With the Los Angeles Dodgers down to their final out, trailing 3-2 in the 10th inning, Game 1 of the World Series looked as if it belonged to the New York Yankees.
Then, the impossible happened.
Freddie Freeman sent a four-seam fastball 412 feet away and into baseball lore for eternity.
The pitcher on the wrong end of the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history, Nestor Cortes, still seems to rightfully carry some resentment from that infamously unfortunate moment of his career.
Cortes was promptly traded this offseason for two-time All-Star Devin Williams, three days after his birthday. He is looking to start the next chapter of his baseball life as a member of the Milwaukee Brewers.
The southpaw spoke to the Athletic’s Tyler Kepner about what transpired last October and is still holding onto the belief that New York were the better team in the World Series.
“We had done enough to win that game,” Cortes said. “They can talk whatever they want to talk, but we win Game 1 — which we should have — we lost 2 and 3, we win Game 4 and we should have won Game 5. Then we go back to L.A. up 3 to 2.
“So people can say it slipped away from us, people can say we made a lot of mistakes, which we did. But at the end of the day, we were the better team. I see it that way, and I’m sure everybody in that clubhouse sees it that way. The reality (could have been) going back to LA leading 3-2. It didn’t happen that way and they deserve all the credit in the world, they won the World Series. At the moment, they showed they were the better team.”
Baseball is a game made up of numerous moments that all come together over the course of nine (and sometimes a few more) innings. One player or one moment can sometimes dictate how a game ends, or as we saw in October, leading to how a season ends.
The game of hypotheticals can be played all season long about how the World Series could have gone, but all the baseball world has is what actually happened and the moments the Dodgers won with their talented organization.
As the quest to become baseball’s first back-to-back champions in a quarter-century gets underway, Los Angeles hopes to have the team that will win the battle of key moments once again, and raise the commisioner’s trophy once more.
