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| oh no |
When potential Game Seven starter Taylor Glasnow, of all people, came out of the Dodgers' bullpen in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game Six, with runners on second and third and nobody out in a 3-1 game, Ernie Clement had a chance to win the World Series with a single swing of the bat. It had taken a moment for the madness of Addison Barger's double-that-got-stuck-in-the-wall to settle, but as soon as it did, the full weight and potential of Ernie's at bat came into focus. For the third inning in a row in this closely contested, thoroughly well-pitched game, the Blue Jays had two runners on, but this time with nobody out. You look ahead only slightly, and think: even if neither Ernie Clement, who has been hitting everything all month, nor Andres Gimenez, whose nearly every hit this postseason has produced a run, manage to make things happen here, we'll still get to the top of the order, and George Springer will come to the plate as the potential winning run (the potential World Series winning run). The three-run, World-Series-winning homer is asking an awful lot, obviously, but consider, too, that were Ernie able to so much as dunk a little chip-shot single into the outfield, it's probably a tie game (Barger, though no burner, but runs well enough). But Ernie, swinging on the first pitch as he so often does to such great success, popped out to Freddie Freeman. One down.
And so it was Andres Gimenez, whose cool and calm professionalism all admire, with 2017 World Series MVP George Springer on deck behind him. This still all felt pretty good! But two pitches later, Gimenez popped out to shallow left, and Kiké Hernandez doubled Barger off at second, with ancient gloveman Miggy Rojas heroically digging the ball out of the dirt on a wicked hop before Barger—who, in his bottom-of-the-ninth eagerness, had taken a step or two too many towards third—could scamper back. The gross improbability of this finish was made all the grosser by an unusually compelling Kiké Hernandez postgame interview (and Kiké Hernandez is, to me, already a compelling guy generally), in which he noted that he was playing even a little shallower than he had been instructed, and that he'd totally lost the ball in the lights, but had dashed in upon hearing Gimenez's bat break (in real time, I had neither heard it break, nor did I see it do so, at first). It was an extraordinary read by a player who has long been extraordinary in the postseason, for whatever reasons, and the adeptness of Miguel Rojas' dig at second really can't be overstated—how many times does Rojas scoop that out of ten? I say in all appreciation of his fielding acumen that I don't know that it would be most. It was not lost on me that, on this team of future Hall-of-Famers, with hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in salary (hey: get it while you here, boy), it was Kiké and Miggy Rojas who made the deeply improbable play that keep the Dodgers season going at least one more day; this turn of events, as so much of what happened in Game Six, felt like baseball in its truest expression. Addison Barger, for his part, as he himself noted after the game, made a bad read. Simple as that. He was not alone in it: Joe Davis, the fine Fox broadcaster, seemed to think the ball was going to drop in (off the bat, I thought so too, and not merely out of hope), whereas Dan Shulman's voice turned towards dread pretty quickly (perhaps he had noted Kiké's unusually shallow positioning?). You may recall that in Game Seven of the Blue Jays ALCS win over the Seattle Mariners, the one George Springer turned around with his three-run homer in the bottom of the seventh, it was Cal Raleigh left standing in the on-deck circle as Jeff Hoffman struck out the side in the ninth. As Game Six of the World Series ended last night, it was George Springer standing with the bat on his shoulder. So it goes.
Lest the whole game shrink to that one wild inning, let's remember that the Blue Jays' pitchers retired the Dodgers in order in seven of the game's nine frames. That's right: seven three-up, three-down innings. Kevin Gausman struck out the side to open the game to the cheers of maybe the loudest first-inning SkyDome crowd I have ever heard, and had the splitter dancing all night. The three-run third on big hits from Will Smith and, at long last, Mookie Betts was, of course, the ultimately insurmountable problem, but three runs on three hits and two walks, striking out eight batters in six complete innings, you'll take that from your World Series Game Six starter against the Los Angeles Dodgers for sure. And the Blue Jays again had their chances against this peak version of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, but two double plays in the early innings ended any real threats beyond Springer knocking home Barger's double in the home half of the third. The Blue Jays never led this game, not for a single moment, which is what makes the feeling at the end of the game so strange: we never led, never even seemed likely to lead, but kept it close enough that we brought two batters to the plate in the bottom of the ninth with a chance to win the World Series on the next pitch. But then we didn't.
This was a tough one, for sure, and though I am not a person especially given to gloom after baseball games, I did sit for a good while afterwards with the feeling that we may very well have missed the best chance we're going to have to win this thing, even if that chance came in a game we were never, in fact, winning. I spent a little time last night saying goodbye to the season. But of course, at this point, goodbye is really the only thing that remains to be said to this, the most wonderful baseball season I have known, or feel likely to ever know, in that it ends tonight (or early tomorrow), regardless of how this final game plays out. There can't be any more baseball. It'll be Max Scherzer, of all people, on the mound for the Blue Jays, followed, of course, by everybody (Yesavage up next? Bieber?). While there remains some question as to how the Dodgers will arrange their pitching, the alignment that makes the most sense to me (for what that's worth!) is Shohei Ohtani as the opener, to keep his bat in the lineup when Tyler Glasnow comes in to pitch afterwards. If anyone but Ohtani, Glasnow, and Sasaki touches the ball for the Dodgers, I would be very surprised (unless, I suppose, it were Yamamoto, on no-days rest; I think that would leave me surprised, but not very surprised, given all that we've seen).
Taking the broad view, this has already been an all-time classic World Series, one that in a sense deserves a Game Seven. And so, as baseball fans, we should be grateful that that's what we're getting. It's true, too, that there is no one who would not, at the start of any given baseball season, eagerly accept the chance to see their team play in Game Seven of the World Series that October (or indeed November, as we have it now). All of these things are exceedingly the case. But, at the same time, I really can't tell you how much I wish this was already in the bag! In this, I am a very small and narrow-minded partisan. And I will live within that smallness for at least this last day, hoping for a truly lopsided, Game-One-style, endless-dingers, Blue Jays trouncing of these excellent Los Angeles Dodgers, though I hold no real animosity towards their very likeable players, their amiable manager Doc Roberts, or the seemingly agreeable fans that gather in such multitudes at their beautiful ballpark. Do I anticipate such a drubbing? Or even, necessarily, a Blue Jays win? Oh by no means! I am actually feeling unaccountably resigned and fatalistic! But all the same, I'll be here, enjoying the snacks that I've already arranged (and that have, in kindness, been arranged for me), amidst this last game of the season of my favourite baseball team ever, the 2025 Toronto Blue Jays. "Okay, Blue Jays," they will sing at tonight's seventh-inning stretch, as at so many before, but for the first time—the only time it'll ever happen, you'd have to think— at the seventh-inning stretch of the seventh game of the World Series. "Let's play ball."
KS
