That’s How You Start A World Series

If you think about sports as a television show rather than some fit people running around and doing things, Game 1 of the World Series was a terrible idea. Yes, the series is well cast, and the production value is solid by contemporary standards, but you just cannot give away your best stuff in the pilot episode.

Fortunately, by the rules of our diminishing yet still shared reality, Game 1 was an extraordinary epic. Freddie Freeman pointing his bat toward the sky after hitting the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history—straight up, rather than in the direction of the game-winner he’d just vaporized—told everyone watching that whatever else happens in these next several days, a baseball event is coming from on high. On this night, and maybe for the next week, football could eat what we in the agricultural sciences call shit. Baseball is, for the moment, back.

Freeman’s magnum opus was one big swing on a cruddy fastball from Nestor Cortes, who was being asked to hold a 3-2 Yankees lead in the 10th and whose credentials for that moment were solely that he threw lefthanded and was well-rested in the sense that he hadn’t pitched in a month. Freeman took an interesting game—good pitching, good defense, a fan getting involved Jeffrey Maier-style—that had previously missed its chances to make the more sellable Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts the hero, and bestowed upon it something momentarily incandescent and infinitely more enduring. Freeman no-doubted Cortes’s second crud fastball out of the two pitches he threw; the first was a hanger to Ohtani that left fielder Alex Verdugo ran down in foul ground before flipping into the stands, advancing Gavin Lux and Tommy Edman to second and third and creating the reason for intentionally walking Betts.

It was a delightful visual moment and, in terms of the narrative, absolutely irrelevant to the drama to come. It also spared us the considerably less dramatic Jazz Chisholm single and stolen bases to more or less manifest the winning run in the top of the 10th. We’re putting that here because no one will remember it on Monday otherwise. Hell, almost nobody remembers it now.

The whole series won’t and can’t be like this, but the promise of this matchup was all plain to see in Game 1. You have to watch the entire 10th inning to comprehend the excellent buildup and eventual magnitude of the moment, and you have to embrace the fact that Fox’s designated supermen—Ohtani and Betts, Aaron Judge and Juan Soto—wound up being bit players in the end. This was and forever more shall be the Freddie Freeman game—Freeman the wonky-ankled first baseman who took time away from the job in September to help care for his then-critically ill child, and who has been peg-legged through the majority of the postseason. Indeed, the Fox broadcast team made a point of saying while Betts was being intentionally walked to load the bases that Freeman only needed to single and gimp his way safely to first to win the game.

Instead, he won the entire weekend, and maybe the full week. Now you’re all in, even if you’re a sorry-assed college football dweeb or a pathetic droning NFL junkie. Even if, as is very likely, the rest of the series isn’t as good as it began, it has shown after one game what is possible even in a sport where the state of play mandates that there’s no way to manufacture the biggest moment for the best players. Everyone has to take his turn in order and cannot cut the line based on rep, and until Freeman made this better than the World Series deserved to be, the improbable hero was Chisholm, who stole those bases in the top of the 10th and scored on Anthony Volpe’s hard smash/groundout. There is, literally and figuratively, no drawing this up in pre-production.

Maybe Freeman is also improbable because his ankle is essentially a crumpled bag of corn chips, or because he isn’t a screen-filling presence, or because his haircut was stolen from 1961 Roger Maris. But the moment he made on Friday night crushed all the things that the producers, broadcasters and writers all told us would explain this series. This series now sells itself, regardless of its big names; it is the first time Rob Manfred might allow himself to be proud of the sport he allegedly manages. This is baseball’s biggest moment in multiples of years, and it was all because Freeman, the most readily forgotten of the three likely Hall of Famers atop the Dodgers lineup, hit an overwhelming home run with maximum yield in a gigantic moment on his first swing, delivered a bat-punctured gesture of effervescent celebration, and even screamed at his father afterward in unconfined joy. Some unscripted and astonishing baseball stuff happened, in short, and while this may not save baseball from its multiple levels of seedy cupidity, this is the sport’s best moment for all fan bases since Kirk Gibson in 1988.

If the people who do TV, or the executives placed on this planet solely to flatten this sport into a product, had their choice, all this wonderment would not have been wasted on Game 1. Let us thank the galactic pixies that they do not always get their way.