OPINION: Outrageous pitching performance by Dodgers ace leaves Jays bats speechless
It was said that the Los Angeles Dodgers were angry after being humiliated by the Toronto Blue Jays in the opening game of the World Series on Friday night.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto certainly pitched like he was absolutely furious.
Toronto’s bats were silenced in Game 2 by a dazzling performance from the Dodgers starter, who allowed just a lone sacrifice fly to Alejandro Kirk over nine brilliant innings. The Jays had just four hits on the night, two of them bloops, and not one after the third inning.
The Dodgers eventually won 5-1, evening the series at a game apiece.
If the Jays launched rockets on Friday, Saturday brought a whole mess of wet firecrackers.
Yamamoto, a 27-year-old from Japan in his second year in the majors, worked with a repertoire that seemed frankly unfair. He struck out Nathan Lukes on a 97-mile-an-hour fastball and froze Daulton Varsho on a 77-mile-an-hour curveball, while also mixing in a sharp, hard split-fingered fastball.
Good pitches are often called filthy. This stuff was disgusting. Gross. Cover-your-eyes nasty. You get the idea.
Other than a shaky first inning, Yamamoto had Blue Jays hitters off balance all night, in a way they had not been since Game 5 against Seattle in the American League Championship Series, more than a week ago.
Yamamoto struck out eight Toronto batters and threw 105 pitches for a complete game, which is the modern baseball equivalent of spotting a unicorn.
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A Rogers Centre crowd that began the night rocking and joyous, with franchise legend Joe Carter throwing out the ceremonial first pitch and then hamming it up with the present-day Jays, ended up resigned to its fate as Yamamoto mowed down hitter after hitter. Hopefully not too many attendees were stewing over the prices they had paid on the resale ticket market.
Toronto’s inability to do much of anything at the plate made an unfortunate victim of starting pitcher Kevin Gausman, who was quite filthy himself through six innings before surrendering a pair of solo home runs in the seventh, to Will Smith and Max Muncy.
For a team that has talked so much about the brotherhood and camaraderie that they share in a tight clubhouse, Gausman could be forgiven for wondering if he has caused some sort of offence to his teammates given the lack of run support they have given him.
Gausman also pitched well in both of his starts against Seattle — Games 1 and 5 of the ALCS — but the Jays lost both. Toronto’s potent offence, the best of any playoff team by some distance, backed Gausman with just four runs across his last three starts.
Gausman’s departure after those seventh-inning home runs turned things over to the Blue Jays bullpen, which exposed the soft underbelly of the team.
The Dodgers tacked on two more runs against a series of Jays relievers, more evidence for the pre-series theory that whichever team is forced to go to its bullpen first is in trouble.
And, as if to prove that when things go sideways in the baseball playoffs, they often go really sideways, Toronto’s normally reliable defence helped Los Angeles score both of those runs.
Alejandro Kirk failed to block a pitch in the dirt that allowed a runner to score, and Andres Gimenez tried to turn a double-play on a slow grounder with the bases loaded instead of taking the force out at home. That decision allowed the Dodgers’ fifth run to score when the double-play attempt was unsuccessful.
Given the wet noodles that the Jays were waving at Yamamoto, an extra run felt like it might as well have been a grand slam.
Indeed, the Japanese sensation struck out the side in the eighth inning, at a point in the game when the vast majority of starting pitchers have long since been sent to the showers.
And so now it is off to Los Angeles for the next three games. The Jays will be disappointed to have given up the home-field advantage they brought into the series, but all is not lost. Toronto is 3-2 on the road in these playoffs, and they went to Seattle in the last round, having lost twice and promptly won the next two.
Perhaps more importantly, the Jays’ emphatic Game 1 win proved that they could trade punches with the defending World Series champions and their roster of All-Stars. The Jays haven’t rolled over and had their tummies rubbed.
Sometimes, a baseball team runs into a pitcher who is simply unhittable. The hard thing to fathom is that, with the way Yamamoto has been pitching — he also threw a complete game in the National League Championship Series, which is downright freaky — he was still not the Dodgers’ choice to be the Game 1 starter. The Los Angeles rotation is that good.
If the series does end up coming back to Toronto, Yamamoto would likely be the Game 6 starter for the Dodgers. It’s probably best for Jays fans not to think about that possibility just now.
TORONTO – Whether it was at the draft, the trade deadline, or during free agency, Ross Atkins has always emphasized the importance of values during his decade as general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays.
Every time there was a potential addition to the team, Atkins never failed to mention their “high character.”
He believes that policy has paid off in 2025, with the Blue Jays reaching the World Series for the first time in 32 years in large part thanks to their cohesiveness and dedication to each other.
“I’ve always been taught and learned and believed strongly that hiring and identification of — whether it be players, coaches, scouts, anyone that’s helping support the organization — that hiring’s the most important thing we do,” said Atkins during a news conference on Friday before Game 1 of the World Series. “If you do that with values that are important to you, then over time, that’s going to pay off for you.”
Atkins said that centring the team’s personnel policy and the resulting atmosphere is something that he and manager John Schneider actually spoke about earlier in the week.
“The thing that I think about the most is the relationships, the people that we have hired and the people that we have grown with together,” said Atkins, who was hired as the team’s GM in December 2015. “I’ve always felt there’s a big group of people here that I’m working with that will, for sure, be lifelong relationships and lifelong friendships.
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“This success — albeit we’re not done, with work to do — not just this year, but well beyond, I think just emboldens that feeling of how powerful these relationships will be.”
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Toronto led all of Major League Baseball with 49 come-from-behind wins in the regular season, with 12 of those victories coming when the Blue Jays trailed by at least three runs.
They also rallied from a 2-0 deficit to the Seattle Mariners in the best-of-seven American League Championship Series. The climactic Game 7 in Toronto was capped by George Springer’s three-run homer in the seventh inning, undoing Seattle’s early 3-1 lead in that series finale.
“I think that’s what forms a good team. It’s talent and it’s players, but it’s people,” said Schneider before the World Series began. “I think that we’ve done such a phenomenal job of creating a culture where people are just welcome.
“It’s what we’ve grasped on to, the standard we’ve set. Not just the type of player we want, but the type of people we want in here, too.”
Schneider has been with the Blue Jays organization since 2002 when he was drafted in the 13th round of that year’s draft. He retired from playing after the 2007 season due to three concussions suffered that year, then became a minor-league manager for the rookie-level Gulf Coast League Blue Jays in 2008, working his way up through the franchise’s different levels of ball.
He said that the relationships that have been built in Toronto during Atkins’s tenure has helped create the culture that made the Blue Jays (94-68) playoff run possible.
“I think that when you’re trying to establish a winning environment and a winning organization that can do it repeatedly, that people come into play,” said Schneider. “People that are going to push things forward and not be satisfied.
“Even this year, when we acquired (infielder Andres Gimenez) and signed (Anthony Santander) and signed Max (Scherzer), we were talking about what that would do for people around them too and where the people that we had already were in their career and in their lives.”
Schneider said it was also a factor in July as Major League Baseball’s trade deadline approached and the Blue Jays were gearing up for a deep post-season run.
“It was cool to have those conversations with Ross, understanding what we were doing at the time, and not trying to disrupt that,” said Schneider. “You want to try to add people that are going to help.
“So Seranthony (Dominguez), who is about as selfless as there is, Louis Varland, Ty France, they’re good pieces for what we already have, too. We made it a point to be really aware of it this year and, again, it’s been a couple years in the making to get to this point.”
Varland and France were traded to Toronto by the Minnesota Twins on July 31 for Alan Roden and Kendry Rojas. Varland, who has become a fixture in the Blue Jays bullpen in the post-season, said that the strong culture on his new team was immediately apparent.
“From the coaching staff to the players to the support staff to the chefs, like everybody’s great, everybody’s friendly, welcoming,” he said. “I saw this the other day, ‘the Glue Jays.’
“That’s, like, a perfect way to sum it up. Everybody’s so close and everybody’s a great guy or girl.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 26, 2025.
© 2025 The Canadian Press
TORONTO – One of the highlights of Toronto skipper John Schneider’s first day at the World Series — aside from the 11-4 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers — was getting a chance to connect with former Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston.
“He’s always been great to me,” Schneider said before Game 2 on Saturday. “He just said, ‘I love what you’re doing, I love the way your team plays and you should be very proud of what you’ve done.’
“And I said, ‘That means a lot coming from you.’”
Gaston, who threw the ceremonial first pitch to Schneider before Game 1, guided the Blue Jays to World Series titles in 1992 and ’93.
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After throwing the pitch, the 81-year-old Gaston asked Schneider to autograph the ball for him since he planned to put it on his mantle.
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“I did and I made him a promise that I need to get one from him,” Schneider said with a smile.
DOGGED APPROACH
Blue Jays catcher Tyler Heineman said his team is well aware the defending-champion Dodgers entered the World Series as heavy favourites.
Los Angeles dropped only one playoff game entering the Fall Classic and boasts a lineup that includes sluggers Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and others.
At the start of the series, the Dodgers were listed as a -220 favourite on BetMGM to win the series while the Blue Jays were at +180.
“We know we’re severe underdogs but that doesn’t matter to us,” Heineman said. “We were severe underdogs at the beginning of this season. We weren’t even supposed to be in the playoffs, yet alone the World Series.
“To the group inside (the clubhouse), that doesn’t hold any weight to us. We know what a special group we have.”
Before Game 2, the sportsbook had L.A. down to a -120 favourite to win the series while the Jays were at +100.
BACK TO BACK
The Dodgers are aiming to become the first team to win consecutive World Series crowns since the New York Yankees won three titles between 1998 and 2000.
Major League Baseball’s current 24-year streak without a repeat champion is the longest of its kind in the history of the so-called Big Four sports (MLB, NBA, NHL, NFL).
The Dodgers are the first defending champions to return to the Fall Classic since the Philadelphia Phillies in 2009.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 25, 2025.
© 2025 The Canadian Press
TORONTO – John Tavares scored his 499th career goal on a breakaway at 1:28 of overtime as the Toronto Maple Leafs snapped a three-game slide with a 4-3 victory over the Buffalo Sabres on Saturday.
Nick Robertson, Matias Maccelli and Dakota Joshua provided the rest of the offence for Toronto (4-4-1). Cayden Primeau made 23 saves in place of the rested Anthony Stolarz. Tavares added an assist, Matthews Knies had two of his own.
Tage Thompson scored twice and Bowen Byram had a single for Buffalo (4-4-1). Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen stopped 18 shots for the Sabres, who entered having won four of their last five.
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Thompson and Robertson traded goals in the first period. Maccelli and Byram did the same in the second before Thompson and Joshua repeated the feat in the third to set up the OT dramatics.
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The Sabres picked up a 5-3 victory over the Leafs on Friday in Buffalo to snap a five-game slide against Toronto.
The Leafs were minus star winger William Nylander, who was listed as a game-time decision, because of a lower-body injury.
TAKEAWAYS
Leafs: No. 1 defencemen Morgan Rielly was also a game-time decision, but was healthy enough to play after taking warm-up. Nylander sat out for the first time in 267 regular-season contests dating back to April 2022.
Sabres: Luukkonen made his first start of the season after missing the first eight games with a lower-body injury. Alex Lyon picked up Friday’s victory.
KEY MOMENT
After the visitors went up 3-2 in the third on a Thompson power-play goal, Joshua tied the score with under seven minutes to go in regulation.
KEY STAT
Tavares sits one goal shy becoming the 49th player in NHL history to reach 500 for his career.
UP NEXT
Sabres: Host the Columbus Blue Jackets on Tuesday.
Leafs: Host the Calgary Flames on Tuesday.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 25, 2025.
© 2025 The Canadian Press
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