Presented by PASTRY PERFECTION.
This Day In Sports…October 27, 2011, 15 years ago today:
In what is called the best non-clinching Game 6 in World Series history, the Texas Rangers twice reach the final strike for their first world championship. And each time—once in the bottom of the ninth inning and once in the bottom of the 10th—the St. Louis Cardinals rallied from a two-run deficit to tie. David Freese won the game 10-9 with a solo home run to lead off the bottom of the 11th.
It was Freese who had saved St. Louis with his two-out, two-strike, two-run triple in the ninth. After the Rangers’ Josh Hamilton had hit a two-run homer in the top of the 10th to give Texas the lead back, the Cardinals’ Lance Berkman was down to his final strike before lacing a single up the middle to score Jon Jay and bring down the house in Busch Stadium (although it was nothing like the scene following Freese’s homer an inning later). After the game, St. Louis reliever Octavio Dotel famously hollered, “We (expletive) won! It’s over! It doesn’t matter!”
Dotel was right. Game 7 had been forced the next night, with the Cardinals cruising to a 6-2 victory and the Series title. Freese picked up where he left off in Game 7, lashing a two-run ground-rule double to tie the game 2-2 in the bottom of the 1st, and the Cards didn’t look back. Immediately after the game, Freese was named World Series MVP. He had also won NLCS MVP honors and became only the sixth player in history to sweep those awards. While he was merely good in the regular season, Freese was great in the postseason, appearing in one more World Series as an L.A. Dodger. He hit .417 in the 2019 Fall Classic before retiring.
For the Rangers, the one-time Washington Senators franchise that moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex in 1972, it was indescribably painful. They had also lost the 2010 World Series to the San Francisco Giants and manager Bruce Bochy. But in 2023, Bochy came out of retirement to manage Texas, and the Rangers would capture their first World Series title, four games-to-one over the Arizona Diamondbacks. Rangers fans let out a sigh of relief 12 years in the making.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
