Published October 29, 2024

No, I didn’t get the score of the game wrong. The Dodgers lead the Yankees three games to none in the best-of-seven World Series after last night’s 4-2 victory in Yankee Stadium.

I did think Los Angeles would get its shutout. That’s baseball, huh?

One thing that amused me was the sequence after Shohei Ohtani was hit by a pitch in the top of the ninth inning. He waited, as we all did, for the ruling confirming that the ball had hit his shoe, talking with the first-base coach and smiling.

Once cleared to occupy the base, Ohtani quickly turned his head to glance behind himself before taking his lead off first. It’s situational awareness, yes, checking things out, all but automatic at that level of baseball. And yet, I couldn’t help imagining Mystery Science Theater 3000 narration during that scene.

“Has he heard one story too many about New York crime? Dude, relax! You’re safe!”

“Let’s see a bobblehead do that!”

“For a moment there, I thought I saw Taylor Swift in the bleachers!”

“The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man is not looming behind you!”

Anyway, I wanted to see Mets vs. Guardians, so I don’t really have a rooting interest in this one. Truthfully, I don’t often root for teams as much as I do things that even I would find hard to explain.

At no point was it 9-5

And speaking of getting the score wrong, I don’t know what the heck was going on here when the Dodgers had a 4-0 lead late in the game.

Even as someone in the business of posting online stories, I was thrown by that one. My best guess is someone working with an early version of the running updates for Game 3 dropped in some dummy text somewhere and forgot to change or remove it. Also, Google is increasingly becoming close to unusable.

Image of baseball and bat by Mike Flippo via Shutterstock.