This World Series had one game that lasted two. It had a nine-run inning in its first game, and a nine-inning complete game in its second. It had a living legend reach base nine times one night, and a rookie with fewer than nine big league starts strike out 12 another.
And now it’s going to have a Game 7.
A series full of tension and release reached an apex in the ninth inning of Game 6 when the Toronto Blue Jays threatened to win the whole thing on a walk-off, only to have the Los Angeles Dodgers pull off a game-ending double play to escape with a 3-1 victory that forced a winner-take-all matchup on Saturday night.
It will all come down to one game, but first, this game came down to one play.
Down by 2 in the bottom of the ninth, Blue Jays put the tying run into scoring position with no outs when Alejandro Kirk was hit by a pitch and Addison Barger hit a ground-rule double that wedged beneath the padding on the center field wall. Dodgers’ manager Dave Roberts brought in Tyler Glasnowa candidate to start Game 7, who induced a popup with his first pitch. Two pitches later, Andres Gimenez hit a fly ball to left field where Kike Hernandez made the catch and threw to second to double off Barger and end the game.
It was a stunning finish to set up a fitting conclusion. This World Series has been loaded with singular performances and massive momentum shifts. The Dodgers won an 18-inning epic in Game 3, then lost two in a row to fall to the brink of elimination. Facing a must-win, they turned to one of the standouts of this postseason, Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
He did not throw a complete game, as he had in his previous two playoff starts, but he went toe-to-toe with Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman for six innings, a pitchers’ duel worthy of a postseason that’s been marked by standouts on the mound. Yoshinobu allowed just one run and picked up his second World Series win. Gausman was nearly as good.
The first time through the Dodgers’ lineup, Gausman struck seven of nine. He had 12 swings-and-misses by the end of the second inning — he’d had 11 whiffs in 6 2/3 innings Game 2 — and was one out away from getting through the third inning when he intentionally walked intentionally walked Shohei Ohtani to face Will Smith with two outs and two on.
Smith smoked an RBI double into left field. When Gausman walked Freddie Freeman to load the bases, Mookie Betts — who was hitting .125 without an RBI in the World Series — lined a two-strike single to score two and push the Dodgers’ lead to 3-0.
Gausman settled in again after the Betts single, retiring the next 10 in a row, but three runs was all the Dodgers needed.
The lone Blue Jays run came in the bottom of the third. DH George Springer was playing for the first time since hurting his side in Game 3, and he seemed to wince with every swing, but with two outs and a runner at second he drove an RBI single to center field to put the Blue Jays on the board. They’d cut into the Dodgers’ lead, but that was as close as they would get.
Yamamoto pitched out of trouble in the sixth, Roki Sasaki got through the heart of the order in the eighth, and Blue Jays escaped by the skin of their teeth in the ninth.
And with that, fittingly, it was on to Game 7.
