World Series 2018: Everything you need to know about the Dodgers-Red Sox Fall Classic

A lot went down during the Red Sox championship parade on Wednesday. There were cute little kids and proud Big Papi and Alex Cora telling people who doubted them after the first few games against the Yankees to “suck on it.” Plus, a lot of drunk fans in attendance to cheer their championship team on. Probably more than usual during this particular parade since it was being held on Halloween.

Because of that, beers were being thrown at the duck boats. Now, before we go any further, I just have to state the obvious and say that beers are always thrown during championship parades. Especially in Boston (stares at Gronk) and they’re usually welcome. Sometimes players will drink them.

The Red Sox beat the Dodgers to win the World Series on Sunday in Los Angeles, their ninth as a franchise and fourth since the turn of the century. Back on the East Coast, the players and fans will spend Halloween celebrating the win with another parade in Boston. The city’s 11th since 2002. So they’re well-practiced with the duck boats and the signs, etc.

That doesn’t mean this won’t be just as big a party as the ones before though. With the added Halloween element, we might be in for some true shenanigans.

The Red Sox are celebrating their fourth World Series in less than 15 years this week, after defeating the Dodgers four games to one overall and wrapping things up on Sunday night. So instead of a Game 7 on Halloween, we’re getting a parade!

Not able to get to the parade in Boston? Would rather watch at home than brave the cold in the city (although it’s supposed to be sunny and near 60 that day)? Here’s how you can watch on TV or online.

The Red Sox clinched their fourth World Series in 14 years Sunday night, defeating the Dodgers four games to one and 5-1 in Game 5 to seal the win. The Red Sox, and Boston as a whole, are pretty well-practiced as far as championship parades go so details are already emerging about the big shindig later this week.

According to WBZ Boston, the parade will kick off at 11 a.m. Wednesday, on Halloween morning. A big party in Boston on Halloween — what could go wrong? For the 11th time since 2002 and the fourth time for this franchise, athletes will roll through the city on duck boats with their families, waving to adoring fans.

The Red Sox are relishing their World Series win at exactly the level a team celebrating its fourth championship in 14 years should. They’re the bullies now, after all. Top of the heap, can’t pretend you’re an underdog anymore. During the celebration, the team blasted “New York, New York” in the clubhouse, a nod to the Yankees doing it at Fenway after their lone ALDS win.

So the petty kicked in right away after the champagne started flowing, and the official Red Sox Twitter account kept that mood going the entire morning after online. They made sure to remind everyone that they won a championship, which is fair enough. Be excited.

The Red Sox won the World Series on Sunday night and as per tradition, certain items from their team and players will be taking a trip to the Hall of Fame. Although not all of them will be on permanent display, Cooperstown makes sure to collect some of the most signature items from each World Series champion to add to their collection.

This year’s choices include a bat (sure), a sweatshirt (okay), and a pair of glasses (huh?). Here’s the full list of items going to the Hall of Fame, according to Hall of Fame VP of Communications and Education John Shestakofsky, and a little background on why.

The Red Sox won the 2018 World Series with a Game 5 win against the Dodgers on Sunday night, and besides the World Series MVP presentation and all the emotion on the field and the parade plans coming into focus on thing on people’s minds was whether this team will go to the White House or not.

That’s been the trend over the last few years every time a team wins a championship. The celebration starts, and almost immediately the speculation follows on whether they’ll go visit the White House. Or if President Trump will invite them at all. He disinvited the Eagles the day before they were meant to go, the Warriors declined, the Penguins happily went, and the Patriots made a partial appearance last year.

LOS ANGELES — For the first time in five years, the winner of the World Series wasn’t a team that had an easily identifiable legacy of pain. The 2018 World Series champions weren’t the ‘17 Astros, who had never won. They weren’t the ‘16 Cubs, who hadn’t won in over a century, or the ‘15 Royals, who had just emerged from a two-decade stint as the butt of baseball’s jokes. No, this year’s champion was the Boston Red Sox, who have done it several times before and look like they can do it several times more.

This is exactly what the Red Sox have always wanted.

LOS ANGELES — Too many words were spent and too many breaths were wasted in the last week about Dave Roberts and his bullpen. But the Dodgers lost a second World Series in a row because they didn’t hit a lick.

The Red Sox finished off the Dodgers 5-1 on Sunday night, putting the final nail in the coffin, making Dodger Stadium the site of a championship celebration for a second consecutive year. The last time that happened was in 1976-77 at Yankee Stadium.

Rafael Devers is one of my favorite parts of the postseason, and if you don’t take that description at face value then you’ve come to the right place. Because this is my chance to convince you that he is, in fact, an angelic marvel who at 22 years old (as of Wednesday!) is one of the brightest spots on the Red Sox despite not being an outright star just yet.

You might be mostly familiar with Devers — who goes by Raffy or Raf in the clubhouse — if you follow any of the many Red Sox fans who have claimed him as our son. Or, as we are legally bound to put it, “MY SON.” Number of “n’s” in “son” is up to the individual but it’s usually between three and seven. All caps is not optional. A Twitter search for “Rafael Devers” and “son” is worth the scroll.

The postseason narrative around David Price is not a kind one. He finally got a postseason win as a starter for the first time in 12 tries with a dominant performance in ALCS Game 5 against the Astros, but before that it was a sea of losses and criticisms and second guessing whether he was worthy of his contract in Boston.

Before he struggled as a starter in the postseason, Price had a mix of capable and excellent postseason relief outings while on the Rays, but his postseason luck ran out during his brief stints with the Tigers, Jays, and eventually the Red Sox where he is currently in the middle of a seven-year, $217 million contract.

The Los Angeles Dodgers need a win in Game 5 of the World Series on Sunday night at Dodger Stadium just to keep their season alive. The Boston Red Sox, up three games to one in the Fall Classic, are headed home either way, and a win on Sunday would give them a championship trophy to take home on the plane.

Clayton Kershaw gets the start on Sunday for the Dodgers, looking for a rebound after failing to record an out in the fifth inning in his Game 1 start. Kershaw has allowed one run in 15 innings in two home starts this postseason, a 0.60 ERA, compared to a 10.13 ERA on the road.

Yasiel Puig’s home run in the sixth inning of Game 4 against the Red Sox is one of the best in World Series history.

I didn’t do any research to back up that claim, and frankly, I don’t need to. We all saw that dinger and everything that came with it. The same way that slam dunks are more attractive for the power that comes with them, this home run was a beauty. Because as soon as you saw that laser off Puig’s bat, you knew. You felt that.

LOS ANGELES — Walking out of Dodger Stadium after Game 4 of the 2018 World Series, two drunk guys next to me started a “FIRE ROBERTS!” chant, and they kept it going as they trudged toward the parking lot. There wasn’t a wink and a nod with the chant. This was the easy release of steam from a pressure cooker, done methodically to prevent an explosion, and it was entirely earnest. “FI-RE ROB-ERTS,” and there wasn’t a clap clap clapclapclap after it. Too mad for the clap clap clapclapclap.

No one joined in, but there were chuckles and grumbles all the way down the hill, and everyone was talking about the bullpen and Dave Roberts and the bullpen and Dave Roberts and the bullpen and Rich Hill and Dave Roberts. It was like spinning a radio dial from left to right, and every station was coming in crystal clear and playing the same song, just at different points. The bullpen management chatter was going to No. 1 with a bullet.

The Red Sox came back from being down four runs in the seventh inning of a crucial game in the World Series on Saturday night, a game that started less than 17 hours after the prior night’s crushing loss in 18 innings which let the Dodgers back into the series. Another team might not have been able to come back from that deficit after a Game 3 like that happening the night before, but Boston did. Which is one of the reasons they’re on the verge of a championship at all.

That’s how this team has been all year though, with a narrative attached that is inescapable at this point in the postseason. Because they keep proving it to be true. This Boston team is unkillable. That they can come back from anything. That they are extremely dangerous with two outs, which they added more evidence to multiple times in Game 4. That you can never tell which part of their lineup is the most dangerous in any given series because they all have the ability to be dangerous.

Manny Machado is a straight-up baseball heel. The Milwaukee Brewers were introduced to this concept when he kicked first baseman Jesus Aguilar while running through the base in the NLCS, capping off a routine groundout. The Boston Red Sox, however, have been intimately familiar with his rampant dickishness (professional term) for at least a year now.

The Sox have had plenty of experience with Machado, who escaped the gravity of the rotting garbage planet that is the Orioles for the lush galaxy of the Dodgers infield in 2018. But while he was with Baltimore, he found plenty of opportunities to put himself in Boston’s crosshairs.

Thirty years ago, Dennis Eckersley threw a pitch to Kirk Gibson that made him one of Dodgers’ fans favorite people. In Game 1 of the 1988 World Series the Oakland A’s were enjoying a 4-3 ninth inning lead at Dodger Stadium when Gibson pinch hit with a man on first.

You know the story. Gibson, with injuries to both legs and barely able to get a confident swing off, cracked a home run to right and hobbled around the bases to win the game and put the Dodgers on the road to a 4-1 series win. They haven’t won a World Series since.

The Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers treated us to a classic marathon, and set all sorts of World Series records in Friday night’s 3-2 win for LA that finished on Saturday morning.

Max Muncy played hero, delivering a walk-off victory with a home run off Nathan Eovaldi in the 18th inning, giving the Dodgers their first win of the series. Here are the records that were set in Game 3:

How do you follow a marathon classic? The Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers will show us in Game 4 of the World Series on Saturday night (8 p.m. ET, FOX), just over 16 hours after ending the longest game in postseason history on Friday.

After 18 innings and nine pitchers used by each team in Game 3, on Saturday we are sure to see a scramble for both teams on the mound. Neither team announced their starters as of Saturday afternoon.

LOS ANGELES — Game 3 of the 2018 World Series was the longest postseason game in baseball history, and it was almost the longest game in baseball history. It was longer than Games 1 and 2 combined, and it was longer than the entire 1939 World Series. There are so many threads to follow, so many what-ifs, so many fissures and crevices to get lost in. But here’s what I keep coming back to: Both teams combined to throw 561 pitches.

We don’t know if that’s a record because pitch counts are a very recent development. It’s probably a record, but more than that, think about each pitch as an isolated event. A pitcher holding a ball, looking in, getting a sign, mentally figuring out how to best execute the pitch, coming set, coming to the plate, and then actually executing that pitch while hoping for a favorable result, which may or may not have happened. This happened 561 times.

Red Sox manager Alex Cora originally only wanted to use projected Game 4 starter Nathan Eovaldi in Game 3 if the Red Sox had a real chance at winning Game 3. Eovaldi would be the “rover” Cora has been turning starting pitchers into in the eighth, as a bridge to closer Craig Kimbrel, but if the Red Sox weren’t in a position where they needed to bridge to their fireman, then Eovaldi would be the Game 4 starter in Los Angeles on Saturday night.

It ended up being David Price, the Game 2 starter — yes, this game was weird and it ruled — who came in to bridge to Kimbrel, but it was during a tie game. A tie game that stayed tied, and then untied, and then tied again, and finally Max Muncy hit a walkoff homer in the [checks notes] 18th inning. Eovaldi had to pitch six-plus innings to make that happen, though, which means he is not starting Game 4, which literally begins later today.

Before we get into Cody Bellinger’s outfield heroics in during the early extra innings of World Series Game 3, which were impressive, we should first acknowledge that just a half inning prior to showing off his capacity to nail a throw home he mucked things up by getting thrown out on the base paths.

Attempting this steal in the bottom of he ninth meant that instead of the Dodgers having the bases loaded with one out after the two consecutive walks that would follow, that had runners on first and second with two outs in a 1-1 game. Brian Dozier would foul out to the catcher to end the inning.

If you stayed up watching World Series Game 3 on Friday night (and Saturday morning) then congratulations. You stuck it out for the longest game in World Series and playoff history. If you weren’t rooting for either of the teams playing you might be fundamentally broken but you did it. The game clocked in at seven hours and 20 minutes.

The longest previous World Series game came in at five hours and 41 minutes. When it hit the fifteenth it also became the longest World Series game by innings. 14 innings happened three other times: 1916 Game 2 (the last time these two teams played in the Fall Classic), 2005 Game 3, and 2015 Game 1.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are facing long odds as the World Series heads back to Dodger Stadium for Game 3 against the Boston Red Sox on Friday night in Los Angeles.

After dropping the first two games in Boston, the Dodgers find themselves in a precarious position. Fifty-four teams have trailed 0-2 in a best-of-7 World Series, and 43 have lost the series. Of the 11 (20%) that have overcome those odds, three were Dodgers (1955, 1965 and 1981).

Hello, baseball fans. The season is almost over, even though it feels like it just started 67 months ago, and it’s always nice to wind down with October, which is the only month where everyone is having the same baseball experience. Everyone is watching the same games, which means this is the one month where we can all riff on the same thing.

This is also the one month where we’re all subjected to the same commercials over and over and over and over and over and over again.