“The One After That”

I have been consumed by the 2025 World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays. It ended last Sunday in extra innings, with the Dodgers winning 5–4 at the Rogers Centre in Toronto. The victory gave them back-to-back titles—their second consecutive championship.

I have spent the past week rewatching pivotal events in Games 6 and 7 of the series, along with reaction videos from both teams’ fans. The videos of Blue Jays supporters reacting in disbelief and outrage are heartbreaking. One fan even blamed Toronto’s “curse,” which I hadn’t known about but is the stuff of legend.

That’s one of the reasons I love baseball—it is made of legends and algorithms. Without that improbable mix of myth, narrative, history, and statistics, would anybody really care about a game in which “men in tight pants hit a ball with sticks,” as one YouTuber put it? The fact that I do is a testament to the draw of the game, which feels more like a tidal pull—slow and inevitable under my feet.

Having worked through a week’s worth of videos, I have identified three characteristics of baseball in general—and of this series in particular—that I believe capture the essence of the game. Others have done this before, of course, from columnist George Will to pitcher Jim Bouton, who famously exposed the locker‑room side of the sport, including the three d’s of drinking, drugging, and debauchery. But I’d like to suggest three things from my perspective that make the game stand out.

The first is its improbability. Think of this in terms of uncertainty. That is, how likely is a player to hit a pinch‑hit grand slam, or the same player to hit a ball in the bottom of the ninth that gets wedged in the outfield wall? How about a force‑out at home plate decided in inches and milliseconds? Or another player hitting a solo home run in the ninth who hadn’t had a hit in a month? And what kind of money would you put on two outfielders colliding in left‑center and holding onto the ball to force extra innings?

Not only did I not put any money on it, but I stopped watching Game 7 and rented—of all things—The Boys from Brazil (1978), starring Gregory Peck as Josef Mengele and Laurence Olivier as a Nazi hunter with a thick Yiddish accent. When I went back to the game, reality sounded as improbable as Olivier’s accent.

The second is time. Baseball has its own sense of it—its own peculiar rhythm that feels out of time. Imagine watching paint dry in a combat zone. As you sit there, you never know when or where a mortar will explode. That alone can leave you frantic, desperate, wondering what in God’s name you are waiting for, and cursing baseball for its utter lack of urgency. Game 3 of the series lasted 18 innings over six hours and thirty‑nine minutes. That’s longer than my bedtime. Yet even that wasn’t a record.

Third, baseball truly is a team sport. It has stars, but in nine‑inning games spread over a best‑of‑seven series, everyone plays a part. Pitching predominates, but even Dodger starter Yoshi Yamamoto can’t win it all by himself. He needs the unlikely home run, the force‑out at home, the circus catch in left‑center—particularly when the Blue Jays came so close to winning so many times. Ronaldo, Magic Johnson, and Tom Brady may carry the team, but because of the improbabilities and rhythm of a ballgame, you never know what you’ll need or when you’ll need it. Managers earn every penny.

This entire series felt like a combat zone without any predictability. The only thing predictable was that something unpredictable would happen. You could sense it in the air. How many opportunities arose with the bases loaded and either none or one out? The series could have ended any number of times for either team. That it didn’t go in the home team’s favor is—as the song goes—a shame, even with Cracker Jacks.

Judging from fan reactions, not just Toronto but all of Canada took it hard. You could hear the crowd gasp at the Maple Leafs game when it was announced that the Dodgers had tied Game 7 in the top of the ninth with just two outs to go. It was as if people knew what was about to happen, and they prepared themselves. However, as one YouTuber noted hopefully, “There’s always next year… and the year after that… and the one after that.”

Image credits: Daiji Umemoto, CAYMAN. Want more? Click on “Amazon” for other publications or go to Robert Brancatelli. Visit other blog readers under “Who You Are.” Comment by clicking on “Leave a Reply” below, or contact us through the Contact tab above. This post is dedicated to Katherine Storey, naturalist.