The World Series Will Go On

The Fall Classic has traveled near and far, but wherever they are, the Dodgers have relied heavily on Yoshinobu Yamamoto to lead the team to victory, and on Friday night he delivered once again. Following a three-game swing in Los Angeles, the World Series returned to Toronto for Game 6. And though back in their home and native land, the Blue Jays fell to the Dodgers 3-1, meaning Canada’s team will face L.A. in a decisive Game 7 on Saturday night.

The faster we’re fallin’, we’re stoppin’ and stallin’,
We’re runnin’ in circles again.
Just as things were lookin’ up, you said it wasn’t good enough,
But still, we’re tryin’ one more time.

Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman had the first seven batters he faced looking like they might be in over their heads. His splitter was working exactly as intended — presenting as a center-cut fastball, then diving in too deep for the hitter to make contact — and leading to a ton of swing-and-miss. As he worked deeper in the game, Gausman mixed in his slider more, which earned him some quick outs on weak contact. For the most part, he cruised through his six innings and 93 pitches. For the most part.

With the Dodgers offense floundering and Gausman locked in early on, things were starting to feel hopeless for Los Angeles, even with Yamamoto on the mound.

Like Harrison Ford, I’m getting frantic.

It felt like it had been at least one week since a Dodger had gotten a hit with a runner in scoring position. A week is an exaggeration, but only a small one. That last time it happened was all the way back on Monday. In the fourth inning of the nearly seven-hour marathon that was Game 3, Freddie Freeman hit an RBI single, scoring Shohei Ohtani from second. Over the next 34 innings, the Dodgers went 0-fer with runners in scoring position, in part because they managed just six opportunities across the next two games.

But with two outs in the third inning of Game 6, Will Smith came to the plate following a double from center fielder Tommy Edman and an intentional walk to Ohtani. Smith took an outside slider for ball one, then Gausman delivered a splitter just below the zone, looking to add to his whiff total, which already sat at 13 to that point in the game. Instead, Smith dropped down and golfed the pitch all the way to the outfield wall, just inside the left field line. Edman scored, but Ohtani was held at third, perhaps out of respect for the strong arm of Nathan Lukes in left field, perhaps because Freeman was due up next, perhaps because the Dodgers didn’t want to risk involving their possible Game 7 starting pitcher in a collision at the plate. But for a team struggling to get big hits, playing it conservatively felt risky.

Freeman followed Smith’s double by working a walk, which brought Mookie Betts to the plate. Entering the day, Betts was slashing just .234/.319/.328 over 72 postseason plate appearances, and he had been even worse in the World Series, just 3-for-23 across the first five games of the Fall Classic. Consequently, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts dropped Betts down in the order. This meant Betts was batting cleanup, as is typical for slumping hitters. His World Series bat tracking data suggests that he’s gotten away from the version of his swing that made him so successful in August and September, and instead he’s been committing the cardinal sin of “trying to do too much.”

You come over unannounced
Dressed up like you’re somethin’ else.
Where you are ain’t where it’s at,
You see, you’re makin’ me
Laugh out when you strike your pose.
Take off all your preppy clothes.
You know, you’re not foolin’
Anyone when you become

Somebody else ’round everyone else.
You’re watchin’ your back like you can’t relax.
You’re tryna be cool,
You look like a fool to me.

During the FOX postgame show, Betts admitted to making things too complicated, so he opted to chill out and take his wife’s advice to be present in the moment rather than worrying about what had happened earlier in the series. With the bases now loaded, Betts took the first two pitches he saw from Gausman, a slider for a ball and a splitter for a strike. Gausman then threw him three straight fastballs aimed at the upper third of the zone. Betts swung and missed at the first, fouled off the second, but on the third he connected, shooting a groundball single through the left side of the infield. Ohtani and Smith scored and Betts notched his first two RBI of the series.

Though their three-run third offered hope that the bats might be heating up, the Dodgers were held scoreless for the remainder of the game, leaving it up to Yamamoto and the rest of the pitching staff to make the lead stand up. After throwing back-to-back complete games in his prior two starts, it was reasonable to wonder if Yamamoto might give the bullpen another night off. He pitched well again on Friday, allowing just one run over six innings, but five hits, one walk, and six strikeouts drove his pitch count up to 96, pushing any notion of a third consecutive complete game out of reach.

And I’ve been takin’ care of business, every day,
Takin’ care of business, every way.
I’ve been takin’ care of business; it’s all mine,
Takin’ care of business and working overtime — work out.

Despite not having his best day at the office, at least not by his own incredibly high standards, Yamamoto still showed up and got the job done, and really only broke a sweat in the third and the sixth — the lone innings in which a runner reached second base against him. After retiring the first six Blue Jays, seven-hole hitter Addison Barger led off the third with a double on a poorly located fastball. Yamamoto followed that up by striking out third baseman Ernie Clement on three pitches, but he needed six pitches to get shortstop Andrés Giménez to ground out. Then the lineup turned over, and George Springer stood in for his second time. In his first trip to the plate, Springer saw seven pitches from Yamamoto, but ultimately rolled over a curveball in what was his first plate appearance since exiting Game 3 with an oblique injury. And though Springer could be seen visibly grimacing every time he moved his bat in the direction of the plate, he was still able to line a 3-0 cutter on the outer black into right field for a single in the third, plating Toronto’s only run of the evening.

From that point on, things went fairly smoothly for Yamamoto. He allowed a single in both the fourth and fifth, and got outs on the first two hitters in the sixth before playoff-boosted Vladimir Guerrero Jr. checked in with a double on a curveball off the plate. Bo Bichette followed with a walk, and with his fastball command clearly slipping, Yamamoto finished his outing by getting Daulton Varsho to punch out on four straight splitters.

I’ve known a few guys who thought they were pretty smart,
But you’ve got being right down to an art.
You think you’re a genius, you drive me up the wall,
You’re a regular original, a know-it-all.

That don’t impress me much.

Yamamoto put in a workmanlike effort, but it wasn’t without help from his defense. And the game’s most sparkling defensive gems came from Miguel Rojas, who had started just two games in the postseason prior to Game 6 (Game 2 of the NL Wild Card Series and Game 2 of the NLDS). His last appearance was coming off the bench in the 13th inning of Game 3, and prior to that he hadn’t seen game action since Game 3 of the NLDS. Rojas is arguably the Dodgers’ best defender at second, and to paraphrase Roberts’ pre- and postgame comments on the subject, he was hoping Rojas could provide a vibe shift and inject some energy into what was a do-or-die game for Los Angeles.

In the afterglow of Game 6, Roberts is looking pretty smart. Rojas made no less than four crucial plays in the field, including this barehand of gnarly chopper to get Barger for the second out in the seventh.

I can’t feel my face when I’m with you,
But I love it.
But I love it, oh
I can’t feel my face when I’m with you,
But I love it.
But I love it, oh.

Of course, the game’s defensive crown jewel came in the bottom of the ninth, just as fans of both teams were thinking, “Playoff baseball will be the death of me.”

Roki Sasaki started the inning for the Dodgers after posting a sloppy, but scoreless, performance in the eighth. Alejandro Kirk led off for the Jays and reached first on an 0-2 splitter that split up and in instead of down, and collided with Kirk’s wrist. Toronto pinch-ran for Kirk with Myles Straw. Barger followed with a double that likely would’ve scored the speedy Straw from first, except the ball wedged under the padding at the base of the wall on the fly and got stuck there. Defensive replacement center fielder Justin Dean wisely threw up his hands instead of trying to pry it loose. In the chaos of the play, not only did Straw score, but Barger also zoomed all the way around the bases for what most of the Rogers Centre crowd thought was a game-tying inside-the-park home run. Alas, the ball was ruled dead, Straw was placed at third, Barger at second, and the score remained 3-1. Still, the pressure was on the Dodgers, with Sasaki exiting the game with runners on second and third with no outs, Clement and his .403 postseason average coming to the plate, and Tyler Glasnow (who was in line to start a Game 7 if needed) jogging in from the bullpen to close it out.

I said, ooh, I’m blinded by the lights,
No, I can’t sleep until I feel your touch (Touch).
I said, ooh, I’m drowning in the night,
Oh, when I’m like this, you’re the one I trust.

Glasnow needed just three pitches to seal the win for the Dodgers, but the thought of a quick three pitches belies the anxious tension vibrating through the stadium and reverberating out of television screens around the world. On his first pitch, Glasnow got Clement to pop up a sinker, keeping it on the infield and preventing the runners from advancing. His second pitch was a curveball to Giménez that missed up. And his third pitch was a sinker on the outside corner that Giménez looped to left field and into the glove of the oncoming Enrique Hernández. After the game, Hernandez told Ken Rosenthal he was playing shallower than the defensive alignment card called for, based on his own recollection that Giménez didn’t have as much pop going the other way. As Giménez made contact, Hernández heard his bat break and started in, but he admitted to Rosenthal he couldn’t actually see the ball; it was obscured in the stadium’s lights. He continued running in, but joked that he was worried the ball would smash right into his face. Instead, it dropped out of the lights and into his mitt. At some point in the process, Hernández also clocked that Barger was halfway to third, so as soon as the ball had settled into his glove, he snatched it out and snapped a throw to second, where who else but Rojas was waiting to dig it out of the dirt to complete the double play.

But you, you’re not allowed.
You’re uninvited,
An unfortunate slight.

And not only did the double play close out the win, it kept the haunting presence of Springer in the on-deck circle.

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee.
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty.
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early.

So the Dodgers chewed up the Blue Jays in Game 6, forcing a Game 7, which is set for Saturday night, the first of November, in Toronto.

Everybody’s workin’ for the weekend,
Everybody wants a new romance,
Everybody’s goin’ off the deep end,
Everybody needs a second chance.