In the biggest baseball moment of his life.

And that tied the game.

And that’s baseball.

Isiah Kiner-Falefa is not fast. He was never especially fast — defense has been his calling card from the start — but now, at age 30, after eight taxing seasons for four big league teams, he’s definitely not fast. And yet three times in this World Series, he’s been used as a pinch-runner. The Blue Jays have not had much choice. Their star shortstop, Bo Bichette, has been playing on one leg. He badly hurt his knee in September. People who know the full story are astonished that he’s playing at all.

So Kiner-Falefa has been asked to be Bichette’s proxy on the bases. The first time it happened, Game 1, Falefa found his way around the bases to score. 

In Game 3, though, IKF got himself thrown out at third base, ending a ninth-inning threat. The game went on for another nine innings after that.

And here in the big moment, with Yamamoto on the mound and Varsho at the plate, Kiner-Falefa stood on third base. Unfortunately, I do mean that he STOOD ON THIRD BASE. He was barely off the bag as Yamamoto began his wind-up. As the pitch was thrown, he took no secondary lead. This was a big and bold game filled with spectacular moments. Will Smith bashed a home run that will ring through the ages. Andy Pages literally ran over Kiké Hernández to make a game-saving catch. Varsho and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. pulled off back-to-back defensive miracles when it looked like the Dodgers might break through. Too many things happened.

But sometimes, the most mundane thing of all is what matters most.

In the ninth inning of World Series Game 7, Isiah Kiner-Falefa timidly clung to third base as the pitch was thrown.

Miguel Rojas has never won a Gold Glove, but he has made a baseball life for himself by playing brilliant defense. He grew up in Venezuela — that remarkable baseball country where Luis Aparicio and Dave Concepción and Omar Vizquel learned how to brandish a baseball glove — and he signed with the Cincinnati Reds when he was 16 years old because he was a defensive marvel. 

He couldn’t hit at all — pitchers just knocked the bat out of his hands — but whoa, could he play shortstop. The Reds gave up on him after a while because great defense is not enough. The Dodgers gave him a chance. He hit just .181. Los Angeles traded him away to Miami.

The Marlins didn’t have much else going for them, so they kept writing in Rojas’ name in the lineup to get his glove on the field. The defense was always stellar. He even started to hit just a little bit. The Dodgers traded to get him back in 2023 — they had an opening for a player who would play anywhere. Rojas was just that kind of player. He even pitched a little.

Now, he was playing second base, and he was way in like all the other infielders because this was a defensive emergency. Rojas understood that there was one mission: If Varsho happened to hit a ground ball his way, he had to find a way to stab it and fire the ball home before the game-winning run scored. 

Yamamoto, at the end of one of the most epic runs in the history of the World Series, threw a splitter to the outside part of the plate in the hopes of getting that ground ball.

Varsho went down to get it, nullifying his usual uppercut swing, and indeed cracked a ground ball to second base.

Kiner-Falefa did break as the ball was hit, but he did not get a good jump because of his apprehensive lead and lack of forward momentum.

Rojas took a step to his right to cut off the ball. It took a more energetic hop off the grass than expected, and he found himself falling backward slightly as he gloved it. He steadied himself, best he could, and thought about the one mission: He had to get the baseball home in time. He fired the ball home as hard as he could, even though he was still off-balance.

The throw was true. 

Dodgers catcher Will Smith stretched to catch the ball like a first baseman.

IKF slid feet first, even though the play at the plate was a force.

The play was close — particularly close on replay, where every tiny thing matters, including whether Will Smith’s cleat broke contact with the plate before he caught the ball — but the call was plain.

Kiner-Falefa was out.

And the game would go on.

The thing about baseball is that the game will keep going on until somebody is the hero and somebody is the goat. It can’t really end any other way. They’ll stay out there all night and all day until the game is no longer tied.

In the top of the 11th inning, the Dodgers’ Will Smith hit the go-ahead home run. Smith caught an absurd 73 innings in this World Series, far and away the most in history — more than Gary Carter in 1985, more than Johnny Bench in 1975, more than Bill Freehan in 1968, more than Yogi Berra in 1956.

That feels like the perfect achievement for Smith, who has his own quiet place in the Dodgers’ Playtone Galaxy of Stars. He just clocks in every year, puts up a four or five WAR season, and clocks out when the job’s done. When Mookie Betts’ confidence left him — it was so heart-rending to hear Mookie, one of the greatest players who ever lived, tell Derek Jeter and David Ortiz how much he’s stunk this postseason — Dave Roberts moved Smith into the No. 2 spot.

And Smith ran into Shane Bieber’s mistake pitch — poor Shane, that was such a hanging slider that it might have been stolen from the Louvre — to give the Dodgers the lead.

In the bottom of the 11th inning, the Blue Jays’ Alejandro Kirk came up with the tying run on third and the winning run on first. There was no uncertainty in the moment. Kirk is a 5-foot-8, 250-pound sparkplug from Mexico who plays with his heart and runs with lead feet. He had mashed five home runs this postseason, and he had cracked two hits already in the game, and it sure felt like the game would end with him, one way or another. 

Either, he would hit the home run that would send Toronto into a frenzy.

Or, he would hit the double play grounder that ended hope.

There were other possibilities, obviously, but it didn’t feel that way in the moment. An epic game like this had to end decisively. Kirk did hit the ball on the ground, and there was no doubt how that would turn out. The ball was gloved by Mookie, he stepped on second, and fired to Freddie Freeman in plenty of time for the double play. The Dodgers became the first team in the millennium to win back-to-back World Series. The Blue Jays became the latest baseball team to head into the winter with a basket full of heartbreaking might-have-beens.

Was this the greatest baseball game ever played? It seems to me that the question is both silly and essential. It’s silly because the greatest baseball game ever played isn’t a tangible concept.

If you are a Cubs fan, the greatest game ever played was probably Game 7 of the 2016 World Series.

If you are a Cardinals fan, the greatest game ever played might have been Game 6 of the 2011 World Series.

If you are a Red Sox fan, you might be partial to Game 6 in 1975.

If you are a Yankees fan, the greatest game ever played might have been the one your dad took you to as a child, and you got to see Mickey Mantle hit one out.

If you are a Royals fan, the greatest game ever played might be the one where Kerry Robinson raced back to the wall, climbed it, leaped to save a home run … and then watched as the ball dropped feet in front of him on the warning track and bounced over the wall for a ground rule double.

Or maybe that’s just my favorite Royals game.

The point is, there is no greatest game in baseball history, not really; the game has been around too long, too many extraordinary things have happened, too many emotions are tied up in our memories, too many great games have been played.

And yet, we HAVE to ask if Saturday’s game was the greatest ever — if this was the Greatest World Series ever; the folks at MLB dusted off a ranking I did a few years ago on that subject — because that’s the point, isn’t it? We want to mark our time. They’ve been playing professional baseball for 150 years. You would think by now that we’ve seen everything.

And games like Saturday night remind us: No. This is baseball.

We haven’t seen anything yet.