LOS ANGELES — The sport that had every thing ended at 11:50 p.m. PT on Monday. For the earlier 6 hours, 39 minutes, Recreation 3 of the World Collection performed out like a fantastical dreamscape of baseball, crammed with pressure and drama and insanity, with happenings the sport had by no means seen earlier than and will not ever see once more. It was pleasant, and nonetheless, when the 18th inning ended and the Los Angeles Dodgers had crushed the Toronto Blue Jays, 6-5, it was, in a means, a reduction, as a result of holding your breath for hours on finish will not be a sustainable technique to stay.
Such is the value we pay for an affair like Recreation 3. The Dodgers and Blue Jays competed at an distinctive stage within the second-longest sport in World Collection historical past. They punched and counterpunched, emptied their benches and bullpens. They executed with wizardry and located items of themselves they did not know existed. And within the 18th inning, it was Freddie Freeman, already the hero of final yr’s World Collection, who deposited a center-cut sinker from Brendon Little over the center-field fence 406 ft away.
There have been 703 video games performed within the 121-year historical past of the World Collection. And whereas there are actually opponents, this one launched itself into the higher echelon, undoubtedly elite, and left the 52,654 followers at Dodger Stadium as giddy as they have been nearly seven years to the day earlier, when the one different 18-inning sport in World Collection historical past ended the identical means: with a Dodgers walk-off homer.
Recreation 3 of the World Collection featured…
609 pitches (LAD: 312, TOR: 297)
37 runners left on base
25 place gamers used
19 pitchers used pic.twitter.com/MBHReOJ16x— ESPN Insights (@ESPNInsights) October 28, 2025
The heroes have been plentiful. Will Klein, the final man out of the Dodgers’ bullpen, a reliever who had topped out this yr at two innings and 30 pitches, threw 4 innings of one-hit ball and struck out 5 on 72 pitches. The final of them, an 86-mph curveball, induced a swing and miss from Tyler Heineman and a primal scream from Klein, who understood what had been requested of him and knew he’d delivered.
Video games do not turn out to be classics with out efforts like Klein’s. He recorded the ultimate out having walked the earlier two Toronto batters. Yoshinobu Yamamoto — who had thrown a 105-pitch full sport two days prior — warming up within the bullpen. The sight of that alone illustrated the anarchy of Recreation 3, a funhouse mirror of a ballgame, with every thing out of order.
Aside from the otherworldly expertise of Shohei Ohtani. Ohtani reached base 9 occasions, one thing that had been completed solely twice in huge league historical past — common season and postseason — and never since 1942, and his magnitude lorded over this sport from starting to finish. He led off the sport for the Dodgers with a double. He homered his subsequent time up. He doubled once more. He homered as soon as extra, his second of the sport, his eighth of the postseason, to tie the sport at 5 and unleash the chaos to come back.
At that time, Blue Jays supervisor John Schneider had seen sufficient. Within the ninth inning, Ohtani grew to become the primary hitter deliberately walked with the bases empty within the ninth inning or later of a postseason sport. The following thrice he got here to the plate — twice with the bases empty — Schneider held up 4 fingers and gladly gave Ohtani a free go. Within the seventeenth, with a runner on first, the Blue Jays opted to pitch to him — and Brendon Little promptly deposited 4 balls nowhere close to the strike zone.
Schneider’s decision-making earlier within the sport, by which he tried to scratch throughout runs by substituting in a cadre of pinch runners, left the Blue Jays’ lineup crippled for a lot of the second half of the sport. In opposition to a Dodgers bullpen that had been a sieve for a lot of the postseason, Toronto managed only one run in 13.1 innings. Los Angeles used 10 pitchers — together with Clayton Kershaw, the long run Corridor of Famer. Kershaw got here on within the thirteenth with the bases loaded, floor by means of a nine-pitch at-bat towards Nathan Lukes and induced a dribbler to second base that Tommy Edman scooped along with his glove to Freeman.
Moments like this abounded over the sport that featured 615 pitches, probably the most ever within the postseason since MLB started monitoring pitches in 1988. Within the 14th, Will Smith lofted a fly ball to heart area and dropped his bat, considering it was a sport winner. The ball died on the warning monitor. Teoscar Hernández, who, like Ohtani, had 4 hits, did the identical within the sixteenth. It wound up in a glove, too.
Freeman’s didn’t. He had struggled a lot of the postseason, coming into the sport with just one RBI. His first two video games had seemed a far cry from his World Collection final yr, when, nursing quite a few accidents, he hit a walk-off grand slam in Recreation 1 and received sequence MVP. It wasn’t simply the shortage of manufacturing. He wasn’t hitting the ball significantly laborious, both.
On the ultimate pitch, he lastly did. That is the form of factor that occurs in 18-inning video games. They’re uncomfortable and scary and may finish with the crack of a bat. It’s terrifying. It’s stunning. It’s every thing.
These fortunate sufficient to bear witness will always remember it, both. They squirmed and flinched and closed their eyes and prayed and squealed and cringed and, in the long run, noticed 31 hits and 37 runners left on base and 19 pitchers and one significantly majestic swing that, 10 minutes shy of Monday turning into Tuesday, ended the most effective World Collection video games ever — and gave the Dodgers a 2-1 benefit on this yr’s sequence.
They will return to the stadium Tuesday — lower than 18 hours later — and do it once more. It will not be the identical, as a result of baseball video games by no means are — however that is completely superb. Recreation 3 had every thing.