Wow - that was awesome. 

But it was not a play full of fabulous athletes doing their job. In baseball, mental toughness is doing your job on one pitch to the best of your ability (accept whatever happens, and repeat). There was a lot of trying hard, but failing to give a best effort performance on this play! Hey athletes, do your job! (Easy for me to say.)

Rather than a thing of beauty, it was a very good hit, followed by a baserunning mistake by the Rays' Arozarena and three mistakes by the Dodgers. Well, three mistakes is more than one and in a moment as big as this, one mistake can lose the game. In this case, it took two.If you didn't see the play 20 times already, here it is...

Now, please allow me to excitedly share the details of exactly what happened.

First, I want to say that walking Arozarena with Phillips on deck was fine. Jansen made some great pitches in this inning, but he made some mistakes, too. Very rarely can a pitcher throw 21 pitches and not have any mistakes. The first pitch to Arozarena was Jansen's biggest mistake. It was supposed to be a fastball away, but instead it was right down the middle. Obviously not what he was expecting, Arozarena took the pitch for strike one. Hey pitchers, sometimes you pay a big price...and sometimes you don't. Arozarena was obviously trying to be patient and to his credit, he stuck to his plan and earned the walk. Light-hitting Brett Phillips, a defensive replacement, said he was just trying to slow himself down in this, the first World Series at-bat of his life. The scene was this: fast runners on first and second, down 7-6, two outs, bottom of the ninth. Jansen, with his superb cutter, is tough on lefties and threw three wonderful pitches to get the count to 1-2. A cutter in was close, but taken for a ball. A cutter up and in was taken for a strike, and a fastball on the low, outside corner was correctly called strike two. Then all heck broke loose.

The final pitch was supposed to be a cutter up and in. Instead, it was just in, not up. This is a small mistake that Jansen would often get away with, but Phillips did a great job and hit a line drive into center field for a clean single. Kiermaier is going to score. Jansen should be backing up home plate, but he's not. He's spectating, and that matters. This moment is huge, and it gets to Chris Taylor in center field. He likely has no chance to get the speedy Kiermaier at home, but clearly he had dreams of getting that game-ending assist. In his haste to throw the ball home, he fails to watch the ball into his glove and boots the ball. The third-base coach sees this and waves Arozarena home, but this thrilling moment gets too big for him, and he loses his balance as he flies around third. Arozarena falls to the ground halfway between third and home. As he gets up, he starts to retreat back to third to test his luck in a rundown. But he does so with his eyes up, and this is what he sees...

After Taylor booted the ball, he went and pitcked it up and threw towards home, but the throw is a bit offline to catcher Will Smith's right. Smith should stay at home, but he slides to his right in case he needs to catch this throw. He should have trusted that either his first baseman, Max Muncy, would cut the throw, or Jansen would back it up, but he doesn't. Perhaps he saw that Jansen was not in position behind him. When Muncy cuts it, Smith starts sliding back to his left to be in position to tag Arozarena. He does not know that Arozarena fell down! Muncy throws home The throw, to a moving target, is under control, but a bit to the right of where Smith would prefer it to be. It is not a hard throw. It is likely that Muncy saw that Arozarena had fallen and was just feeding a simple throw to home to start the rundown. But Smith thinks the game is on the line with that tag play and he, like Taylor a moment before, rushes. He tries to make the tag before he secures the ball. My line to catchers to avoid this commone mistake: "Keep your chest to the ball until the ball is in your glove!" This mistake was not (yet - it should be changed) ruled an error, but it was one, and it ended the game. 

Ball game. Series tied 2-2. Everyone come back tomorrow. 

Isn't baseball great?!?