Joe Davis honored one of baseball’s all-time great announcers in the most fitting way on Friday night.
As Freddie Freeman crushed a walk-off grand slam in the bottom of the 10th inning of World Series Game 1 against the Yankees, Davis, the Fox play-by-play man, paid homage to Vin Scully — the former Dodgers and NBC baseball broadcaster.
“Freeman hits a ball, right field — she is…. gone! Gibby, meet Freddie! Game 1 of the World Series,” Davis said on the call.
Scully, who called plenty of huge World Series moments during his legendary career, used the phrase “She is gone!” when Dodgers star Kirk Gibson crushed the iconic 1988 World Series Game 1 blast against A’s closer Dennis Eckersley.
Before the game started, Fox aired a Scully-voiced feature from 2010 that aired on Prime Ticket and was an ode to the Yankees-Dodgers rivalry.
With the same team and nearly the same spot of Dodger Stadium involved, the parallels were easy to spot.
On top of those, there was another striking similarity between Freeman and Gibson.
Like Gibson in ’88, Freeman has been battling injury this postseason run, specifically an ankle issue that has limited his running ability.
It kept him out of multiple games in both the NLDS and NLCS, but he had a memorable Game 1 with a triple and the walk-off home run off the Yankees’ Nestor Cortes.
The blast was the first-ever walk-off grand slam in the World Series.
