I was 22 years old for Game 6 of the 2011 World Series, a few months out of college in an era that will inevitably cultivate cultural nostalgia but for which I feel little warmth. We were still in the throes of the Great Recession, I was working lousy hours in a call center because I couldn’t find a job in my field, and I felt directionless. And then my favorite baseball team made a miraculous run to make the postseason, and then my favorite baseball team upended the World Series favorites and the NL Central winners in the playoffs, and then my favorite baseball team won the greatest baseball game I had ever seen.

Game 6 of the 2011 World Series is an objectively great game–one might disagree on whether it’s the greatest baseball game, but it was outstanding. It was the greatest baseball game I had ever personally watched, and I felt comfortable asserting that this stance was at least mostly objective and not based on my favorite team being the one that won it. And it seems impossible that a game will ever mean as much to me as that game did.

Saturday night might have been better.

In the top of the ninth inning, while everybody even slightly familiar with Major League Baseball was looking ahead to the potential Shohei Ohtani do-or-die at-bat looming, Miguel Rojas, who is way overqualified to be a team’s lineup weak spot but who was nevertheless, hit a solo home run to tie the game. By Championship Probability Added, a Baseball Reference-based statistic that measures how much an individual play swings the probability of a team winning the World Series, it was the tenth most impactful play in the history of Major League Baseball, boosting the Dodgers’ chances of winning a title by 34.91%, turning a single-digit opportunity to win to a relatively even chance. Two-and-a-half innings later, it was the 12th most impactful play in baseball history.

At #5 is Will Smith’s 11th inning go-ahead home run, impactful of course as a go-ahead home run in any sense but aided even more by it coming with two outs and with a moderate swing to Toronto with their extra half-inning looming. At #4, now easily the most impactful play in baseball history which was to the benefit of the team on defense, was Alejandro Kirk’s game-ending double play, which pulled the Dodgers from slight World Series favorites (53.76%) to World Series champions in the blink of an eye, the inevitability of the play immediate to anybody, like myself, who had contemplated that the literal slowest runner in Major League Baseball was coming to the plate following Addison Barger’s one-out walk.

Plays one through three are not the three most famous plays in Major League Baseball history–none of them are even the most famous plays in their own games, which makes Alejandro Kirk’s groundout, likely a footnote to the Rojas and Smith home runs, all the more poetic at #4. #3 was future St. Louis Cardinals legend Tony Womack’s one-out, game-tying double off Mariano Rivera in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7 of the 2001 World Series. #2, a play which came two batters after the infamously named “Snodgrass’s Muff”, was Tris Speaker’s game-tying single (on which he advanced to second base on a throw to home plate) in the eighth and final game of the 1912 World Series. #1 came from the legendary Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, but it was not Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off home run but rather Hal Smith’s two-out, eighth inning home run for the Pittsburgh Pirates to lift the team from a one-run deficit to a two-run lead.

What happened on October 27, 2011 was extremely cool, and the idea that one, even a St. Louis Cardinals fan, would root against more extremely cool things happening in the future as a means to maintain Game 6’s place in the history books, is a futile effort. I would guess that most people reading this are unfamiliar with the sheer mayhem of Game 8 (!!) of the 1912 World Series; if you’re in your twenties or younger, you might reasonably not even know off-hand what the most famous play from the aforementioned Tony Womack game was. Eventually, the David Freese game will fade into differing levels of obscurity–there are already Major League Baseball players who are too young to remember it. Decades from now, especially outside of St. Louis, there will be young baseball fans who learn about the David Freese game and look upon it with the same fascination that I did when I learned that Game 7 of the 1960 World Series was so much cooler than its most famous play. Some day, in most of our lifetimes, large swaths of baseball fans won’t remember what happened on Saturday, either. But that won’t mean it wasn’t amazing.

I needed a few days to mull over Game 7 of the 2025 World Series, because I take these things way too seriously–the “#4, #5, and #12 moments in baseball history” fun fact was not something I read but something I pulled from my own now-496-line Microsoft Excel file listing every play in baseball history which made a 10% or greater impact on Championship Probability (before anyone asks–Game 6 of the 2011 World Series had six, an unusually high amount for a non-Game 7; Game 7 of the 2025 World Series had twelve). These were conclusions I wrote down the next day.

1. That was the best baseball game since (at least) Game 6 of the 2011 World Series. While Game 6 defensiveness, as I noted before, is pointless, I won’t pretend that I am not at least somewhat guilty of it. Especially after Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, an objectively very good baseball game that was magnified in public perception almost entirely because of the moribund franchise which won it, it seemed as though there was a rush to declare any half-decent game as immediately in the Greatest Of All Time conversation. I heard people declare Game 3 of the 2018 World Series one of the great games of all-time–that game (the eighteen inning one that ended on a Max Muncy walk-off home run) was slow and boring and was easily surpassed by 2025’s eighteen-inning epic, which was at least exciting during regulation and which at least had a pitch clock to speed things along. There are advantages to Game 7 over Game 6–the finality, the tightness of the game, the kinds of plays that you cannot articulate with Win Probability statistics (the Dodgers’ near-disastrous near-collision with Kiké Hernández and Andy Pages). There are also advantages to Game 6–no play in Game 7 flipped the game’s script as much as the David Freese triple, the sheer energy of the crowd that unlike Saturday was mostly rooting for the team doing the cool things, the final play of the game being defined by the triumph of a walk-off home run rather than a slow guy being slow. I’m not going to argue either way.
2. This is the best Game 7 I’ve ever seen, in any sport. The only Game 7 that is even close is the 2001 World Series, as referenced earlier. This doesn’t mean it is the greatest Game 7 of all-time, merely that among ones I saw, this was it. Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals had incredible historical stakes, between the Golden State Warriors’ pursuit of the greatest season in NBA history and the Cleveland Cavaliers’ attempts to win the city’s first title in decades and to fully solidify the LeBron James redemption arc, but the game itself, while good, was periodically sloppy and did not hang in the balance quite as long as Saturday’s game. The best NHL Stanley Cup Final Game 7 that I remember came in 2009, but while that one ended with a flurry (a Fleury, those who like terrible puns might note) of drama as the Detroit Red Wings desperately tried to even up the score, the rest of the game was pretty unexceptional.
3. This is the best Game 7 in Major League Baseball since 1960. There is plenty of competition here. The aforementioned 2001 Game 7 was high drama. The 1991 World Series was a 1-0 extra-innings affair that I never had the privilege of seeing without knowing the outcome. Games 7 of 1975 and 1986, while moderately underwhelming compared to the all-time classic Game Sixes, were still close battles with terrific comebacks to break the hearts of a Boston Red Sox fan base that has spent most of the 21st century exacting their revenge on the universe. The 1962 World Series, the very next Game 7 after 1960, was a 1-0 game with one of the most dramatic, if anticlimactic in retrospect, bottoms of the ninth in baseball history. But the sheer volume of drama of 2025 is what certifies it for me–there was an amazing ninth inning but there was also an amazing tenth and eleventh inning, and (and this is maybe its best argument for being superior to Game 6 in 2011) the first eight innings were also really good.
4. This is the greatest game in the history of baseball in which the visitors won. In early 2011, MLB Network hosted a listicle show of the twenty greatest games in baseball history, and up to that point, the highest ranked game in which the visitors won was Game 6 of the 1986 NLCS, a 16-inning victory by the New York Mets over the Houston Astros to advance to the World Series. And let’s be clear–this game was amazing. Because of the drama of Game 6 of that year’s World Series, it has arguably been overly lost to history, and I’m glad MLB Network recognized it. But a non-do or die game in a non-World Series just means inherently less stakes. Which game is in a vacuum greater is a valid conversation, but the added context of Literally Game 7 Of Literally The World Series makes me quite happy to declare that 2025 wins.