World Series: Blue Jays show Dodgers exactly how they got here
Los Angeles Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani waits in the dugout ahead of the top of the seventh inning of Game 1 of the World Series against the Toronto Blue Jays in Toronto on Friday. Credit: AP
TORONTO
The chant was thunderous, the message loud and clear: “We don’t need you!”
That was the chant directed at Shohei Ohtani late Friday night by the 44,353 fans at Rogers Centre, and if that sounds like a funny thing to yell at the planet’s best baseball player, they weren’t wrong.
Ohtani, who famously spurned Toronto before signing with the Dodgers, was reduced to being a $700 million sideshow in Game 1 of the World Series. The Blue Jays bulldozed the Dodgers, 11-4, and by doing so, seriously dented the seemingly invincible aura of the defending world champions.
“Turn the page,” Mookie Betts said. “It’s one game. Nothing we can do about it now. It’s all over with. Focus on tomorrow.”
Shocking? Not really. Especially for those of us who bore witness in this building when the Jays did the same thing to a highly confident Yankees team during the first two games of the Division Series.
Those Yankees, much like the Dodgers, figured to have a decisive rotation edge with a Cy Young Award candidate in Max Fried and an 18-game winner in Carlos Rodon. But none of that matters to the Blue Jays, a relentless group of hitters who thrive on contact, grinding down whoever’s on the mound until they crack and eventually break.
Toronto chewed up the Yankees’ pitching staff, including Fried, to the tune of 23-8 in taking the first two games of that Division Series before finishing it up in Game 4 in the Bronx.
Surely they couldn’t duplicate that demolition against the Dodgers, right?
L.A.’s rotation had looked unbeatable through the first 10 games of this postseason with a 0.63 ERA that was the lowest in LCS history. The Dodgers’ starters had a 1.40 ERA with 81 strikeouts and a .132 opponents’ batting average in the postseason, which did a lot to explain their 9-1 mark.
The six-day layoff before Friday’s Game 1 also allowed the Dodgers to set up their rotation, leading with Blake Snell, who was nearly untouchable through his first three 2025 postseason starts (3-0, 0.86 ERA). But that was before running into the Jays, who made him throw 42 pitches through the first two innings and pestered him enough that Snell slipped up in the fourth.
Protecting a 2-0 lead, Snell gave up a leadoff single off the rightfield wall by Alejandro Kirk (eight-pitch at-bat) before Daulton Varsho hammered a first-pitch fastball for a tying two-run blast that sent the Rogers Centre crowd into a frenzy. Snell hadn’t allowed a homer to a lefty hitter all year, and it was the first one he’d served up overall since Aug. 29.
Those two runs equaled Snell’s previous total for the entire postseason, a stretch of 21 innings, and it soon would get much worse. He failed to get an out in the sixth, allowing a walk and a single before nailing Varsho on the shoulder. That set up the Blue Jays’ nine-run barrage, including a grand slam by Addison Barger, the first by a pinch hitter in World Series history.
“No excuses,” said Snell, whose ERA for these playoffs rocketed up to 2.42. “I got to be better.”
As much as Snell’s meltdown set off alarm bells for the Dodgers, his relatively early departure — it was the first time this October he didn’t complete six innings — also exposed a potentially fatal weakness: L.A.’s vulnerable bullpen.
The rotation’s playoff success had limited the relief corps’ usage as the starters had pitched 64 1⁄3 of a total of 92 innings in those 10 games, or 69.9%. Their eight starts of at least six innings in which they allowed four or fewer hits tied the 2001 Diamondbacks for the most in a single postseason.
On Friday, the Dodgers looked very different. When reliever Emmet Sheehan got called into Snell’s bases-loaded, none-out mess, he immediately gave up three runs on a pair of singles and a walk. When the Jays went to Barger to pinch hit, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts countered with lefty reliever Anthony Banda, whose 2-and-1 slider wound up as the historic grand slam.
Afterward, Banda dismissed the idea that the bullpen’s confidence has taken a hit, even with its already shaky reputation entering this World Series.
“I don’t think it affects anything as far as that,” Banda said. “Just didn’t execute. When we do, we’re lights out. I still believe that. But tonight was just a very bad night.”
Not unique, however, when it comes to these Blue Jays, who love surfing the momentum wave they get from a rocking Rogers Centre.
During that sixth inning, all the Dodgers could do was stand around and watch the carnage as their bullpen disintegrated. For a $395 million team that supposedly is “ruining baseball,” L.A. was the one that got wrecked Friday night, and that had to be eye-opening after cruising through October to this point.
“I was just watching it, the same way y’all are,” Betts said of that sixth-inning burial. “It is what it is. There’s nothing you can do about it now. We can’t go back and change it. So there’s no sense in dwelling on it.”
No, but the Dodgers do have to find a way to stop the rolling Jays in Game 2, or at least slow them down. The Yankees couldn’t do it, which is why they’re watching this World Series from home — and feeling a sense of deja vu.
David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.
