There is a somewhat prevalent belief among fans that baseball should be boring. That is, baseball is a sport best suited for the interminable regular season grind of 162 games, and is best viewed at noon with a beer in hand, not in discrete odd-numbered series. Even though dismissing the euphoric potential of postseason baseball is straightforwardly outrageous, there are certain truths to this school of thinking. A three- or five- or even seven-game series is a hilarious way to determine the success of an MLB team; lazy regular-season baseball games are an ideal exercise in hedonism; and it’s a good reminder that playoff games—for all the stakes and pressure and potential—can still, by virtue of being baseball and thus fundamentally at the whims of luck, wind up being, well. Just fine, I guess.
For every historic Game 3 in the World Series, there is a Game 4, where everything unfolds about as you might expect. Shohei Ohtani the batter does not reach base nine times; Shohei Ohtani the pitcher does not throw six shutout innings and also hit three homers. The game lasts nine innings with a respectable, series-leveling 6-2 scoreline, instead of 18 innings with a walk-off home run. The nerve!
Instead of unlikely heroes, it was likely villains: Here was the Los Angeles bullpen that was promised, except even more decimated, resulting in an unfortunate inning of Anthony Banda into Blake Treinen that produced four earned runs (two of them inherited from Ohtani) and put the game out of reach. It was likely heroes, too, on the side of the Blue Jays: an impossibly deep offense epitomized on one end by Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who socked his seventh dinger of the postseason and has been the best bat across all of October, and on the other end by Ernie “Enrique Hernández” Clement, who is evidently a postseason god despite being a below-average hitter during the regular season.
That is not to malign Game 4 as being egregiously boring. No game, and especially not a playoff game, that sees Ohtani pitching to Guerrero can possibly be boring. Ohtani opened the duel in the first inning by striking out Guerrero on three pitches. Guerrero responded the next time through the order, with Nathan Lukes on first and one out, sending a sweeper that hung at the top of the zone out over the left-center wall. Fittingly, the third at-bat was one where neither really won. Ohtani, who was probably running on less than his usual 12 hours of sleep but is nonetheless not a coward, pumped the zone with 99 mph four-seamers, and induced a hard-hit lineout to end the fifth inning.
It was tough to say, when Louis Varland allowed two baserunners without recording an out in the bottom of the ninth inning, if my expectation that the Dodgers might just come back to tie the game was because of the Blue Jays bullpen that was promised (bad), or the Dodgers offense that was promised (good!), or because the absurdities of Game 3 set an impossibly high standard. Regardless, both the funniest and most fun results failed to pass. The Dodgers’ bottom of the order grounded out and then struck out. Dodgers outfielder Alex Call provided one last bit of intrigue with his at-bat: Should Call get on base, would the Blue Jays actually walk Ohtani with two outs and a four-run lead, especially considering that he was 0-for-3 with one walk to that point? Unfortunately, Call lined out, so we will never know. But for at least one second, we believed.
The Blue Jays won the game, 6-2, and tied the series at 2-2; most importantly, they guaranteed themselves (and the spectators) a Game 6. Both teams reified their win conditions for the greater audience, in case you didn’t already know that the Dodgers had to keep the Blue Jays away from the bullpen, and the Blue Jays had to get some good and/or lucky appearances from their pitching rotation and hope to get to the L.A. bullpen.
Confirming prior beliefs is all well and good, but while a slightly boring regular-season game is just a slightly boring regular-season game, a slightly boring playoff game inevitably feels like a bit of a disappointment. That said, perhaps fully embracing the arbitrariness of baseball has unlocked something inside my brain that derives a sick, simple-minded pleasure at watching an expected outcome unfold. Game 3 was almost literally two games for the price of one; if that’s your standard, you’ll be disappointed 99 percent of the time. But there is something oddly satisfying in seeing Shohei Ohtani get walked, again, in his very first at-bat, and in watching Dave Roberts, who just can’t help himself, go back for more Blake Treinen.
