The Toronto Blue Jays sent 57 batsmen to the plate in the 25 hours between Yoshinobu Yamamoto's last pitch of Game 6 of the World Series and his first pitch of Game 7, so it isn't like they didn't have plenty of chances to avert the doom that was ultimately theirs. Indeed, the last World Series like this one was actually the cafeteria scene in Blazing Saddles, and that was 51 years ago. Too many deeds from too many people, too many defining achievements and agonizing near-misses, too much to absorb and too many details into which you could lose yourselves.
Somehow, though, the longest and least-hinged World Series since the Black Sox invented gambling found its equilibrium in the last place a rational baseball knower would have expected to look, and at the last possible moment—with Yamamoto providing the one bit of comprehensible order this ziggurat of chaos could permit.
It was a series that made room for nearly every player on both teams to make memories that Major League Baseball's cabal of marketing goblins can flog for years, and not just because it produced more actual innings of play than any series since 1912. Even those who just watched the series to get lost in the radioactive glow of Shohei Ohtani or Vladimir Guerrero Jr. were alternately enthralled and enraged in equal measure, while nearly every other player on both teams was spotlighted at one point or another. It was by any reasonable measure the most brilliantly mad championship in any sport in years, and the only real disappointment came in the 11th inning last night when Alejandro Kirk's series-ending double play meant that there would be no 12th inning, or 13th, or seemingly without end into the depths of the night.
The only person, it seemed, who could bring order to this was the one true constant: Yamamoto. He had thrown a complete game in the National League Championship Series and then a second in Game 2 of the series, a measure of forbearance last seen a decade ago, but being the inveterate showoff that he is, he then tried to insert himself into the 19th inning of Game 3 when the rest of the Dodger pitching staff was spent only to be foiled by Freddie Freeman's home run in the 18th. Undaunted by that missed opportunity, he pitched six innings of one-run ball on short rest in Game 6 Friday night. He made outs happen with a metronomic precision that none of his fellow lodgemembers could match. But his race had been run, and he was destined to watch inertly as Bo Bichette's third-inning homer last night gave Toronto a 3-0 lead that surely would bring down the curtain on the Dodgers' hopes of reprising their championship of 2024.
It was here that Dodger manager Dave Roberts, at the end of his tactical tether, decided to reinvent relief pitching by not leaving it to his relief pitchers. He was convinced of this in part because the only reliever he did use, Justin Wrobleski, nearly got the Dodgers into a bench-emptying brawl after nearly hitting and then actually hitting Andres Gimenez, and a 60-man battle royal was not part of the plan. Wrobleski was replaced first by Tyler Glasnow, then Emmet Sheehan and Blake Snell, all starters by trade, but as the game careened brake-free into extra innings, Roberts discovered the oddest of things: He was running out of starting pitching.
Enter Yamamoto—yet again. With the alternative being the venerable but deeply washed Clayton Kershaw, Yamamoto was inserted with Blue Jays at first and second with one out in the bottom of the ninth and promptly hit Kirk to load the bases, though more importantly he didn't try to start a riot a la Wrobleski. He then induced a grounder to second from Daulton Varsho that 36-year-old multiple retread Miguel Rojas, who had tied the game in the ninth with his first home run in nearly two months, turned into a force out at home only because catcher Will Smith barely managed to tap home plate with his foot. This was followed by a deep and dangerous fly ball from Ernie Clement that centerfielder Andy Pages caught for the third out while broadsiding left fielder Enrique Hernandez because on this night every out had outsized significance and a higher degree of difficulty. The series that gave us an 18-inning masterwork five days earlier looked ready to challenge that mark, a triumph of excess that might have caused the sport itself to immolate from the repetitive explosions.
It did not, of course, but not because the players weren't willing to continue embracing the madness into Sunday if need be. Hey, it was the end of daylight savings, and who wouldn't want to see 2 a.m. become 2 a.m. again while John Schneider was trying to convince backup catcher Tyler Heineman to pitch a fifth inning?
The Dodgers loaded the bases with one out in the 10th without scoring, and after Yamamoto powered through a 13-pitch inning without incident, Shane Bieber, Toronto's third repurposed starter, left an indifferent slider out over the plate for Smith to park in the left field seats to give the Dodgers a 5-4 lead. Roberts, with a smorgasbord of relievers left under the buffet heat lamp too long still available, went back to Yamamoto for a third inning that started with Guerrero's signature form of pitching terror, a screaming leadoff double down the left field line, followed by a sacrifice bunt by Isiah Kiner-Falefa that put Guerrero at third. Yamamoto looked vulnerable at last when he spent his 229th pitch of the week walking Addison Barger, which turned out to be, with Yamamoto's apparent mastery of the occult, a godsend, as three pitches thereafter he induced the deeply rectangular Kirk to ground into a series-ending double play, a final merciful act to the Dodgers and those whose exposed nerve endings weren't emotionally prepared for a 12th inning, let alone anything thereafter.
The series ended seven minutes after the old midnight, after 25 1/2 hours of raucous performance art dressed up as an allegedly fading sport which actually showed off all the things that make it not only worth preserving but a deserved renaissance. The team most notorious for spending money like yachtsmen on leave outlasted the team that made the fifth highest payroll look like plucky middle-class shop-owners, and the combinations of their efforts made for perhaps the finest denouement of the sport in this century. It just needed one person everyone could rely on when everyone around them was shrieking like flaming banshees on go-carts, and found it in Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the perpetual starting pitcher on call.
