Baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, competes with its own deep mythology. So many of its highlights are in black and white, and so many of its GOATs are ghosts, that the former national pastime is easily dismissed as past its prime. It isn’t. The 2025 postseason, which ended when the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays in the 11th inning of the seventh game of an ulcer-inducing World Series, stands with any in baseball history.

The early rounds of the postseason were enlivened by extraordinary feats from the game’s two biggest stars, but that was just baseball clearing its throat for the World Series, which earned its title—in English, Spanish, and Japanese; in the United States and Canada—as a genuine Fall Classic. Major League Baseball is 149 years old. The National League was founded a month before Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. And the game somehow still delivers the unexpected and the unforeseeable.

Game 3 of the World Series was a stone-cold thriller, with peaks of high drama and longueurs of exquisitely tense tedium. It started at 5:11 p.m. in Los Angeles and ended shortly before midnight, when the Dodgers’ first baseman Freddie Freeman finally hit a solo home run to the black void of the batter’s eye in center field. The home team earned a 6–5 win, a two-games-to-one series lead, and the chance for both teams to briefly rest the record 19 pitchers they collectivel