A few weeks ago, I enjoyed watching Sophie Zinn and her teammates play softball. I did have one problem though. I couldn't understand why batters weren't being tagged out when they overran first base, why foul balls were strikes and balls caught on a bounce weren't outs. That comes, of course, from spending most of the baseball season at games played by 1860s rules where batters can't overrun first, foul balls aren't strikes and balls caught on a bounce are outs. As a result, even though I'm "only" in my late 70s, I have baseball experience in three different centuries. So, from that perspective, I want to offer a few thoughts about the seventh game of the 2025 World Series, a classic, if there ever was one.
First of all, I really appreciated how play-by-play announcer Joe Davis used references to past World Series to put Saturday's game into context. He and the Fox Sports staff clearly did a lot of preparation beforehand. Hearing, for example, that there has only been one seventh game walk off home run, helped build the drama of whether there would be another one in 2025. And learning about Grover Cleveland Alexander's clutch pitching heroics in the seventh game in 1926 anticipated a similar performance by the Dodgers Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Knowing about great moments in seventh games of the past helped us to better appreciate the memorable moments that were unfolding before our eyes. And hearing stories about baseball's past can, and I hope will, encourage today's fans of all ages to want to know more about the game's history.
As soon as the game was over, and perhaps even before it ended, opinions were being offered about where the Dodgers 5-4-win ranked in the pantheon of great World Series seventh games. An article on MLB.Com, ranking all 41 placed Saturday’s game fourth, after 1960, 2016 and 2001. As I think about the game, what stands out is the number of what Henry Zinn would call insanely cool moments in the last three innings. In the top of the ninth, the Dodgers needed a clutch hit just to stay alive and got one from an unlikely source. But that dramatic home run was almost pushed aside in the bottom of the inning when Toronto came literally inches short of a walk off win. Think for a moment about how we would remember a series ending on a close play at home plate, especially if the original call was reversed after a video review.
Since, however, Toronto did come up short, the play was important, but not the final decisive moment. That was reserved for the eleventh when the Dodgers got their second clutch home run and again, had to withstand a Toronto rally that had the tying run just a sacrifice fly away from tying the game. Although I was rooting for the Dodgers, there was a part of me that wanted the game to go to the twelfth, matching the 1924 seventh game, the longest in World Series history. While I haven’t reviewed every seventh game in detail, it feels to me like none match Saturday’s game for the sheer volume of drama in the ninth and beyond.
Does that make it the greatest seventh game ever? The answer, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, lies in the eyes of the beholder. The great thing about baseball history is there are no shortage of such games to debate going back to the day in1870 when the Brooklyn Atlantics ended the Cincinnati Red Stocking’s 91 game winning streak.
It’s a debate that thankfully will never end.
And that's why the real winner on Saturday night was the game of baseball.
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