Ballpark Figures

“Baseball is but a game, glitter on dirt. It is three outs and four bases and nine innings (sometimes 18) and a bunch of millionaires grunting on your TV screen. It is a nice summer day, a hot dog and a few cold ones. It’s an expensive jersey that you didn’t need but bought anyway. And it is all, compared to the realities of life, completely trivial. It’s a beautiful distraction. Neither the actions nor the outcomes actually matter. In other words: It’s all only as important and as meaningful as it makes us feel. And on Saturday, this heavenly, cruel, perfectly imperfect sport sent any and all who interacted with World Series Game 7 through every emotion the human experience has to offer. Fans from Saskatchewan to Southern California, from Toronto to Tokyo, were held captive by the game’s wondrous, tortuous, addictive power. It was, in every way, the best baseball has to offer.” Game 7 took fans everywhere in an off-the-rails thrill ride.

+ Outside of LA (and maybe including it), no one was more thrilled than baseball fans in Japan.

+ “Barely 24 hours from the most important start of his life, Yoshinobu Yamamoto delivered one of the gutsiest, most improbable ironman performances that the World Series has ever seen.” The Dodgers Ace Who Made World Series History. (It was positively Bumgarner-esque.)

+ “Saturday’s Game 7 World Series loss isn’t the kind that fades. It embeds itself into a city’s—or, in this case, an entire country’s—sporting memory. It will fester and linger not just in the hours and days that follow, but in the years and decades that stretch beyond it.” The 2025 Blue Jays Will Live Forever in the Land of the Almost. (If it makes them feel any better, Giants fans feel just as bad, which is why this is probably as good a time as any to remind you that Wilmer checked his swing.)