For the first time in 46 years, a sitting US president was about to throw out the first pitch in a World Series game.
Deep in the bowels of Yankee Stadium, George W. Bush was being warmed up by a man wearing a softball mitt. Outside on the diamond, a fake umpire was standing near home plate with a gun and a taser concealed beneath his uniform. Above them, the stadium was rocking, so much so that the picture frames in the offices below were hanging askew.
Nothing was normal on October 30, 2001: The New York Yankees were hosting the Arizona Diamondbacks for the biggest prize in baseball in a city still in shock – just 13 miles away, the debris from the World Trade Center still burned .
But despite all the fear and emotion, it would end up being one of the greatest World Series ever played.
Read more about why this particular edition of the Fall Classic still means so much to so many all these years later.
The first two games of the World Series were close – each ended with the tying run 90 feet from home on third base.
The crazy part is, they didn’t feel close. They felt like legitimate and legible depictions of how the Brewers never waver on the way to ultimate success. They felt like the Brewers were the better team.
But if there was any doubt, Game 3 should have convinced you.
The Rays – a great team, the other one-seed! – managed just three hits. They made outs on the basepaths again , and their regular season aggressiveness on the bases has started to look like a liability this series. Chandler Simpson made the catch of the postseason early on, but errors plagued them elsewhere.
What are you supposed to do against a team that can put up double-digits on small ball? The Brewers scored 10 runs without the ball leaving the park once. They scored eight of them with two outs in the fifth inning on a history-making seven-straight hits (no team has had that many consecutive hits in a postseason…ever).
The next time they came to the plate, they managed another couple singles that never came around to score, but the point is: These guys do not let up.
Jackson Chourio was 4-for-5. Robert Gasser – a 27-year-old rookie – faced the minimum through six innings. And the bullpen is usually the Brewers’ biggest strength!
It’s very probable the Brewers will win the World Series, possibly as soon as tonight. It will be the first in the team’s history.
When they do, it will be because they undeniably deserve it. They have lost just one game this entire postseason. They swept the two-time champion Dodgers who are regularly and accurately compared to Goliath. They had the best regular-season record. They had the best regular-season record last year.
And, even if you’re uninterested in the labor implications, we should never stop marveling that a team which plays in the smallest media market in the sport, with a bottom-10 payroll, has established this level of consistent dominance.
Or, we’re about to witness an all-time comeback by the Rays.
There were nine innings of Monday’s Game 3, but it really all came down to one half-inning of history.
The Milwaukee Brewers used seven consecutive hits to score eight runs, all of which came with two outs, to trounce the Tampa Bay Rays and move within one win of claiming the franchise’s first World Series. Both those seven consecutive two-out hits and eight two-out runs were World Series records.
The Brewers got on the board first in the third with a couple of soft hits that found the right holes in the Rays’ defense. Jackson Chourio laced a single – his second in a day where he would go 4 for 5 – and Jake Bauers drew a walk. They cashed in when Christian Yelich hit his second bloop single of the game to bring Chourio in.
On the very next pitch, William Contreras dropped a single into right field where Victor Mesa, Jr. struggled to field it cleanly, allowing Bauers to score.
The Rays quickly went down in order repeatedly, dominated by Brewers’ starter Robert Gasser. When the Brewers came up in the top of the fifth, they were poised to make history.
With Chourio and Yelich having reached on a hit and walk, Contreras hit a chopper to third base, but replay showed Yelich beat the throw from a spinning Caminero at second, setting up a bases loaded situation. After a pitching change, Brice Turang then smashed a ball right back through the box and off the glove of Taylor Walls. Chourio and Yelich scored as the ball trickled into center field.
The Brewers kept the pressure on with a single from Garrett Mitchell and a double from Cooper Pratt to plate three more runs and suddenly the game was out of hand. Sal Frelick then hit a double into the left field corner to bring Pratt in for with yet another run.
After a pitching change, David Hamilton smacked a single into center field off Cole Sulser to score Frelick. Chourio, who is just 22, then came up and collected his second hit of the inning, a double to plate Hamilton from first base.
After that, things were pretty much academic (even if Frelick was diving in the outfield up 10 runs on his injured shoulder). The Rays scored once in the bottom of the ninth on Yandy Díaz’s long double to make it 10-1.
The Brewers look nailed on to win this series – and if they don’t, it’ll be a historic comeback for the Rays. No team has ever come back from 0-3 in the World Series to win the championship.
After one of the most dominant performances in recent World Series history, the Milwaukee Brewers are on the verge of history.
The Brew Crew have never won a World Series title since the team was founded as the Seattle Pilots in 1969. They’ve been within a game of a championship before, losing in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals.
They’ve got a few more cracks at it now with a 3-0 lead over the Tampa Bay Rays.
After 10-1 laugher on Monday, the Rays will need to start making a historic comeback happen tonight if they want to have any shot at shocking the baseball world with a comeback. No team has ever come from 0-3 down to win the World Series. And of the 25 teams who have faced that deficit, 21 of them got swept.
That’s a lot of history staring Tampa in the face. The question is now how they respond.
The game airs at 8 p.m. ET on Fox and streams on Fox One and MLB.tv. We’ll be here all night with all the news, analysis, highlights and live reactions you could want from this edition of the Fall Classic.
