2025 World Series: 18 innings, 11 innings, 1 inning and Epic Game 3
LOS ANGELES – The game that ended it all ended at 11:50 PM PT on Monday. Over the past 6 hours and 39 minutes, Game 3 of the World Series played out like a fantastic baseball spectacle, full of tension, drama and madness.
It was a game like no other had ever been seen before, and will never be repeated again, and when the 18th inning ended and the Los Angeles Dodgers had beaten the Toronto Blue Jays 6-5, it was somewhat of a relief, because holding your breath for hours on end is not a sustainable way to live.
That’s the price we pay for a game like Game 3. The Dodgers and Blue Jays competed at an exceptional level in the longest game in World Series history by innings and the second-longest by time. They punched and counterpunched, emptying their benches and bullpens. They were executed by magic and found pieces of themselves they never knew existed. And in the 18th inning, it was Freddie Freeman, last year’s World Series champion, who deposited a sinking home run off Brendon Little over the center field fence 406 feet away.
703 games have been played in the 121-year history of the World Series. Although there were certainly rivals, this one launched itself into the top tier, undoubtedly the elite, and left the 52,654 fans at Dodger Stadium as dizzy as they had been for nearly seven years since the day before, when the only other 18-inning game in World Series history ended the same way: with the Dodgers walking off a homer.
Game 3 of the World Series featured…
609 shots (LAD: 312, TOR: 297)
37 runners remained on base
25 players were used at the position
19 pitchers were used pic.twitter.com/MBHReOJ16x– ESPN Insights (@ESPNInsights) October 28, 2025
Stars were plentiful, and in the wake of the madness, one stood in the Dodgers clubhouse, still trying to process what had happened. Will Cline, the Dodgers’ last man, a reliever who led the way this year with two runs scored and 36 pitches pitched, tossed four innings of one-hit ball and struck out five in 72 pitches. The last one, an 86 mph curveball, brought a swing and a miss from Tyler Heineman and a scream from Klein, who understood what was asked of him and knew he would deliver.
Games don’t become classics without efforts like Klein’s — and he had a fan who wanted to acknowledge that. Into the Dodgers clubhouse walked Sandy Koufax, Dodgers Eminence, who at 89 years old looked no worse for wear at 12:48 a.m. Koufax walked up to Cline, extended his hand, looked him in the eyes and said, “Wonderful.”
This was the kind of game, the one that forges the connections between a Hall of Famer and a man with 22⅔ major league innings and who had not pitched on the Dodgers roster in any of the previous three rounds of the postseason. The kind of game that had Klein opening his phone just to see how many messages he had, only for him to scroll… and keep scrolling… and keep scrolling to the point where he just stopped. The kind of game that had Klein exclaiming to a friend at the club: “Seventy-two. Can you believe it?”
Game 3 was chaos, an interesting mirror of the ball game, everything out of order. Shohei Ohtani’s greatness is never in doubt, but seeing a baseball player reach base nine times, something that has only been done twice in big-league history — not since 1942 and never in the postseason — still goes down as incredible, as his size dominates the game from start to finish. He led off the game for the Dodgers with a double. He went home next time. Doubled again. He came back again, for his second of the game, and his eighth of the postseason, to tie the game at 5 and unleash the chaos to come.
At that point, Blue Jays manager John Schneider had seen enough. In the ninth inning, Ohtani became the first batter to intentionally walk with the bases empty in the ninth inning or later of a postseason game. The next three times he came to the plate — twice with the bases empty — Schneider held up four fingers and gladly gave Ohtani a free pass. In the 17th, with a runner on first, the Blue Jays elected to pass to Ohtani — and Little promptly deposited a four-run ball nowhere near the strike zone. (Schneider said after the game that he expects more tiptoe around Ohtani in the coming days.)
Schneider’s decision making earlier in the game, in which he attempted to scratch via run by replacing a cadre of runners, left the Blue Jays’ lineup vulnerable for much of the second half of the game. Against a Dodgers bullpen that served as a sieve for most of the postseason, Toronto managed just one run in 13⅓ innings. Los Angeles used 10 pitchers, including Clayton Kershaw, the future Hall of Famer. Kershaw came on in the 12th with the bases loaded, being hit by a nine-bat against Nathan Lukis and urging an eluder to second base that Tommy Edman scooped with his glove to Freeman.
Memorable moments abounded during a game that featured 609 pitches, the most in a postseason game since MLB began tracking pitches in 1988. On the 14th, Will Smith lofted a fly ball to center field and dropped his bat, thinking it was a game-winner. The ball died on the warning track. Teoscar Hernandez, who, like Ohtani, had four hits, did the same in the 16th. He ended up in the gauntlet as well.
By that point, Klein had arrived and proceeded to pull a modern-day Nathan Eovaldi, who had cut 97 pitches over the final six innings of a marathon 2018. In Klein’s final outing, Yoshinobu Yamamoto — who had thrown a 105-pitch complete game two days earlier — was warming up in the bullpen. Klein walked with two hits. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts could have easily gone for Yamamoto. He stuck with Klein.
Klein did it, because he had to, and that, as much as anything else, is the lesson of an evening like Game 3, when a great game — which was great for the first dozen or so innings — evolves into something entirely different. Game 3 was a test. Endurance and will – or, as it were, will.
“You just have to do it or don’t do it,” said Dodgers outfielder Justin Wrobleski, who spent time with Klein in Triple-A this season. “You go out there and say: ‘I know what to do here and let’s see what I got’. I love moments like that because it’s a test of your character. And even more so it’s a test of everything else.”
Mark Klein. Freeman, of course, is one of the clutch kings of his generation. He had struggled greatly in the postseason, entering the game with just one RBI in the Dodgers’ previous dozen playoff games. His first two in this World Series looked a far cry from his performance last year, when he struggled with a number of injuries, hit a grand slam in the first game and won the Series’ MVP award. It wasn’t just a lack of production. He wasn’t hitting the ball particularly hard either.
On the final pitch of Game 3, he finally did it. This is the thing that happens in 18-inning games. It’s uncomfortable, scary, and can end with a bat popping. It’s terrifying. It’s beautiful. It’s everything.
And those who are lucky enough to witness it will never forget it. They writhed and winced and closed their eyes and prayed and screamed and cringed, and in the end, they saw 31 hits, 37 runners left on base, 19 pitchers and one particularly majestic swing, 10 minutes before Monday turned into Tuesday, that ended one of the best World Series games ever — and gave the Dodgers a 2-1 advantage.
Klein isn’t sure how his arm will feel when he returns to the field Tuesday for Game 4. He said it’s usually a second-day guy, and the pain doesn’t come until the second day after the outing. After being showered with praise from his teammates and thanked by Koufax and written into the annals of Dodgers history, tomorrow and the next day were not much to worry about.
“I feel good right now,” Klein said, and for good reason.
He was the winning pitcher, the stopper, the MVP in every part of the field like Freeman and Ohtani, and the adrenaline rush numbed any pain that would eventually arrive. That’s for another day. That was it – and more.