LOS ANGELES — It took half of the 18-inning World Series Game 3 classic Monday night, but the Blue Jays did discover the correct strategy to curtail the greatest player on Earth.
The Jays were the team that intentionally walked Aaron Judge the most this year (nine times), and they applied the same strategy in spades to combat Judge’s comparable all-time hitting counterpart in the other league.
Dodgers two-way great Shohei Ohtani played an unreal game and upstaged everyone in a four-star classic with a beautiful Hollywood script.
But nine innings in, the Jays realized that avoiding Ohtani was their one hope, and the ploy of free passes kept them alive long into the night — until 2024 World Series hero Freddie Freeman finally ended things with a walk-off homer to dead center field leading off the bottom of the 18th to give the Dodgers a 6-5 victory and a 2-1 lead in the Series.
