Freddie Freeman wallops his manner into World Series historical past with walk-off slam that’ll float eternally | USAEMALL.com

LOS ANGELES — Carlton Fisk … Kirby Puckett … Derek Jeter … David Freese.

As he smoothed the dirt in the batter’s box in the 10th inning Friday night, Freddie Freeman never could have envisioned he’d be spending the rest of his life hanging out with those October legends.

But then walk-off magic happened.

Before the next wave of Freeman’s bat, no living human could lean back in an easy chair and describe to you what a walk-off, lead-flipping, extra-inning World Series grand slam looked like. But we can now. It looks exactly like this.

History is an amazing thing to make — and a breathtaking thing to witness. A stadium rattles until it awakens every Richter Scale in Southern California. A walk-off hero jumps on home plate and disappears into a sea of hugs and laughs and tears of joy.

A scoreboard tries to tell this tale — Dodgers 6, Yankees 3 — but there is so much emotion and so much history that can’t possibly be captured by the final score of Friday’s Game 1 of the 2024 World Series.

So that’s where this column comes in handy. There are certain nights in October that seem to exist so those of us at Weird and Wild World HQ can help you make sense of them. This was one of those nights.

“Freddie just hit a ball that’s going to be in the history reels forever,” Dodgers reliever Michael Kopech told us afterward. “So it’s a special moment — for him and for us.”

When a man hits a walk-off home run in extra innings — in the World Freaking Series — he can’t imagine in that moment that the baseball is never going to come down. But he could ask the guys in the first sentence of this column …

Carlton Fisk … Kirby Puckett … Derek Jeter … David Freese.

They’re in that hallowed Extra-inning World Series Walk-off Club. So Freddie can ask them the next time he sees him. Or even better …

He could walk across his clubhouse and ask Max Muncy.

Six years ago, it was Muncy who stepped to the plate at 12:30 in the morning — California time — and pounded an 18th-inning walk-off home run of his own, to finish off the longest World Series game ever played: Game 3 of the 2018 Series.

It turned out to be the only game the Dodgers won against the Red Sox in that World Series. But if you think that means that home run was forgotten, Muncy is here to set you straight.

“Yeah, Freddie is gonna hear about this one for a long time,” Muncy said Friday night. “Freddie has hit some big home runs, especially in the postseason. But he’s gonna hear about this one.”

So why is that? What is it about home runs like this that cause them to reverberate through history and stick in our memory banks? We can help explain that!

Extra special

Freddie Freeman watches his slam sail into the seats. (Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Imagn Images)

This was the 693rd game in World Series history. So think about how wild (and weird) it is that no hitter, in any of those other 692 games, had written a script to match Freddie Freeman’s script.

How many walk-off slams had ever been hit, in any other World Series game? Yep, that would be none.

In fact, only one walk-off slam had ever ended a game in any other postseason round. That was hit by Nelson Cruz, in Game 2 of the 2011 ALDS. So what were the odds that Cruz would be in the park for this one, as a member of the Spanish-language Univision broadcast team? Baseball!

But moving right along, here comes a distinction even wilder than that. Wouldn’t you think that sometime, in the 119 previous World Series, somebody would have dug into a batter’s box somewhere, with his team trailing, and hit an extra-inning home run that turned a loss into a win?

You would think that, all right. But you would think wrong — because the complete list of men to do that consists of …

Freddie Freeman!

Or wouldn’t you think that somebody would have hit a home run that at least tied a World Series game in extra innings? Nope. No one has ever hit one of those, either.

So what we saw Freeman do Friday, in the 10th inning at Dodger Stadium, was produce an all-time October moment. And who can ever get enough of them!

“When you get told you do something like that, in this game that’s been around a very long time — I love the history of this game,” Freeman said. “To be a part of it, it’s special.”

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She is … gone

As the 10th inning began Friday night, one of my fellow baseball scribes turned to me and asked: What are the chances that Kirk Gibson limps out of the dugout to hit in this inning?

We laughed at the thought. But in retrospect …

In the history of the World Series, just two men have ever stood in a batter’s box with their team one out from defeat … and then hit a walk-off home run that changed everything:

Kirk Gibson, Game 1, 1988
Freddie Freeman, Game 1, 2024

(Hat tip: Paul Casella, MLB.com)

Geez. Holy Chavez Ravine. Gibson, of course, flipped that 1988 script in the ninth inning, not the 10th. Nevertheless, is that goosebumpy enough for you — even if Freeman hadn’t been limping around all week, much like Gibson did back in the day?

But when a few of us tried to recast The Kirk Gibson Story afterward, with Freeman as the new lead in this production, Freeman’s teammates were not all in on that. Especially not after Freeman had tripled in his first at-bat of the Series. After all, Gibson could barely make it to third base after his home run back in ’88. So are we sure this was the same thing?

C’mon, Muncy said, “Freddie’s been hobbling too fast. He’s moving good. He had a triple tonight. So I don’t know if you can compare that. From everything I heard, Gibson had half a leg.”

In a year that has been so improbable …

Freeman’s euphoric teammates wait to greet him at the plate after he ended Game 1. (Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Imagn Images)

When Freeman wriggled into the box with two outs in the 10th, the Dodgers’ chances of winning this game were only 26.7 percent, according to Baseball Reference. That changed swiftly, obviously. One moonshot into the right-field pavilion later, those chances were more like 100 percent.

So if you’re adding along at home, you know what that means: Freeman’s homer had just jumped their Win Probability by a staggering 73.3 percent, with one swing of the bat. Does that seem good? We’ll do you a favor, by stepping outside those decimal points to tell you just how good.

This was officially one of the biggest, most game-changing swings in the history of the World Series!

So there. Does that help make sense of it? And how cool is it that we can measure that with Baseball Reference’s handy dandy Pivotal Play Finder, which can rank every World Series hit by its Win Probability Added. So we did that.

Most pivotal extra-inning homers 

Most pivotal extra-inning hits 

 (*game-tying single in 10^th)

Most pivotal bases-loaded hits 

(*lead-flipping double with two outs in ninth)

And finally, here it comes, the leaderboard you’ve been waiting for but might not have known you were. It’s the …

Most pivotal World Series walk-off hits ever 

(Source: Baseball Reference)

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Their intentions were good

After the intentional walk, Freeman dropped the mic. (Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Imagn Images)

But wait. There’s more. This grand slam would not have been possible if the Yankees hadn’t filled up the bases by intentionally walking Mookie Betts to pitch to Freeman. So how rare is a postseason grand slam following an intentional walk?

Whoa, we hadn’t had one of those since … 12 days ago, when these same Dodgers intentionally walked Francisco Lindor to fill the bases for Mark Vientos … in this same stadium. The baseball gods work in mysterious ways, don’t they?

But if we just confine this discussion to intentional walks that set up a slam in the World Series, we have only four of those in history:

(Source: STATS Perform)

But you’ll notice this was the first extra-inning intentional walk to set up a grand slam in World Series history — and only the second in postseason history. The other was issued by … Dave Roberts, who intentionally walked a guy named Juan Soto to get to Howie Kendrick in the 10th inning of Game 5 of the 2019 NLDS. That didn’t go quite as well for the Dodgers manager as this!

No wonder Roberts would later describe this game as maybe “the greatest baseball moment I’ve ever witnessed.”

But he was not alone. We’ve measured the cool factor of this home run with lots of numbers. Yet maybe the truest measure was the euphoria this epic blast infused in Freeman’s teammates. An hour later, that feeling hadn’t subsided — not even a little.

“I can’t imagine how Freddie is feeling right now,” said Michael Kopech, “because I feel like I’m floating.”

There’s another baseball game to play Saturday. So the Dodgers will show up and play all nine innings of it (assuming that’s enough). But we should let them in on a secret. If they go on to win this thing, when they all close their eyes — in five years, 10 years, 20 years — and think back on this World Series, they’ll still be floating …

Just like Freeman’s walk-off slam for the ages.

Party of Three

Freeman celebrates after tripling in the first inning. (Jason Parkhurst / Imagn Images)

OK, hang with us for just another minute. There are three more things you need to know about this game!

EMPTY NESTOR — Somebody has to give up these momentous home runs. In this case, that somebody was Nestor Cortes. So what’s his claim to fame? As Eric Orns, one of our favorite readers/baseball stat gurus, reports, Cortes became the first pitcher in postseason history — at least in the pitch-count era (1988-present) — to give up two runs on two pitches.

First pitch — spectacular catch by Alex Verdugo on Shohei Ohtani’s foul looper down the left-field line.

Next pitch (after an intentional walk that now requires zero pitches) — walk-off slam.

Hey, at least the Dodgers didn’t run up his pitch count.

GO DEEPER

Nestor Cortes wanted the ball. And all that came with it

GRAND SLAM FEVER — Does it feel like there’s a grand slam every week in this postseason? It should — because this was the fifth of the postseason. And we’re not through playing yet. So as Orns reminds us, it would take only one more slam to break the record for most in a single postseason.

The two years with five of them: 2021 and 1998. Stay tuned!

TRIPLE THREAT — Finally, have we mentioned that Freeman had a triple in his first at-bat of this game and a walk-off extra-inning homer in his last at-bat? We had a hunch he was the first player in history to do that in a World Series. Boy, were we wrong. But it was worth checking … because what a list of guys who have hit a triple and an extra-inning walk-off in the same World Series game.

(Source: Baseball Reference / Stathead)

Just looking at that list, it reminded us that we remember those games as The David Freese Game … The Derek Jeter “Mr. November” Game … and The Kirby Puckett “We’ll See You Tomorrow Night” Game. So little does Freeman know it, but what we saw Friday will go down in the annals as (what else) The Freddie Freeman Game. Which tells you all you need to know about a classic October evening of …

Baseball!

GO DEEPER

Freeman’s grand statement lifts Dodgers over Yankees in Game 1: Takeaways

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Yankees’ Boone explains ill-fated decision to use Cortes against Dodger lefties

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Juan Soto owns defensive shortcomings in Game 1, as sloppy play stifles Yankees

(Top photo: Keith Birmingham / MediaNews Group / Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)