Game 7 of the 2025 World Series was one of the wildest, and to some extent that’s expressed as easily as “a deciding World Series game went to extra innings,” which had happened just twice before in baseball history. When you’re talking about things like “was that the best Game 7 ever?!,” given the breadth of baseball history, you know you’ve seen something special; when you have a Game 7 in extra innings in the first place, you know you’ve seen some wild plays.
After all, the Series ended on just the third Series-ending double play in history, and first since 1947. For the rest of time, we’re going to be talking about the light-hitting middle infielder (Miguel Rojas) who hit the game-tying homer — his first homer off a right-handed pitcher (excluding position players) in more than a year. We might also be talking about the other light-hitting middle infielder (Isiah Kiner-Falefa) who took a lead not quite long enough and missed scoring a Series-winning run by inches forever, too. It was that kind of World Series.
As you’ve probably come to expect by now, there’s a way to rank and rate just about everything in baseball and life — so what we’re about to provide you may not come as a shock. Given not only the in-game situation but the context of how deep into the playoffs we were, Saturday night had two of the top five most impactful plays in baseball history. It had the 11th, too — and also the biggest out in history. The biggest out. In history.
So yes, the pressure you felt watching — the joy or awe or dread, depending on what side of this one you were on — is reflected by the numbers, too. Four of the top 15 most important plays in history happened just on Saturday night.
(How is this defined? Based on Baseball-Reference’s “Championship Win Probability,” which takes the in-game win probability you’re probably familiar with — how much does a particular play contribute to a win based on the score, inning, outs, and runners at the time — and combines it with adjustments for the point in the postseason you’re in. A World Series Game 7 is more important than a World Series Game 1, which is more important than the third game of a Division Series, and so on.)
To show how that works, when Rojas hit his game-tying home run in the ninth inning, he earned +34.9% Championship Win Probability, which is the difference between how likely the Dodgers were to win the ring when he stepped to the plate and what it was after he blasted Jeff Hoffman’s slider.
It was one of nine different plays where the title-winning odds moved by at least 15%. That includes the three homers you’re thinking of, but also Ernie Clement flying out to Andy Pages in the ninth — where a hit wins it all — and Pages and Daulton Varsho each grounding out with go-ahead runs being forced at the plate, and Mookie Betts’ double play, and also Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s leadoff double in the 11th, and Enrique Hernández grounding out with the bases loaded in a tied game in the 10th inning, and there was just so much happening here, all the time.
What that adds up to is this: That’s the wildest game in baseball history, given the context of “a World Series Game 7,” because no game had ever seen more than seven such plays.
Games with most “massively impactful^” plays, MLB history
With that knowledge, check out the new top individual plays of all time — from the first World Series in 1903 until Mookie Betts started the game-ending double play Saturday night — because the list now looks like this, ranked by how much championship win probability added (cWPA) each play contributed.
That’s right, the most impactful play in history came in the Bill Mazeroski game, but wasn’t Mazeroski’s famous homer, because that came in a tie game. Mazeroski never gets the chance if Smith doesn’t pull the Pirates from staring a loss in the face.
This is credited to the batter, really, but Alejandro Kirk surely doesn’t want his name associated with this one. Given that changing the score is a lot more impactful than not changing the score, it’s really difficult for an out to rank this high — and it is, in fact, one of only two outs in the top 25 most impactful plays in history. It rates so highly, really, that the only way an out could do much better than this is to have some future extra-innings Game 7 end with the bases loaded and no one out, or a triple play, or something equally as wild. Potentially plausible? Sure. Something you should expect to see in your lifetimes? No way.
The fifth-most important play in history wasn’t even the most impactful play of the 11th inning, which is how you know we’re really cooking. Unlike some of the plays that rank beneath this, this wasn’t a “staring down a loss” situation, because of the tie. But because the in-game situation was the most unlikely in which a run is going to score — bases empty, two outs — Smith gets an extra boost here for almost literally making something out of nothing.
Thomson’s homer — the literal “Shot Heard ‘Round The World’ — wasn’t even a postseason game, which tells you how important it was. Technically, anyway. At the time, the pennant winners went right to the World Series, but with the Dodgers and Giants tied atop the National League, a best-of-three tiebreaker was played. “Playoffs” though they may be, they’re officially considered regular-season games.
The situation here was more important than Smith’s — the Dodgers were losing, obviously — but came with one fewer out and didn’t put the team ahead. One thing this metric doesn’t account for is the identity of the players involved, because Rojas, who had fewer homers (57) in a dozen Major League seasons than Cal Raleigh had just this year, has to be one of the least likely power sources in the history of the World Series. There’s Mazeroski parallels here, actually, as Maz was a 10-time Gold Glover who was a well below-average hitter for almost the entirety of his career; Rojas (86 OPS+) and Maz (84 OPS+) were both about 15% below league average (100 OPS+) for their times.
Three of the top dozen most important plays ever, and also the biggest out of all time. If it felt like you’d never seen a game quite like that before, that’s easy to explain: You hadn’t.
