Thinking . . . and thinking . . . and thinking about the 2025 baseball postseason. One for the ages.

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Well, its all over including the parade. The World Series Champion Los Angeles Dodgers were celebrated in their hometown on Monday with a celebratory parade that went along the streets of LA and ended up in front of 52,700 fans at Dodger Stadium.

And while we generally shorten the title to World Champions . . . leaving out the “series” piece . . . this time it felt like the whole world truly got into the mix. The Blue Jays felt like they were representing all of Canada (more on that in a moment) and the Dodgers would never have won without their contingent of Japanese superstars. What often seems provincial and strictly American seems to have suddenly exploded onto the world scene.

I was in Europe and basically missed all the wild card games and most of the Division series this year. But once I returned home I was glued to the television in what turned out to be a riveting postseason full of drama, heartbreak and unexpected joy. Throughout it all, I jotted myself little reminders of things I didn’t want to forget.

So here is my totally subjective and highly selective look at the 2025 baseball postseason.

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THE FIRST OF SEVERAL THINGS I’VE NEVER SEEN IN MY DECADES OF WATCHING BASEBALL

Game 1 of the NLCS between the Dodgers and Brewers started off with a bang and ended with a whimper.

“A wild sequence of events played out in the top of the fourth inning when Brewers center fielder Sal Frelick had a home run-robbing catch pop out of his glove, creating one of the wackiest postseason moments in recent memory. With the bases loaded and Dodgers infielder Max Muncy at the plate and one out, he hit a long ball towards the center field wall, sending Frelick on a chase. The outfielder snagged the ball at the wall, but it popped out before he was able to gain full control of it.

Just watch it . . . and see how the chaos ensued.

Here was Joe Posnanski’s take on the play:

“’It’s in and out of his glove, but he caught it,’ the excellent Brian Anderson shouted from he booth. ‘And now, chaos on the bases. Might have a play at the plate. The throw … not in time! … No! He’s out! HE’S OUT!’ . . .

Then Brewers catcher William Contreras jogged over to third base to step on the bag … because Will Smith, who was also convinced that Frelick had caught the ball, had returned to second.

Score it 8-6-2-2u—the craziest, wildest, most wonderful double play I’ve ever seen.

It took me five whole minutes to explain to Margo what had happened, and that was a very fun five minutes.

Baseball! This is the magic. We’ve all seen countless fly balls hit with a runner on third base. But we never saw that before.”

Unfortunately, with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, Blake Treinen, who Posnanski describes as a “one-man Dodgers wrecking crew” which is not a great thing to be since he’s on the Dodgers, pitched to Brice Turang with the bases loaded, two out, and LA clinging to a one-run lead. Turang struck out on a pitch about a foot over his head. As I said, it ended in a whimper.

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THE NLCS ENDED QUICKLY WITH AN OTHERWORLDLY PERFORMANCE

Shohei is otherworldly . . . and I don’t think he’ll be the last. In Game 4 of the NLCS, he was the first guy to strike out 10 batters and hit three home runs in one game. Ever. It truly boggles the mind.

And I’m going to go against the conventional wisdom that says we’ll never see another two-way baseball player like Ohtani. I actually believe that he will inspire whole generations of new athletes to press to both pitch and bat, and some of them may also be very, very good.

Sweeps in the League Championship Series are usually bad for the team that does the sweeping when the World Series rolls around . . . except when they’re not (looking at you 2019 World Series Champion Nationals) . . . and now the 2025 Dodgers.

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HOW MANY TIMES CAN THE BLUE JAYS DODGE THE BULLET

In Game 5 of the ALCS, Eugenio Suárez clubbed the biggest hit in Seattle baseball history, an eighth-inning grand slam that beat the Blue Jays and put the Mariners on the brink of their first-ever World Series. Except they didn’t make it.

The George Springer home run that broke Seattle’s heart in the ALCS was both predictable and perplexing.

The predictable part: Springer has a history of postseason greatness. The perplexing? How in the world did Seattle manager Dan Wilson choose to bring in Eduard Bazardo to pitch to Springer when he had his top set-up man and his closer fresh and rested. It is Game 7, for crying out loud. What are you saving them for?

Toronto dodges another bullet, and Seattle, with the wonderful Cal Raleigh, will have to wait ’til next year.

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QUICK TAKES ON THE WORLD SERIES

• The announcers for FOX are bad. Just awful. How could the network inflict them on us during this prime baseball event? (Oh, I forget, it is FOX.) Joe Davis sounds as if he is reading from cards with prepared sound bites that someone thought sounded intelligent. John Smoltz just never stops talking.

• The commercials drive me crazy, and because this was a seven game series we all saw them night after night after night. The ridiculous Google Cloud commercials (e.g., does stepping on the line increase or decrease your chances of winning) mix up correlation and causation in a way that even a third grader would understand.

• The worst of the commercials (outside the political ones from Virginia) were the Tom Brady “football knowledge” ads. They are stupid gobblygook that just prove Thomas Boswell’s point in his famous 99 Reasons Baseball is Better than Football,

“Football players, somewhere back in their phylogenic development, learned how to talk like football coaches. (‘Our goals this week were to contain Dickerson and control the line of scrimmage.’) Baseball players say things like, ‘This pitcher’s so bad that when he comes in, the grounds crew drags the warning track.’”

• The Blue Jays have to be the slowest team in baseball. Perhaps that’s because they have a number of John Kruk-type “I’m not an athlete, lady, I’m a baseball player” guys, beginning with 5’8″/245 pound Alejandro Kirk. I think Kirk is great, but the announcers got it right when they said he’s probably hit more 400′ singles than anyone else in baseball. He’s not exactly a rocket out of the batter’s box.

• Other things I’ve never seen: A batter in Game 7 gets hit by a pitch, and the very next batter drills a single off the pitcher’s leg. That’ll teach him!

• I loved seeing Sandy Koufax at the games in LA. What an icon.

• It was especially wonderful to see Koufax in a series that featured “the return of the starting pitcher.” Yoshinobu Yamamoto was incredible, and he’s the best pitcher on the planet. Full stop. Jayson Stark recapped his series this way:

“In Game 2 last Saturday, he became the first pitcher since Curt Schilling (2001) to throw back-to-back postseason complete games. That was cool… In Game 3 on Monday, he volunteered to go to the bullpen and was actually warming up in the 18th inning before that marathon ended. That was heroic… Then, in Game 6 on Friday, he started the game that saved the Dodgers’ season, throwing 96 pitches over six innings. That was huge.

So after that game Friday night, Yamamoto was the one pitcher whom his manager, Dave Roberts, said would not be available in Game 7. Made sense—to everyone on the planet not named Yamamoto. So who came trotting out of the Dodgers’ bullpen in the ninth inning to pitch the last 2 2/3 innings of Game 7 in relief? . . .

From 96 pitches Friday to 34 more Saturday—on zero days’ rest? Who does that in this day and age?”

• After losing a heart-breaking and unforgettable 18-inning Game 3, Toronto came back to prove the old baseball adage, “momentum is tomorrow’s starting pitcher.”

• Vlad, Jr. even topped his father. Oh, and his father’s in the Hall of Fame.

• I’m beginning to think that Joe Posnanski has something when he goes on and on and on about how the intentional walk needs to change. I like his suggestion of giving batters who are issued intentional walks or four pitch walks two bases. Let’s stop taking the bat out of the hands of the best players.

• Posnanski also had a good way of showing that Ohtani is really human (at least a bit). When he was thrown out stealing with some ghastly baserunning, Joe described it as a TOOTBLAN (Thrown Out On The Bases Like A Nincompoop.) Priceless.

• I like Freddy Freeman—even if he does play for the Dodgers and has been a Nats-killer for years.

• Toronto had multiple (and I mean MULTIPLE) opportunities to win this series. By the end of the 8th inning in Game 7 I was pretty sure they had blown all those chances. I was right. They couldn’t dodge that last bullet.

• I wrote last week about how “the Dodgers are Achilles. They were dipped into the River Styx by the Baseball Gods, and thus they are Shohei and Mookie and Freddie and Yoshi and Blake and Teo and Tyler and all the rest, and thus are mostly invulnerable. But they were held by the heel, and the heel is not invulnerable, and the heel is that ghastly bullpen.” As my good friend and brilliant reader John Hildreth texted me after Game 7, “Dodgers stayed out of their gruesome bullpen.” That’s a pretty good analysis of why they are World Series Champs.

• I love Canada. Throughout this series it felt like the entire country had united behind the Blue Jays. As the only Canadian team in MLB that’s understandable. But there’s more going on at the moment, with our country fighting a stupid trade war over one man’s bruised ego. So it was great to see how the Blue Jay fans put their heart and soul into singing O Canada each night in Toronto. I think there’s something that progressives can learn from that scene: don’t be afraid to be patriotic.

Yes, and Game 7 ended with Dodgers 5, Blue Jays 4, “in a game in which the winning team never led until the 11th inning.” Jayson Stark noted that “It took historic home runs sailing through the Toronto sky in the ninth and 11^th innings. Both teams threw out the go-ahead run at the plate—in back-to-back half-innings. The benches and dugouts emptied after a fourth-inning hit-by-pitch. And that’s not even the half of it.”

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I KNOW HOW THOSE TORONTO FANS FEEL

Two of my favorite sportswriters wrote fantastic columns about Game 7: the wonderful Jayson Stark in The Athletic and the always insightful Joe Posnanski for his Joe Blogs newsletter. Just read them.

Game 7 of the World Series was one of the best games I’ve ever seen. Most neutral observers are saying it capped the best World Series ever. But you wouldn’t get that sentiment from the Toronto fans. The Blue Jays were two outs away from becoming World Champions, the fans were going crazy, and then Miguel Rojas, who had hit exactly one home run off a righty all year, hit a 105.3 MPH blazer over the left field wall and the air just went out of the entire stadium.

As Stark wrote, “Ready for the complete list of men who have hit a game-tying World Series home run in the ninth inning of a Game 7? Here it comes:

Miguel Rojas — Game 7, 2025
End of list“

I’ve been there. Twice.

The first was not the final game of the series, but it still hurt. I was in the stands in 2014 when rookie manager Matt Williams walked to the mound in the top of the 9th. There stood Jordan Zimmermann, just one out away from completing two of the most amazing back-to-back games with a potential win in Game 2 of the 2014 National League Division Series following his no-hitter to end the season. Only Williams never gives him the chance. Williams pulls Zimm from the game and puts in . . . yes . . . Drew Storen (more on him in a minute), who quickly gave up two hits and one run and the Nats went on to lose the game in an excruciating 18 innings. 

It was worse in 2012. I was there for Game 5 of the 2012 National League Division Series, camera up and ready to capture Drew Storen throwing the division-winning strike that never came.

I would refer Toronto’s long-suffering fans to another baseball fan with a way for words, who said it best:

“It breaks your heart.  It is designed to break your heart.  The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.“

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GREATEST GAME EVER?

I can’t finish without quoting Joe Posnanski‘s last words about Game 7:

“The point is, there is no greatest game in baseball history, not really; the game has been around too long, too many extraordinary things have happened, too many emotions are tied up in our memories, too many great games have been played.

And yet, we HAVE to ask if Saturday’s game was the greatest ever — if this was the Greatest World Series ever; the folks at MLB dusted off a ranking I did a few years ago on that subject—because that’s the point, isn’t it? We want to mark our time. They’ve been playing professional baseball for 150 years. You would think by now that we’ve seen everything.

And games like Saturday night remind us: No. This is baseball.

We haven’t seen anything yet.”

Only 97 days until pitchers and catchers report.

More to come . . .

DJB

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UPDATE: A couple of days after this post went live, Joe Posnanski had a two-part series on Joe Blogs entitled 100 Things I Love About Baseball. Here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2. If this had come out before I wrote my post I would have included a few, but there you go. It was impossible for me to pick a favorite, but here’s a sampling:

• No. 74: Defensive indifference. What a term.
• No. 52: “The game of ball is glorious.” — Walt Whitman.
• No. 10: That the bases can be loaded, juiced, drunk, jammed, packed, full, clogged, occupied, stacked, and bursting, and when that happens, there’s no room for the batter, no place to put him, no margin for error, nowhere to hide, no excuses left, no spot for waste pitches, but there’s also a play at every base, a force at home, a chance to be the hero, an opportunity for the double play, an opening to win this game with one swing of the bat!
• No. 9: The first peek at the outfield green when you walk up the stairs into a ballpark.