TORONTO — For an instant, the sellout crowd at Rogers Centre fell silent. They felt sure that Andrés Giménez’s liner was about to fall. In the visitors’ dugout, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts feared it was about to fall. In the home dugout, Blue Jays second baseman Isiah Kiner-Falefa it was about to fall.
But in that fraction of a second, as 44,710 people held their breath, left fielder Kiké Hernández heard something: Tyler Glasnow had broken Giménez’s bat. Hernández was already playing shallow—with one out, runners on second and third and a two-run lead, he wanted to be able to hold the batter-runner at first and the runner at second at third on a single. But now he knew that the ball was hit more softly than it looked. He sprinted toward it.
And it was a good thing he did, because then he lost it in the lights. , he told himself. .
He was not looking at second base, but he has played all over the diamond, and in that time he has learned to feel a play as it develops. And what he felt was that Addison Barger had taken too big a lead off second base. So after he snagged the ball, Hernández fired to the bag, where Miguel Rojas held on to preserve the Dodgers’ 3–1 victory in Game 6 of the World Series and force Game 7.
“[Hernández] is one of my favorite baseball players to watch,” said manager Dave Roberts afterward. “He’s one of the headiest baseball players I’ve ever been around. And even just getting off on the ball, the awareness to get to his arm, get the ball into second base. He’s just a heck of a baseball player.”
It was the second wild play in four pitches. A close but straightforward game turned into a thriller when the bottom of the ninth went spooky on Halloween night. Roki Sasaki, trying to get six outs to preserve a two-run lead, hit the Blue Jays’ Alejandro Kirk on an 0–1 to open the frame. Then, on a 2–2 count, Barger lined a fastball to the center field wall—where it lodged. Center fielder Justin Dean threw up his hands, believing that if he touched it, the ball would be in play. The umpires called it a ground-rule double. If the ball had landed anywhere else, it would have been a one-run game. (Even the Dodgers could not agree afterward on the rule, but a Major League Baseball official confirmed that Dean should have played the ball; the umpires can rule it dead even after a fielder touches it, and they would have done so in this case. Regardless, in this case, the result was the same.)
Instead, the runners stood at second and third. With no options remaining, Roberts summoned presumptive Game 7 starter Tyler Glasnow in relief; he induced a pop-up for the first out of the inning. Then came Hernández’s ears and his arm and the first game-ending 7–4 double play in World Series history. If he had missed it, the World Series might have been over. Instead, the game was.
For most of the night, the question was whether the lineup could sort itself out. The Dodgers shared the blame—as a group they entered the night hitting .201 in the World Series—but it was Mookie Betts’s struggles that received the most attention, both internally and externally.
“Focus on one game,” was manager Dave Roberts’s message. “Be good for one game. Go out there and compete.”
So when Betts, after getting beaten on two straight fastballs up in the third inning of a win-or-go-home World Series Game 6, lined the third one to left field to drive home the go-ahead runs, the happiest person at the Rogers Centre was surely the shortstop, who howled his relief and banged at his thighs. But No. 2 might have been his skipper, who shouted and pointed at Betts.
Roberts had tried to put a charge into Betts by publicly challenging him. The manager had tried to reassure him, both to the media and behind closed doors, by insisting that he would be fine. He had dropped him down in the lineup, from No. 2 to No. 3 and then finally, on Friday, to No. 4.
Betts had left 24 men on base this postseason, and he was hitting .132 since the beginning of the National League Championship Series. “I’ve just been terrible,” he lamented after yet another 0-for-4 in Game 5. He added, “I wish it were from lack of effort. But it’s not. I mean, that’s all I can say.”
Perhaps that effort was the problem. Maybe he needed to remember that he wasn’t the only one scuffling, and therefore he wasn’t the only one responsible for fixing it. So there was reason to believe that a new slot in the batting order might help. He has spent most of his career in the two-hole, but perhaps the move to the cleanup spot, where there were more run opportunities, would unlock his ability to stay short to the ball and use the whole field: Over his October career, he has hit .313 with runners in scoring position and .241 without.
He took batting practice on Thursday’s workout day, and both he and the hitting coaches believed he’d found something. “I was able to pull the ball,” he said of the workout. “I was able to get my A swing off.” But Betts is such a tinkerer with his swing that he often finds something and loses it within a few minutes.
“They’re going to make good pitches,” Roberts said before Game 6. “He’s going to go out there and compete. But I think that where his swing is at mechanically is as good as it’s been in a week, so I really feel good about that.”
is what Roberts has been practically begging his silent offense to do all series. He openly covets his opponents’ at-bats. “You clearly see those guys finding ways to get hits, move the baseball forward, and we're not doing a good job of it,” he said after rookie right-hander Trey Yesavage held the Dodgers to one run in Game 5, while Toronto exploded for six. “I thought Yesavage was good tonight mixing his fastball, slider, and the split. But you still have to use the whole field and take what they give you, and if they’re not going to allow for slug, then you've got to be able to kind of redirect and club down to take competitive at-bats, and you see, whether it’s [Addison] Barger or [Bo] Bichette, those guys are doing it.”
For Halloween, to Roberts’s delight, the Dodgers went as the Blue Jays. Game 6 featured a rematch of Game 2, which started as a pitcher’s duel and ended in history. Kevin Gausman matched Yoshinobu Yamamoto until the seventh inning, at which point Gausman made a pair of mistakes—two fastballs that caught too much of the plate and that Will Smith and Max Muncy whacked for homers—and Yamamoto seemed only to get stronger. He completed his second straight game, the first time anyone has done that in the postseason since 2001.
Again they looked close to even on Friday. Barger doubled to lead off the third and George Springer, returning from an oblique injury that cost him two games and visibly wincing with every swing, singled to drive in a run.
Meanwhile, Gausman struck out six of the first seven hitters he faced. But the eighth was Tommy Edman, who doubled, and Gausman intentionally walked Shohei Ohtani, the fifth time the Blue Jays have removed the bat from his hands this series. The strategy worked the first four times, but on Friday, Will Smith lofted a double down the left field line to bring home the Dodgers’ first run. The hit marked their first with a runner in scoring position since Game 3. Freddie Freeman walked to load the bases, and then the beleaguered Betts finally barreled up that fastball.
The sequence marked the Dodgers’ first hit with a runner in scoring position since Game 3, and their first multi-run inning since Game 4 of the NLCS. They loaded the bases again with two outs in the eighth, but failed to cash in; still, the third-inning rally held up, even as Yamamoto for the first time in three weeks went only six innings. The leaky bullpen held the lead at two, where it remained.
Game 7 awaits. The Dodgers hope to quiet the crowd here then, too.