What a Night of Baseball

By my best calculations, there are at least thirty-seven ways to score in baseball. Well, it all depends on what you consider a unique way of scoring a run; if you want to get ultra-specific, there are infinite ways. But keeping things pretty general, I count 37 ways to score a run, from a home run to a passed ball with a runner on third to bases-loaded hit by pitch to a double-steal of home to umpire interference when a ball hits a detached glove.

Thirty-seven ways to score.

For four or so painful, heavenly, cruel, sloppy, gutsy, marvelous, silly, triumphant, roaring hours at Dodger Stadium on Monday night, the two best baseball teams on earth could not accomplish any of the thirty-seven. Eleventh inning. Twelfth inning. Fourteenth inning. Seventeenth inning. The night grew curiouser and curiouser, the Blue Jays’ and Dodgers’ hitters faced a perplexing cast of special guest star pitchers — from the best pitcher of our generation to bit actors playing in their first movie — and the scoreboard kept growing zeroes like teenage pimples. It felt like the game might never end.

What a feeling that is. Only baseball — and maybe a fierce late-night tennis match at Arthur Ashe Stadium — can make America (and Canada!) feel like this, like children trying to stay awake to see Santa Claus. You could sense baseball fans of varying tiers giving in throughout the beautiful ordeal. You could almost see bedroom windows across North America going dark and hear people inside mumbling, “OK, I give up, I’ve got work in the morning,” after the latest futile infield fly ball. You couldn’t blame them. It was 1 a.m. in Toronto. Now 1:47 a.m. in New York. Now 2:20 a.m. in Atlanta. How long must a person wait for Nathan Lukes or Andy Pages to come through?

Some of us are willing to wait forever.

Sure, that says something about us that might not be especially healthy.

But this is our game.

How do you write about 6 hours and 39 minutes of baseball? How do you sum up 18 innings, 19 pitchers, 19 walks, 26 strikeouts, a legend who held on for dear life, another legend who got away with ball four, another legend who reached base nine times AND had a TOOTBLAN (Thrown Out On The Bases Like A Nincompoop), another legend hitting another World Series walk-off homer, three crazy plays at the plate (or was it four?), a billion commercials with that so-called New York Yankees fan in Boston continuously saying “Hon?” to his daughter — there are not enough words for all of it.

But I scribbled down things in the blurry wee hours of the morning, and let’s see now if together we can decipher them.

OK, I wrote this way back in the sixth inning when the score was still 4-4, the bases were empty, and Roberts went out to the mound to pull lefty reliever Justin Wrobleski and bring in righty reliever Blake Treinen. On the surface, this made sense since the Blue Jays’ best hitter, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., was due up, and he hits right-handed, and Wrobleski is not as good against righties.

But off the surface, it made no sense at all since Blake Treinen has been a dumpster fire since early September. In his last 10 regular-season appearances, he posted a nifty 11.74 ERA and took the loss in five games. It hasn’t been much better in the postseason. He would have been deemed unpitchable by almost anybody, but Roberts continues to believe in him for what appear to be two reasons:

*Or so we thought. Foreshadowing!

Anyway, Treinen promptly gave up the single to Vladdy and then gave up a shot down the first-base line to bounty hunter Bo Bichette. It was technically a single because Bo Bichette is playing on one leg after spraining his knee, but it was really a double, and the ball took a wicked hop off the wall. Guerrero got a great jump and had the idea to score on the play. Vladdy is not speedy — you would not expect a 6-foot, 250-pound man to be speedy — but he’s not slow either. Surprisingly fast is the term, I guess. Anyway, he’s fun to watch run.

He rounded third, headed for home, Dodgers right fielder Teoscar Hernández would have nailed him at the plate with a good throw. He didn’t make a good throw. Vladdy got his hand on the plate just before the tag. The Blue Jays led 5-4. Blake Treinen was on the hook for another loss.

I wrote this much later in the night, but yes, in the seventh inning, with one out and nobody on base, the Blue Jays did pitch to Shohei Ohtani. He’d already hit a homer and two doubles in the game. In his previous six at-bats at Dodger Stadium, he had six extra-base hits.

It will come as no surprise to anyone reading this that I hate the intentional walk with the heat of a thousand suns. I believe baseball should have banished it 100 years ago when Babe Ruth himself led efforts to do so. I believe baseball would be a significantly better game if the punishment for an intentional walk was dramatically increased — I’m 100% for making every four-pitch walk and hit-by-pitch a two-base penalty. I don’t believe any other spectator sport in the universe would allow teams the chance to steal the thrill of seeing Shohei Ohtani or Aaron Judge hit for the pitiful price of a single base.

But that’s philosophy. The rule now is, yes, an intentional walk is just one base.

So, yeah, there’s no way in the world I would have pitched to Shohei in that situation.

The Blue Jays did. Good on them for doing that. It was courageous. But it wasn’t surprising at all when Shohei deposited Seranthony Dominguez’s middle-middle fastball 400 feet away over the left-center field wall.

That tied the score. And that was the last run that would score for a very, very long time.

No expanded commentary necessary. I write this down every game.

I believe I wrote this down in the ninth inning when Isiah Kiner-Falefa was thrown out trying to advance from first to third on a ball that deflected off Freddie Freeman’s glove and bounced into the outfield. Dodgers second baseman Tommy Edman made an absolutely fantastic play — he raced to the ball, slid, picked it up, whirled, and fired a perfect throw to third in time to get IKF. It was as good a defensive play as you will see in so many ways. But, again, wow, IKF is slow. There’s no reason for a light-hitting defensive shortstop to be that slow.

It’s also possible I wrote this in the 10th when Davis Schneider — who was sent in as a pinch-runner for Ty France — tried to score from first on Nathan Lukes’ double down the right-field line. You develop an inner clock as a baseball fan. That is to say, after watching 10,000 baseball innings, you begin to connect the geometry and tempo of this game. You feel the game’s pulse. When Lukes hit that ball, my mind blared: “Oh, that’s going to score the run for sure.” There were two outs. Schneider was a pinch-runner. There was no possibility the Dodgers could get him.

But Teo made a great cutoff throw to Edman, and Edman made a great throw to catcher Will Smith — and Schneider was out by nine miles. I immediately thought of the great Harry Caray line when the Cubs put someone — I think it was Glenallen Hill, but that could be way off — in the game as a pinch runner. “You know,” Harry said. “On another day, you’d send in a pinch runner for him.”

The Blue Jays really are very, very slow. They were near the bottom of baseball in both triples and stolen bases — and this whole postseason, they have one triple and one stolen base. It hasn’t held them back, obviously. But in a game like Monday night’s, it will stand out.

In the top of the 12th inning, the Toronto Blue Jays put together something that resembled a rally against pitcher Emmett Sheehan. Doesn’t Emmett Sheehan sound like the new sheriff determined to bring justice to a small Western Kansas town?

“Emmett, how do you think you’re going to stop them Varsho boys?”

“You know me, Billy. I’ll do it one Varsho at a time.”

Sheehan walked Kirk, who was pulled for a pinch-runner, Tyler Heineman (note to self: retell the Harry Caray pinch-runner story). Myles Straw then flailed on one of the worst sacrifice bunt attempts I’ve ever seen. I hate to pull out the tired, cliché “in my day, neighbors were friendly, the mail arrived on time, and baseball players could bunt” rant, but I’m sorry, if you’re going to make a living as scrappy defensive whiz Myles Straw, you’ve got to be able to get a bunt down.

But then Ernie Clement moved the runner to second on a groundout, and Dave Roberts made the big-brain decision to intentionally walk Andrés Gimenez, who was, maybe, the worst everyday hitter in baseball this year. I guess this was to get the righty-righty matchup between Sheehan and Schneider, I guess, maybe, I don’t really know. But Schneider dribbled a ball toward third, and the Dodgers had no play, and the bases were loaded with two outs.

That’s when Roberts called for Clayton Kershaw.

As a baseball storyteller, I loved it. I mean, what could be better than watching the greatest pitcher of the last 20 years — armed with nothing but guts, experience, and remnants of the sublime slider that used to break hearts and backs — try to get the final out of his career with the bases loaded in the World Series. This is the stuff of literature.

Did it make sense strategically? Um, stop being a party pooper. This is literature.

Kershaw’s foil was Nathan Lukes, a 30-year-old outfielder from Portland who has spent the last decade trying to get to the Major Leagues. Lukes played in eight minor-league towns on his journey while Kershaw marched to the Hall of Fame. Kershaw threw a first-pitch slider in the dirt. Lukes watched it for ball four.

Think of what must have been going through the minds of our two combatants. For Lukes, this was the dream that must have kept him going when he hit .194 in Port Charlotte and .219 in Durham. This is the dream, right, the one we all had in the backyard, World Series, bases loaded, two outs, Clayton Kershaw on the mound.

Kershaw’s slider was over the heart of the plate. Lukes watched it go for strike one.

And for Kershaw, this was why he came back, presumably, long after he’d achieved everything that could be achieved. One more moment? I asked my friend Dan Quisenberry if he missed the cheers after he retired.

“No,” he told me. “I go to the park, listen to the cheers, and pretend they’re for me.”

Kershaw’s third pitch was a slider just on or just off the inside corner. His fourth was a slider up in the zone. The umpire called the first a ball, the second a strike.

The fifth pitch was in the dirt. Lukes had not swung the bat. The count was full.

And then came the two pitches that will go down in history.

Neither pitch was in the strike zone. Either pitch would have led to ball four and likely the winning run.

But Lukes swung at both of them. You couldn’t blame him. They were both close. The first pitch was a slider over the zone, and Lukes saw it clearly, vividly, got a great swing on it … and fouled it back. He kicked himself — not for swinging but for missing. That was the pitch. That was the chance.

The second pitch was a slider, too — Kersh would live and die with the last pitch he has left — and this one was probably takeable. It never really seemed in the zone. But it was tantalizing, and the backyard dream isn’t to draw a run-scoring walk from Clayton Kershaw, and Lukes dribbled the ball to second, where Edman scooped it up and flipped it to first directly from the glove. Lukes ran his heart out but the flip was there first, and Clayton Kershaw walked off the mound triumphantly one more time.

This is baseball in 2025: Edgardo Henriquez is the Dodgers’ break-glass-in-case-of-emergency reliever. This is telling because the Dodgers’ bullpen has been one raging emergency for weeks now, and still you basically never see Edgardo Henriquez. He’s so unknown that autocorrect keeps trying to change Henriquez to Hernandez. He hadn’t pitched in almost a month.

Edgardo Henriquez throws a 102-mph fastball and a slider that can melt snow.

Will Klein is apparently even lower in the pecking order; the game has to go at least 15 innings before the Dodgers will consider pitching him. He pitched once in the last month — when the Dodgers trailed by seven runs.

Will Klein throws a 100-mph fastball and a curveball that makes NASCAR turns.

I mean, how absurd is pitching in baseball these days when guys like that aren’t good enough to get into games. Sixty years ago, these pitchers would have been tried as witches. Now, they’re postseason insurance in case a game goes 18 innings. Wild.

Will Klein is of particular interest here. He grew up in Bloomington, Indiana but, best I can tell, was not offered a chance to play at Indiana. That might be because he was a light-hitting catcher at the time. He went to Eastern Illinois University, and somebody told him, “Hey kid, you’ve got a good arm,” he started pitching, he threw 100 mph, the Kansas City Royals drafted him in the fifth round, he kicked around and then got traded:

And now here he was, on the mound, World Series on the line, and he pitched a clean 15th inning against the Blue Jays who had survived this long, so Roberts sent him out for the 16th. He pitched a clean 16th, so Roberts sent him out for the 17th. He pitched a clean 17th, so Roberts sent him out for the 18th.

At this point, he was visibly gassed. He had not thrown this many pitches since, well, since who knows when? But the Dodgers had no other options. Dave Roberts told sideline reporter Tom Verducci that his next move was to a position player pitching. Meanwhile, Yoshinobu Yamamoto — who had thrown a complete game two days earlier — made himself available.

So Will Klein of Bloomington, Indiana, went out with his cool Lincoln beard to pitch the 18th, and he got Nathan Lukes on a hard-hit lineout to Freddie. He walked Vladdy Jr. (wisely, Vladdy was just about the only viable hitter left in the Blue Jays lineup) and got IKF to ground out. He walked Daulton Varsho. He threw a wild pitch. Runners on second and third. Two outs. Tyler Heineman at the plate because a few innings earlier, the Blue Jays had decided to pinch-run him for Alejandro Kirk.

They battled for six pitches. The last was an 86-mph curveball that had all the spin that Will Klein had left in his body. Heineman swung over it for strike three.

And baseball had a new hero named Will Klein.

That’s all I wrote. Freddie Freeman hit the home run to end this madness. It was his second walk-off World Series home run. Nobody else in baseball history has two World Series walk-off home runs. Probably nobody else ever will.

I slammed my notebook shut and went to bed for three hours before writing this.

While I was asleep, I got an email from Bill James. It reads:

“Well, that was some World Series game. You guys stay up to the end? Around 3:00 your time. I think Freddie Freeman was a Hall of Famer probably two years ago, but certainly now.”