It wasn't Game 3 of last year's World Series, but it was a reasonable facsimile Sunday night (into Monday morning local time) as the Dodgers outlasted the Red Sox at Fenway Park, 7-3 in 12 innings.
The two teams went 18 innings that took 7 hours, 20 minutes in the 2018 World Series. This time? It took "only" 5:40 to finish things, pushing the game past past 1:30 a.m. in Boston.
Max Muncy drew a bases-loaded walk and Alex Verdugo added an RBI single during a three-run 12th inning as the Dodgers handed the Red Sox their first interleague series loss at home since 2014.
Max Muncy's go-ahead walk in the 12th inning tonight was the first time the @Dodgers have had a bases-loaded walk in the 12th inning or later since Chad Kreuter and Paul Lo Duca had back-to-back RBI walks in the 15th inning at Oakland, 18 years ago today.#LABleedsBlue
— Stats By STATS (@StatsBySTATS) July 15, 2019
"You can see the way those guys played and their intensity and focus, they wanted this series," Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told reporters (via Dodgers.com). "They wanted to get the second half off on a good foot. I thought it was very focused baseball and two very equal ballclubs. These are two clubs that can handle four-hour games."
"Just one of those that we had our chances, we didn't take advantage of it, and then at the end they did what they did and scored some runs," Red Sox manager Alex Cora told reporters (via The Associated Press).
Here are seven interesting numbers from Sunday's marathon:
15
The combined number of pitchers used by the teams. Red Sox starter David Price went five innings, and Dodgers starter Hyun-Jin Ryu went seven. The Dodgers resorted to using closer Kenley Jansen in the bottom of the ninth in a tie game. He got out of a two-on, one-out jam to send it to the 10th. Joe Kelly, an October hero for the Red Sox, got his first Dodgers save against his former team.
457
The combined number of pitches by the 15 pitchers, an extraordinary 261 of them by Red Sox pitchers, and that's because ...
61
The number of foul balls by Dodgers batters. Think about that number. Price threw a season-high 113 pitches in his five innings of work. Sixty-one foul balls amounts to at least a few innings' worth of pitches by the Boston staff.
30
The combined number of strikeouts by the two teams. You put all those on one side of the box score and it's 10 innings of outs. That, more than anything, is a commentary on the game today.
6
The number of at-bats four players, two from each team, had in the 12-inning game (others had that many plate appearances). Among the four — Justin Turner and A.J. Pollock of the Dodgers, J.D. Martinez and Andrew Benintendi of the Red Sox — Pollock made the most of his at-bats, going 3-for-6 with four RBIs and two runs.
1.7 and 6.0
The overnight national rating and the Los Angeles-specific overnight rating. The nearly six-hour game was ESPN"s highest-rated "Sunday Night Baseball" game of the season, and the rating for LA is the highest in the market for a non-tiebreaker regular season MLB game since 1999.
