Be honest. If you stayed the entire course of this World Series, there's only one conclusion. Both the triumphant Dodgers and the falling-just-short Blue Jays threw more kitchen sinks into it than you'll find on any Home Depot floor.
And, if you thought the way the Dodgers won Game 6 3-1 came right out of six parts Rube Goldberg and half a dozen parts South Park, both teams seemed hell bent on telling you in the Dodgers' eventual 5-4 Game 7 win that you ain't seen nothing yet.
Feel free to choose your own particular flash points. There certainly were more than enough to keep the analysts analyzing and the poets dreaming.
But tell me. In which planning session did you have Miguel Rojas hitting a game-tying home run in the top of the Game 7 ninth off Jays closer Jeff Hoffman . . . and then throwing the lead runner out at the plate in a bottom of the ninth, bases-loaded traffic jam, for the critical second out making the third inevitable if no less stupefying?
In which sweet dream did you have the Dodgers' late center field insertion Andy Pages running Jays third baseman Ernie Clement's drive down and running over Kiké Hernández to get that out?
"I was going to pull a Willie Mays," said Hernández, referring to Mays's still-stupefying Game 1-saving running-down catch in the 1954 World Series at the rear end of the Polo Grounds, "and then he tackled me, and I felt like I got dunked on, and I thought we lost. I was just down because I thought we lost. And he came up to me and said, 'Are you OK?' 'F--- that, do you have the ball?' He's like, 'Yeah.' I'm like, 'Yeah, let's go!'"
Sure. Just like that.
But in which script doctoring session did you have done to the Dodgers what they did to the Jays in that situation in the next half inning — a bases-loaded force-out at the plate for out number two meaning the third was all but inevitable again?
In which brainstorming session did you have Will Smith following back-to-back groundouts against Blue Jays starter-turned-reliever Shane Bieber with a blast into the left field bullpen to crack the tie? Leaving yet another starter-pressed-into-relief, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, to shake Vladimir Guerrero, Jr.'s bottom of the 11th opening double off and get a sacrifice bunt and then a step-and-throw double play by Mookie Betts to finish it all off?
I sure didn't have those scenarios in mine. Any more than I envisioned the Game 6 finish in which Addison Barger, one of the Blue Jays's most prolific postseason swingers, suffered one of the worst brain freezes known to man, woman, and World Series Friday night — leaning too far off second base in the bottom of the ninth and misreading a soft liner to left by Andrés Giménez that turned into a game-ending double play.
If I'd walked into some producer's office with scenarios such as those, they'd have booked me on the next available flight to Cloud Cuckoo-Land. If not the Island of Misfit Toys.
The Dodgers were actually down three games to two before Barger's mishap happened. He'd even set it up himself when he made second and third on a freak ground rule double, a long fly to left that landed stuck in the crease between the outfield wall pad and the warning track. Dodgers center field insertion Justin Dean hollered alertly for the dead-ball/ground-rule double call.
Neither did I have a scenario in which the team winning Game 7 never held any lead in the game until the eleventh inning when Smith's launch disappeared. Did I fathom the possibility of seven starting pitchers going to work in Game 7 including the whole Dodgers postseason rotation? The winning pitcher in Game 7 relief (Yamamoto) being the guy who started and got credit for the Game 6 win the night before?
"It's hard to say anything else," said Jays infielder Isiah Kiner-Falefa postgame Saturday night. "I thought we were gonna pull off another. But we ran out of some magic." The magic and the efforts that yanked the Jays from rock bottom last year to the threshold of the Promised Land this year simply weren't enough in the end.
Not even Bo Bichette's hefty 3-run homer in the Game 7 third, a homer every Blue Jay knew he'd earned the hard way. returning from the injured list to play in the Series after missing everything from September's birth forward with a knee injury.
"That was his moment," said utilityman Davis Schneider postgame. "Fighting back from his injury it's just amazing what he did. He put his career on the line, to be honest. He's a free agent, he could have gotten even worse and teams might have f--ed him on it, to be honest. But he showed (guts). I appreciate everything he's done for his team and myself."
Guerrero apologized unnecessarily for failing to deliver the World Series title Toronto wanted and he knew deserved. Bichette, who goes back to the deep minors with Guerrero, repeated his oft-expressed wish to stay in Toronto even with free agency looming for him, because this season — despite other Jays departing to free agency, too — taught him the truest meanings of "team."
Everybody re-learns those meanings when you grind a season out that brings you thatclose to the Promised Land knowing only one team will get there. Maybe no Dodger knows this more than Rojas, who provides clubhouse strength and surety even when he's not doing much on the field.
"When you play the game right, treat people right, are the teammate like Miguel is, the game honors you," said Freddie Freeman, the Dodger first baseman whose eighteenth-inning Game 5-winning homer was its own kind of proof of that maxim.
But you might have expected Freeman, or Shohei Ohtani, or even the still-struggling Mookie Monster to square up big Saturday night. You know bloody well you didn't have Rojas lining one into the left field stands in the ninth. You may bloody well know that he didn't have him lining one into the left field stands in the ninth, either.
"I never walked to the plate thinking about hitting a home run in that situation," said Rojas postgame. "I just wanted to stay up the middle, try to hit a fastball. I definitely chased on the first one. I tried to lock it in and be on the fastball after that, let the ball travel a little bit more . . . When [Hoffman] hung me the slider, I just put a good swing on it."
Somehow forgotten in the chaos and mayhem of the final three Game 7 innings was Max Muncy closing the deficit to 4-3 when he pounced on the Jays' glittering young sprout Trey Yesavage, yet another starter pressed into relief, and drove a one-out, 1-1 offering over the right field fence in the top of the eighth.
"Everyone talks about the Dodgers and how much money we spend and how we're supposed to do this, and all this stuff," said future Hall of Fame pitcher Clayton Kershaw, who announced his retirement before season's end. "I tell you what, man. You can't buy the character, the heart and the willingness to do things that other people wouldn't do."
Kershaw has a point. There's a team that's actually outspent the Dodgers in payroll the past four years. (Think about that when you begin feeling weird that the Dodgers are baseball's first World Series repeat winners in a quarter century.)
Would you like to know where they've been those four years? Two second place finishes, two missed postseasons, a National League wild card series loss, and a National League Championship Series loss. Meet the Mets, meet the Mets.
You might find a Met who might have done what Yamamoto did, following his Game 6 start and credited win by going out to pitch two and two-thirds game-winning, game-ending relief, on zero days' rest. Or, what Rojas, Smith, Pages, and the starters out of the pen did. But they have to get there first. ("That," Kershaw said of Yamamoto, "was probably the most gutsy, ballsy thing any guy has ever done.")
If you can name any pitching staff in the game this season who could and would have gone out to do what Ohtani (starting on three days' rest, exiting only after Bichette took him crosstown), Tyler Glasnow (getting the last three Game 6 outs and then getting seven Game 7 outs), and Blake Snell (two days' rest, four Game 7 outs) did, you should be playing the stock market.
Or, how about a catcher going Smith's distance this Series, catching 73 innings of baseball in the seven games including that eighteen-inning round-the-world cruise, which the irrepressible MLB.com writer/research Sarah Langs says beats out Lou Criger of the ancient Boston Americans in the first World Series ever played.
Well, how about we not think about those who will face free agency this winter — yet?
How about we not think about these two combatants other than as they've been this entire Series — classy fun?
How about we not think that there were moments you wondered whether the Dodgers would finally figure out ways past the Blue Jays pitching and defenses?
How about we simply thank God and His servants in the Elysian Fields that we haven't even let Rob Manfred obstruct us from loving a Series that deserved to be loved, despite Commissioner Pepperwinkle's wheeling, dealing, stealing, squealing, and reeling, because — lo! (you thought you'd escape my noticing it!) — this World Series, like the League Championship Series played to decide who'd play it, featured no team whose butts weren't parked in first place at season's end?
And, let us give due props to these Dodgers, warm fuzzies to these Blue Jays, and remind ourselves that, now and then, there comes a Series in which no matter who actually wins or loses, the real winner is baseball.
Leave a Comment