Game 4 of the 2020 World Series delivers baseball bliss.
ARLINGTON, Texas — It happened just past midnight on the East Coast, 34 years to the day the last time a World Series game concluded like this. There are so many possible outcomes for the final play of a baseball game. Home run. Strikeout. Single. Groundout.
Written content by Jeff Passan via ESPN
It’s a testament to how good players are that what unfolded in the earliest hours of Sunday morning was so jaw-dropping, an unforgettable October moment, when a fielding error ends a World Series game.
Actually, it was two errors. A game like this, jam-packed with the very things that make baseball so addictive, deserved no less than something historic — something even more improbable than Bill Buckner’s infamous gaffe Oct. 25, 1986. The denouement of Game 4 — Los Angeles Dodgers catcher Will Smith dropping a ball at home plate that allowed Tampa Bay Rays outfielder Randy Arozarena to dash home, pound home plate with his right hand and gift-wrap their breathtaking 8-7 victory — squashed a potential coronation and breathed life into a series that’s again even.
How these 4 hours, 10 minutes of pure baseball bliss came together only adds to the implausibility of it all, but then that’s why this game is bound to go down in the annals as one of the most memorable in the 116 World Series that have been played. Even before Brett Phillips looped a two-out, two-strike pitch off Kenley Jansen into center field, even before Chris Taylor committed the other error, booting the ball as he tried to field it, even before Arozarena stumbled after rounding third, even before Smith’s howler let him off the hook, this was a righteous ballgame, an emotional vise, squeezing tighter and tighter until the whole thing was too much and burst in spectacular fashion.
It all started around 2 p.m. on Aug. 27. Four days before the trade deadline, the Kansas City Royals had agreed to a deal to send Phillips, a backup outfielder, to the Rays. Phillips was elated. He was from Seminole, Florida, a 20-minute drive from Tropicana Field. It didn’t matter that he would get only 25 plate appearances and be used mostly as a pinch runner and defensive replacement. He was home. And this amazing Rays team embraced him, too. Read more from ESPN.
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