World Series 2025: Game 7 took fans everywhere in an offtherails thrill ride of the best baseball has to offer Jake MintzNovember 2, 2025 at 3:59 PM 70 TORONTO — Baseball is but a game, glitter on dirt. It is three outs and four bases and nine innings (sometimes 18) and a bunch of millionaires grunting on your TV screen. It is a nice summer day, a hot dog and a few cold ones. It's an expensive jersey that you didn't need but bought anyway. And it is all, compared to the realities of life, completely trivial. It's a beautiful distraction. Neither the actions nor the outcomes actually matter.
- - World Series 2025: Game 7 took fans everywhere in an off-the-rails thrill ride of the best baseball has to offer
Jake MintzNovember 2, 2025 at 3:59 PM
70
TORONTO — Baseball is but a game, glitter on dirt.
It is three outs and four bases and nine innings (sometimes 18) and a bunch of millionaires grunting on your TV screen. It is a nice summer day, a hot dog and a few cold ones. It's an expensive jersey that you didn't need but bought anyway. And it is all, compared to the realities of life, completely trivial. It's a beautiful distraction. Neither the actions nor the outcomes actually matter.
In other words: It's all only as important and as meaningful as it makes us feel.
And on Saturday, this heavenly, cruel, perfectly imperfect sport sent any and all who interacted with World Series Game 7 through every emotion the human experience has to offer. Fans from Saskatchewan to Southern California, from Toronto to Tokyo, were held captive by the game's wondrous, tortuous, addictive power.
It was, in every way, the best baseball has to offer.
"There's so many things to unpack," Jays manager John Schneider said afterward.
In the end, the Los Angeles Dodgers emerged victorious, 5-4 in 11 innings. That's what the box score says. In doing so, they captured their second consecutive World Series championship, becoming the first MLB franchise since the 1998-2000 New York Yankees to win back-to-back titles. The club's deep-pocketed ways have already sparked debate and discord about the future of the sport. Those conversations will only intensify as the weather cools. Twenty-nine fan bases are understandably angry; something the triumphant Dodgers won't lose any sleep over.
"We got a bunch more to win," one Dodger joked postgame. "At least one more until [the league] locks us out."
If these Dodgers have indeed become a full-fledged dynasty — and it certainly feels like it — this was an empire well-earned. The Blue Jays gave them everything they had and more. Besides, this is what an evil sports juggernaut is supposed to look like: impenetrable, inevitable. Tortured fan bases are just playthings, character foils for the Los Angeles steamroller.
[Get more L.A. news: Dodgers team feed]
The Dodgers arrived at the pinnacle, once again, thanks to contributions big and small, predictable and unexpected, from every nook and cranny of their roster. Franchise catcher Will Smith, perhaps the best offensive catcher of his generation, poked the go-ahead homer in extra innings. That moment was only made possible because Miguel Rojas, the team's veteran utility infielder — a light-hitting glovesmith whose only round-tripper this season versus a right-handed pitcher came against a position player — crushed a game-tying big fly with one out in the ninth.
"Hitting a homer wasn't on my bingo card, to be honest," he told MLB Network after the game.
"Hitting a homer wasn't on my Bingo card to be honest."- Miguel Rojas on #MLBTonight 🤣 pic.twitter.com/7DdSpCUusZ
— MLB Network (@MLBNetwork) November 2, 2025
Yoshinobu Yamamoto, named a deserved World Series MVP, contributed 2 2/3 miraculous innings on zero days' rest about 24 hours after he threw 96 pitches in Game 6. Add his complete game in Game 2, and it was an entirely unprecedented performance. Fittingly, Yamamoto was on the mound for the final out, a double-play bouncer to superstar outfielder-turned-shortstop Mookie Betts that kept the tying run from scoring from third.
In the aftermath, the Dodgers lifted Yamamoto aloft on their shoulders like a retiring high school football coach at the end of a Disney movie. Later on, in the celebration, Yamamoto found Dodgers assistant pitching coach Connor McGuiness and jokingly informed him, in broken English: "I no pitch tomorrow."
But this game was far, far bigger than any one contribution, any one person, any one play.
It was an off-the-rails thrill ride, with enough heart-stopping moments and tantalizing storylines for five sporting lifetimes. 41-year-old Max Scherzer somehow collected 13 outs. There was a benches-clearing brouhaha. Five starting pitchers appeared in relief. Toronto nearly walked it off in the ninth on a bang-bang play at home. They nearly walked it off again one play later, when two Dodgers outfielders collided but made the out anyway.
Everyone watching, both involved and detached, wanted to vomit for four straight hours, and it was the best.
Perhaps most improbably, on Saturday, the sport of baseball even found a way to humble Shohei Ohtani, a man who has scoffed at and outright ignored its limits more often than any other player in the game's long, colorful history. Starting on three days' rest, Ohtani the Pitcher was a man on empty. Utterly spent. He who has done it all simply did not have it. Ohtani survived his first trip through Toronto's lineup with grit, guile and good fortune, but things went decidedly sideways for him in the third inning.
Bo Bichette — the evening's first hero-that-wasn't — unleashed the hammer blow.
A Toronto Blue Jay since his teenage years, the 27-year-old infielder missed the prior rounds of these playoffs due to a knee sprain. All World Series, Bichette essentially played on one leg, enduring immense discomfort, even though, after Game 7, he admitted only to "a little" pain. Adrenaline and muscle memory pushed him through, enabling a moment of sheer magic: a country-erupting, three-run, 442-foot moon shot to dead center.
The lid popped off the joint. Bichette dispatched his lumber and strutted calmly toward first as revelry reigned. Ohtani went hands to knees in exhaustion, a giant slain. Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bichette's good pal and longtime teammate, waited at home plate, arms spread wide for the hug of all hugs. At the time, it felt like a fitting capstone to a glorious October north of the border.
But it wasn't to be. The baseball gods, imaginative and cruel, had other plans. So did the Dodgers, who clawed their way back into the fight. Max Muncy trimmed the deficit to one in the eighth with a solo blast off rookie Trey Yesavage. An inning later, with the Jays two outs from glory, Rojas stunned a nation with an inconceivable, game-tying tater.
MIGUEL ROJAS WITH THE BIGGEST SWING OF HIS LIFE 💥GAME 7 IS TIED IN TORONTO pic.twitter.com/tDwUGzBrVq
— MLB (@MLB) November 2, 2025
"I cost everybody in here a World Series ring," Jays closer Jeff Hoffman, the poor soul on the other side of Rojas' iconic moment, said afterward. "It feels pretty s***ty."
Hoffman wasn't the only Jay affected. All around the home clubhouse, grown men had tear-stained eyes. Shane Bieber, who gave up Smith's homer, was a puddle. So was infielder Ernie Clement, who broke the record for hits in a postseason in Game 7. Teammates gushed over one another, waxed poetic about how close-knit everybody was, how they felt like it was written in the stars — until, of course, it wasn't.
"I said thank you," a grateful John Schneider revealed during his postgame news conference. "I said thank you probably about 10 times. And that was the main message. I'm sure I'm going to talk to them all again, but I said thank you."
Canada, surely, feels the same.
This Jays club reinvigorated the sport for a nation — no small feat. With a magical postseason run, they turned this franchise into a destination and an institution. Nobody wearing white on Saturday will take much solace in that, at least not in the immediate afterglow. But in time, the pain will subside, and the good will endure.
At around 2 a.m. — the second one, thanks to daylight savings — the Rogers Centre grounds crew gave up. By that point, both teams had long since left the building.
Jays players were home or heading there, their tanks empty, their eyes heavy, their brains too full to dream of sleep. The jubilant Dodgers were likely plane-bound or already in-flight, their champagne-soaked victorywear in a laundry cart somewhere. The stadium stood still. It was over, somehow. All the pictures had been taken, the thank-yous shared, the hugs given, the interviews conducted, the trophy stage taken apart and removed.
All that was left was a mess.
And as an army of leafblowers worked through the bleachers, clearing the detritus of 44,713, the blue-shirted grounds crew struggled to vacuum up the avalanche of confetti that littered the infield dirt. They'd already cleaned up the shimmering strands of paper on the outfield turf, scooping the darn things pile by pile into huge trash bins.
But for whatever reason, the gold and silver shrapnel behind second base proved too difficult a challenge. So they just left it there, a thousand shiny rectangles that could have belonged to the Blue Jays but in the end belonged to the Dodgers.
Meaning that when the sun rose over a defeated city, all that sparkle would still be there. Glitter on dirt.
It's just that. It's much more.
Source: "AOL Sports"
Source: Sports
Published: November 02, 2025 at 09:27PM on Source: VOXI MAG
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