Freddy Freeman had the winning hit in Game 1 of the World Series, but he delivered more than that to Dodgers, baseball fans, the Fox network, and MLB. He ensured that the Los Angeles-New York matchup lived up to the hype from the beginning, while evoking one of Dodgers' fans sweetest World Series memories. With two outs and the bases loaded in the 10th inning, Yahoo Sports reports, Freeman drove the first pitch of his at-bat into the right field stands Friday night for a 6-3 Dodgers victory over the Yankees. It was the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history.
Freeman was an improbable hero, given that he's been playing on a badly sprained ankle. In the playoffs leading up to this, he'd had a single RBI and no home runs. A hobbled hitter slugging a walk-off postseason homer reminded fans of Kirk Gibson's heroics in the 1988 World Series. In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Bill Plaschke calls Freeman's moment "crazily uncanny in its similarities" to Gibson's. That Dodgers star had limped to the plate in Game 1, then celebrated as he painfully rounded the bases for a walk-off winner that the Oakland A's did not recover from. "Everything was the same outside of the fist pumps," Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said Friday night.
The star first baseman described the aftermath of his home run by saying, "It felt like nothing, just kind of floating." In the broader context, Game 1 gave baseball exactly what it needed, Barry Svrluga writes in a Washington Post column: "the sport's two biggest markets, with historic franchises and enormous fan bases, drawing national eyes—sorry, international eyes—to its most important event. And that event delivering." The headline called the game perfect, and Svrluga writes, "Six more of these, please." Game 2 is at 8:08pm ET Saturday on Fox. (More World Series stories.)
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