I think we can all agree we got cheated last night, and to be technical about it, it was still last night—at least on the West Coast where the nice people live—when Freddie Freeman hit the 609th pitch of Game 3 of the 2025 World Series into the darkness beyond center field. We stayed up as a nation through 399 minutes of magnificent, tortuous, agonizing, and weirdly theoretical baseball (except, of course, for you contemptible candypants weenies who “needed your sleep” or whatever other weak-tea excuse you used to justify your sloth), and we were this close to Los Angeles manager Dave Roberts having to make the most agonizing choice in managerial history.
Whether to bring in Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the pitcher who just threw a complete game 48 hours earlier, for the 19th inning that never happened. It would have been a dangerous, valorous, stupid, and entirely noble move made possible only because Yamamoto himself volunteered to do so. It was a total hero play by the only person who could have made it given the context. It would have been the event of not only this baseball season but this calendar year, even if he’d been battered.
