TORONTO – It might have been easier – for the mind and soul – if the Toronto Blue Jays simply offered token resistance in the bottom of the ninth inning of World Series Game 6, down 3-1 and assured of a Game 7 and November baseball, regardless.
Succumb meekly to Los Angeles Dodgers rookie closer Rōki Sasaki, and the postgame vibes would’ve been muted but rote after right-hander Yoshinobu Yamamoto mastered them for the second time in eight days.
Get ‘em tomorrow. Sometimes you just gotta tip your cap. All hands on deck in Game 7.
Alas, these are the 2025 Blue Jays, MLB leaders in comeback wins, incapable of anything but big feelings and bigger goals that almost always, against the odds, come to fruition.
Yet this time, one sinking line drive and the ultimate youthful mistake on the basepaths left one of the greatest hitters in postseason history on deck, robbed of the chance to tie or win the game. And now everyone – the Dodgers and Blue Jays, a collection of 44,710 title-hungry Toronto fans, the hundreds of cops deployed in anticipation of championship bedlam in The Six – must come back tomorrow night and try again.
Game 7, the greatest words in sports?
Tell that to a club that got the tying runs on base and the World Series-winning run to the plate with nobody out, the temporary stage Major League Baseball constructs for championship celebrations poised and ready for a strike force to guide it onto the ersatz surface of Rogers Centre, where, if the ball fell properly, Rob Manfred would award the Commissioner’s Trophy to the Blue Jays.
That stage never moved.
If only Addison Barger did the same when Andrés Giménez’s sinking fly to shallow left field got hauled in by Dodgers playoff legend Kiké Hernández.
The ever-heady Hernández spotted Barger drifting too far off second base, jacked up and too eager to score the game-tying run. Instead, it was an unprecedented World Series walk-off result of the worst kind for the home team: 7-4 double play, game over, and George Springer – he of the 23 career postseason home runs, including a three-run shot to win ALCS Game 7 – on deck for his Joe Carter moment.
Instead, Barger drifted too far off the second base bag, dead man’s land. Hernández, promptly yet casually, spiked a one-hop throw to second baseman Miguel Rojas.
And Barger, all limbs and long hair flailing into second base, was out by a mile.
You could say Rogers Centre was deflated, but then again, it hardly had a chance to get fully going, so quick was the rally, so sudden the end.
The Blue Jays, winners of 105 games, regular season and playoffs, have done more than enough to deserve a championship. Yet the tiniest fraction of it – nine innings of winning baseball in a year they’ve done it dozens of times – still remains to be completed.
“Saying you deserve it is kind of tricky. To deserve something, you have to finish the job,” says Blue Jays rookie starter Trey Yesavage, whose epic postseason may yet require one more climb up the Rogers Centre mound. “You can have all these accolades in the regular season and thus far in the playoffs.
“But deserving something only gets you so far. We need to show up tomorrow.”
Barger has shown up throughout October for these playoffs, just a week removed from busting open World Series Game 1 with a grand slam. He put the Blue Jays in position to steal a game by scorching a ball 105.5 mph into the left field gap, so hard it wedged into the wall.
The ground-rule double didn’t change what would have been: Barger on second as the tying run, nobody out. Ernie Clement’s pop-up against Tyler Glasnow brought up Giménez, a No. 9 hitter but a playoff savior this month.
He did what he could against Glasnow, stroking the ball toward left. Given Giménez’s dearth of opposite-field power, Hernández was playing shallow and closing quickly.
If only Barger could see what almost everyone else could: That it was a relatively routine fly ball, that freezing and retreating almost immediately was the move.
“I was pretty surprised he got to it,” Barger said in the Blue Jays clubhouse. “Off the bat, I thought it was going to go over the shortstop’s head.
“I didn’t think it was going to travel that far. It was kind of a bad read.”
And not the way any club wants to go into a Game 7.
In a funereal Blue Jays clubhouse, some tried covering for Barger.
“I thought it was a hit. I thought it was getting down, a thousand percent,” says infielder Isiah Kiner-Falefa of his vantage point on the play. “Kiké made a great play right there. Aggressive mistake.
“You make a mistake, you want it to be aggressive. That’s how we play. It didn’t work out for us tonight.”
And there was the sense the Blue Jays still possessed that esprit de corps, this notion that no cause is ever lost, that victory – second and third, nobody out – was expected, and will come their way next time.
‘Throughout the regular season, we’re in that spot, it’s a walk-off win,’ says Gausman. ‘Nobody out, guys on second and third. We’ve come back so many times. Everybody kind of just expecting, yeah, we’re going to win this game.’We didn’t, obviously. But we did have an opportunity to win. At least we didn’t kind of go down with no fight.’
Yet there was the undeniable residue that comes with opportunity lost. Not that all is lost: These fellows bounced back from an 18-inning loss in Game 3 to win the next two at Dodger Stadium, putting them in this enviable position in the first place.
The chins will be up come Saturday evening. Yes, there’s still a chance. But it’s impossible to ignore that a golden one just passed them by.
“We had a chance to close them out. But we didn’t so we’ll just turn our attention to tomorrow,” says infielder Bo Bichette. “Game 7, Game 60 in the regular season, we’ll show up ready to play, ready to compete, and give it everything we got.
“We thought we had a chance to win it today. But we didn’t get it done.”