LA Dodgers hold on in Toronto to force winner-take-all Game 7 in World Series

The Los Angeles Dodgers stayed alive on Friday night, getting to Toronto Blue Jays ace Kevin Gausman for three runs in the third inning to win 3-1 and even the World Series at three games apiece. Baseball fans around the world will be treated to a winner-take-all Game 7 on Saturday, with the Dodgers looking to become the first team to win consecutive titles since 2000. The Blue Jays, meanwhile, will try to play spoiler and complete the upset to win their first World Series since 1993.

After the Dodgers offense struggled in the first four games of the series, slashing just .201/.296/.354 as a team, manager Dave Roberts shuffled his lineup ahead of Game 5. But it failed, as the Dodgers managed just four hits and one run against Blue Jays rookie Trey Yesavage and his bullpen. Roberts made a couple more minor changes before Game 6, however, inserting steely veteran Miguel Rojas into the lineup at second base and batting ninth while pushing Tommy Edman to center field and hitting eighth, hoping to get more out of the bottom of his lineup. “I just felt, again, the net sum of having both those guys in there, that’s how we had to construct it, and I feel great about it,” Roberts said before the game.

Gausman, the Blue Jays’ 34-year-old ace, started the contest by retiring the first seven batters he faced, challenging hitters with his fastball while getting four straight strikeouts with his splitter. Edman jumped on a first-pitch fastball in the top of the third inning and sent it over the glove of a leaping Vladimir Guerrero Jr for a stand-up double. The hit put a man on base for leadoff hitter Shohei Ohtani for just the eighth time all series, exactly what Roberts wanted with the lineup shuffle. With first base open, Blue Jays manager John Schneider intentionally walked the Japanese star before Will Smith made them pay, hitting a double to the left field wall and scoring Edman to put the Dodgers up 1-0. “If there is an obvious chance, take the bat out of his hands, yeah, we’re going to do it,” Schneider said about Ohtani. “Again, man, they have really good hitters up and down their lineup, so you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t sometimes.”

Mookie Betts, meanwhile, was moved to the cleanup spot after hitting just 3-for-23 (.130) with no extra-base hits through the first five games of the series. “I don’t want to speak on anybody else,” Betts said after Game 5. “But for myself, I’ve just been terrible.” After Freddie Freeman drew a walk to load the bases, Betts jumped on a fastball and drove it through the infield gap to score two more runs, making it 3-0. “We talked about letting the game come to him a little bit and he got a huge hit for us,” Roberts said.

Addison Barger took back some of the momentum in the bottom of the inning, igniting the 44,710 Blue Jays fans in attendance at the Rogers Centre when he hit a leadoff double into left field before George Springer drove him in with a single. But nobody else had much luck against Dodgers superstar Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who had command of all six of his pitches while mixing up his sequencing throughout the game, keeping the Blue Jays hitters guessing en route to pitching six innings with five hits, one run, and five strikeouts. “He’s a damn good pitcher,” Schneider said afterwards.

With the outlier third inning behind them, both Gausman and Yamamoto picked up where they left off, throwing strikes and keeping hitters from both teams off the score sheet. Both managers went to their bullpens in the seventh inning, as Gausman finished with three hits, three runs, and eight strikeouts in six innings. “I thought it was eerily similar to Game 2 between him and Gaus,” Schneider said. “I don’t want to overlook what Kev did too, coming out of the chute the way he did and just the one inning again. And they had a couple big swings.”

Neither team truly threatened again until the bottom of the ninth, when Dodgers closer Rōki Sasaki re-entered the game after throwing 25 pitches in the eighth inning and lost command of his splitter, hitting Alejandro Kirk on the hand. After the speedy Myles Straw entered the game for Kirk, Barger hit a line-drive double that wedged into the bottom of the left-field wall, causing outfielder Justin Dean to give up on the ball and signal to the umpires that it was stuck. Straw and Barger both scored easily when Dean jogged to the ball, but the umpires determined that it was in fact stuck and therefore ruled the hit a ground rule double. “You kind of like the way that was kind of unfolding and who was due up and things like that,” Schneider said after the game. “But, yeah, it just didn’t work out tonight.

“Baseball happens sometimes.”

Roberts once again seemed to push the right buttons as he gave Sasaki the hook in favor of projected Game 7 starter Tyler Glasnow with just one out and two on in the ninth. “I just felt that Roki wasn’t as sharp,” Roberts said. “I was looking for somebody that can get some swing-and-miss and some kind of elite stuff and that’s why I decided to go with Glasnow.”

Dodgers second baseman Miguel Rojas (72) fields a throw to force out the Blue Jays' Addison Barger (47) at second to turn a game-ending double play on Friday night. Photograph: Frank Gunn/AP

Glasnow got his first hitter, Ernie Clement, to pop out before Andrés Giménez. hit a hard line-drive to left fielder Enrique Hernández. Hernández got a good jump on the ball and caught it on the move before noticing that Barger had ranged too far off the second base bag towards third, hoping to score the tying run. Rojas called for the ball at second and Hernández threw a dart there, getting the force-out for the game-ending double-play. “Kiké just gets great jumps. He is one of my favorite baseball players to watch. He’s one of the headiest baseball players I’ve ever been around,” Roberts said.

“Miggy [Rojas] played the heck out of second base and made some huge plays,” Roberts added. “We were hoping for that kind of energy infusion tonight. We got that from Miggy.”

As the World Series comes to an end in Game 7 on Saturday night, the stakes couldn’t be higher. The Dodgers and the biggest star in baseball are hoping to go back-to-back for the first time since the New York Yankees won three straight titles from 1998 through 2000. At the same time, they could break baseball after fielding a team with the biggest payroll in MLB history, affecting the upcoming labor negotiations between the players union and the owners – some of whom believe that the lack of a salary cap has created an uneven playing field for the other 29 teams in Major League Baseball. “We’re going to leave it out there,” Roberts said of Saturday night’s decider “I don’t think that the pressure, the moment’s going to be too big for us. We’ve got to go out there and win one baseball game. We’ve done that all year.”

While the stakes might not seem quite as straightforward for the Jays, it’s about the potential to unite a country of 40m people: to inspire a new generation of Canadian boys and girls to fall in love with baseball. It’s also a chance for their hometown hero, Guerrero Jr, to etch himself into the history books, making him a Canadian immortal with a postseason nobody in the country has ever witnessed before.

“See you tomorrow,” Schneider said. “It’s going to be electric here. These guys, it’s business as usual, although it’s coming down to one game. These guys are really good at kind of just turning the page.

“That will take a while to kind of unpack. That’s a wild ending. I love the way we played … but we’re going to be ready to play tomorrow. Everyone’s going to be ready to play.”

The winner of the 2025 World Series will be decided 24 hours from now in downtown Toronto. The only question remaining is, on the sport’s biggest stage, who will emerge as the hero? “It’s the two best words in sports,” Schneider said. “Game 7.”