Intentionally walking the bases loaded began with four raised fingers and a crowd holding its breath. The Yankees were one out from winning Game 1 of the 2024 World Series. New York led 3-2 in the bottom of the 10th. Two Dodgers waited at second and third, and Mookie Betts stepped toward the batter’s box.
Manager Aaron Boone had a choice. Let left-hander Nestor Cortes pitch to the right-handed Betts, or send him to first and face Freddie Freeman. The latter had a badly sprained right ankle and a left-handed swing. To Boone, that combination offered a way out.
He raised four fingers. Under the automatic intentional-walk rule MLB adopted in 2017, Cortes never had to throw four balls. Betts simply took first, and the crowd recognized the next name coming to the plate.
Freeman had missed three postseason games because of his ankle. He had also spent much of October looking nothing like his usual self. That made Boone’s wager understandable. It did not make the price of another baserunner disappear.
A spectacular catch creates a dangerous choice
The Yankees’ dilemma began with a play that briefly looked like salvation. With one out and runners at first and second, Boone called on Cortes to face Shohei Ohtani. The left-hander had not pitched in a major league game since September 18 because of an elbow injury.
Cortes threw his first pitch. Ohtani lifted it into foul territory down the left-field line. Alex Verdugo sprinted toward the low wall, caught the ball, and flipped over the barrier into the seats.
That last piece changed everything. Because Verdugo’s momentum carried him out of the field of play after the catch, the ball became dead. The rules awarded both runners a base. What had been first and second with two outs became second and third.
Betts came up with first base empty. Freeman waited behind him. The Yankees needed a single out to protect their lead, but the open bag tempted Boone to choose his opponent.
An intentional walk can feel like a refusal to let the other team’s best hitter beat you. In this case, it was also a promise to confront another former MVP. Intentionally walking the bases loaded shifted the problem from Betts to Freeman, with fewer ways for Cortes to miss safely.
The extra 0.22 runs hiding in Boone’s decision
The cost of intentionally walking the bases loaded appears in a plain old run expectancy table. These charts track how many runs teams typically score before an inning ends, based on the runners and the outs. They know nothing about the hitter’s reputation or the roar from the upper deck.
In a May 2025 FanGraphs analysis, Ben Clemens published figures from the first eight innings of 2024 regular-season games. With runners at second and third and two outs, teams averaged 0.60 more runs before the inning ended. Fill first base, with the same two outs, and the average climbed to 0.82.
By loading the bases, Boone effectively gave Los Angeles an extra 0.22 expected runs at a league-average level. The decimals sound harmless beside a 3-2 score. Yet those fractions reflect an immediate new danger: a walk or hit batter would now force home the tying run.
The automatic intentional pass itself presented no wild-pitch risk. That risk had disappeared with the old four-pitch ritual. The next plate appearance was another matter. Cortes could no longer miss the strike zone four times without giving up a run.
Run expectancy has limits here. Clemens excluded ninth innings and extra innings from that particular table to avoid distortions in the scoring data. More importantly, a manager with a one-run lead cares about winning, not the average number of runs the opponent might pile up. That demands another tool.
Two outs make the bargain less attractive
Loading the bases can help a defense manufacture a force play or double play. But Boone already had two outs. One more would end the inning, and adding Betts to first offered little extra protection.
The real danger sat 90 feet from home. Los Angeles needed one run to tie and two to win. With the bases full, a walk or hit batter would erase New York’s lead without a ball entering play. A single could end the game.
That is where win probability matters more than run expectancy. In his October 26, 2024 breakdown, Clemens wrote that FanGraphs’ league-average model charged Boone about three percentage points of win probability for the intentional walk.
But those numbers assumed ordinary hitters and pitchers. Betts and Freeman were anything but ordinary. The matchup, and Freeman’s injured ankle, could change the calculation.
The injured hitter who complicated every projection
Betts versus Cortes was no ordinary matchup
Betts, a right-handed hitter, carried the platoon advantage against Cortes. Clemens built a more specific model around their projected talent and career splits. It estimated Betts would produce a .395 weighted on-base average, or wOBA, in that matchup. The statistic assigns more value to a home run than a single, giving a clearer picture of offensive damage.
Freeman offered Boone something different. The left-handed first baseman historically performed less well against left-handed pitching. Clemens projected a .373 wOBA for Freeman against Cortes: still strong, but below Betts’s estimate.
So the strategy had a real baseball argument behind it. Intentionally walking the bases loaded meant replacing a dangerous righty-lefty confrontation with a slightly less threatening lefty-lefty one. The question was whether that improvement outweighed the free runner.
Clemens’s batter-specific calculations gave the Dodgers a 26.7% chance to win if Cortes faced Betts, accounting for Freeman hitting next. With Freeman batting and the bases loaded, Los Angeles’ chance rose to 28.8%. The difference was only 2.1 percentage points, but it pointed against the walk.
Freeman’s right ankle bent the numbers
Those projections assumed Freeman was close to his normal self. His body suggested otherwise.
Freeman had badly sprained his right ankle on September 26 against San Diego. MLB.com reported that the injury required daily treatment and had already cost him three of the Dodgers’ first 11 playoff games. Before the World Series, Los Angeles had watched him struggle to drive the baseball with his usual authority.
Clemens noted that Freeman had managed a 37 wRC+ across 33 postseason plate appearances before Game 1. That meant his park-adjusted offensive production sat far below league average in a small, injury-affected sample. If the compromised version of Freeman was the real matchup, Boone’s decision looked much closer.
But there was a warning in plain sight. Freeman had tripled earlier in Game 1, his first extra-base hit of that postseason. A bad ankle might limit a player’s running. It does not necessarily erase his ability to recognize a fastball.
The pitcher Boone chose mattered as much as the hitter
Boone also had Tim Hill warming in the bullpen. Hill threw left-handed and had a much more pronounced platoon profile than Cortes. In the same October FanGraphs piece, Ben Clemens argued that he would have preferred Hill against the Dodgers’ left-handed threats.
Hill would have made walking Betts more attractive. Clemens saw the right-handed star as a particularly poor matchup for that lefty specialist. Cortes, by contrast, had more balanced results against left- and right-handed batters. The strategic value of the intentional walk changed with the pitcher.
Boone disagreed with the idea that his pitcher choice was the central mistake. In MLB.com’s account of his postgame explanation, the Yankees manager said he trusted Cortes’s preparation and liked the matchup. He also worried that Hill’s contact-heavy approach could let Betts enter the action.
That debate leads to the part no spreadsheet could measure precisely: Cortes had spent more than a month without facing major league hitters. His deception relied on varying timing, speeds, and locations. Against Ohtani, one fastball had produced a foul out. With Freeman up, he still had thrown only one competitive pitch since September.
Intentionally walking the bases loaded had placed the game in the hands of a pitcher trying to rediscover the feel of a season.
One fastball turns a close argument into a permanent memory
Freeman watched the signal for Betts’s intentional walk and formed a plan. According to MLB’s reporting, he expected Cortes’s four-seam fastball to ride toward the inside of the plate. The hitter wanted to stay on top of it and catch the ball out front.
Cortes came set. The first pitch to Freeman was a roughly 92-mph four-seam fastball, low and inside but close enough to the plate to attack.
Freeman turned on it.
MLB’s Statcast measured the ball leaving his bat at 109.8 mph and traveling 412 feet into the right-field seats. Freeman held his bat aloft before beginning his trip around the bases. The Dodgers poured toward home plate, and Dodger Stadium erupted into a noise that swallowed any remaining discussion of probabilities.
Los Angeles won 6-3 on the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history. For Dodgers fans, the image joined Kirk Gibson’s injured-leg home run in Game 1 of the 1988 Series. Boone faced an instant referendum on an intentional walk that the numbers had judged much more narrowly.
The pitch missed its intended spot. Freeman did the rest. That distinction matters: the decision to walk Betts did not force Cortes to throw a hittable fastball. It merely made Freeman the man who could punish one.
What the next October manager should remember
Playoff managers will always consider intentionally walking the bases loaded. It feels like a way to choose the terms of a confrontation, and sometimes the matchup advantage really does justify another runner. The decision becomes stronger when the next hitter offers a steep drop in ability or a glaring platoon weakness.
But Boone’s Game 1 choice shows why every part of the equation must travel together. First comes the score. Then the outs, the runners, the hitter on deck, the pitcher’s command, and the cost of one more walk. A spreadsheet can quantify much of that. It cannot guarantee the next pitch lands where the catcher wants it.
The details also warn against judging a decision solely by its most spectacular outcome. Clemens’s projection saw only a narrow difference between pitching to Betts and walking him. Hill might have changed the preferred move. Freeman’s damaged ankle might have changed it back. None of those judgments could promise an out.
The next manager who tries intentionally walking the bases loaded may escape with a harmless popup and hear almost nothing about his gamble. In another October, the same signal could lead to a walk-off walk, a flare into shallow right, or a ball that disappears over the fence.
New York had been an out from taking Game 1. Four fingers moved one star to first base and brought another to the plate. The math captured the risk; Freeman gave it a sound.
And when that next manager raises his hand, the hardest question will remain: How much better must the next matchup be before a free base becomes worth its price?
READ MORE: Intentional walks backfire when postseason managers chase the safer matchup
FAQs
Q1. Why did Aaron Boone intentionally walk Mookie Betts in the 2024 World Series?
Boone wanted Nestor Cortes to face the injured Freddie Freeman in a lefty-on-lefty matchup rather than pitch to Betts.
Q2. Was intentionally walking the bases loaded a bad decision?
FanGraphs estimated the move increased the Dodgers’ win probability slightly. Freeman’s injury made the decision closer than the numbers initially suggested.
Q3. How much did the intentional walk increase the Dodgers’ expected runs?
Boone’s decision added approximately 0.22 expected runs, based on FanGraphs’ 2024 regular-season run expectancy data.
Q4. Why did Alex Verdugo’s catch matter so much?
Verdugo caught Shohei Ohtani’s foul ball but fell into the stands. Both runners advanced, opening first base for Betts’s intentional walk.
Q5. What pitch did Freddie Freeman hit for his walk-off grand slam?
Freeman crushed Nestor Cortes’s first pitch, a roughly 92-mph four-seam fastball, 412 feet into the right-field seats.
