Dodgers defeat Blue Jays in World Series Game 7 to cement a dynasty

TORONTO — The Dodgers’ march toward destiny was completed a quarter past midnight on Saturday evening.

It was unbelievable, indescribable, long-dreamt-of — and yet, the way the night was once headed, entirely unexpected at the same time.

In Game 7 of the World Series, the Dodgers cemented a dynasty with one of the greatest games this sport has ever seen.

They beat the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 in 11 innings, riding one season-saving play after another to improbably repeat as champions of baseball.

There was a miraculous ninth-inning comeback, when Miguel Rojas tied it with a home run to left field. There was a frantic escape of a bases-loaded jam the next half inning — the Dodgers staring down certain defeat, only to once again prevail.

In the 11th, they finally won it, taking their first lead of the game on a Will Smith home run with two outs in the top half of the inning, then watching Yoshinobu Yamamoto — in his third inning of work, a night after throwing 96 pitches in a Game 6 win — close it all out on a double-play grounder to shortstop Mookie Betts.

For ages, this game will be remembered. As long as baseball is played, a script like this will never be replicated.

“I’m a little speechless, a little bit shocked that we won this one tonight,” retiring pitcher and future Hall of Famer Clayton Kershaw said.

“My internal workings were not going great,” president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman added. “Definitely took years off my life. But for us to be on this side of it, worth it.”

The Dodgers looked buried early, falling behind 3-0 when a hobbled Bo Bichette took an exhausted Shohei Ohtani deep in the third inning. They seemed finished until the ninth, clawing back within one but never completely erasing the deficit — until Rojas saved the season with his game-tying home run to left.

Even then, salvation wasn’t assured. In the bottom of the ninth inning, the Blue Jays had the bases loaded, but somehow didn’t break through.

Rojas saved the day for a second time on a ground ball at second base, fielding it from a drawn-in position before firing for a force-out at home plate. The next batter, Ernie Clement, sent a fly ball to deep left-center. Kiké Hernández and defensive replacement Andy Pages collided at the warning track. Hernández hit the deck. Pages completed the catch.

The game would continue, thanks to the heroic (and Series MVP-clinching) effort of Yamamoto, who first entered the fray in the middle of the ninth-inning jam, then followed that up by retiring the side in order in the 10th.

Finally, in the 11th, the Dodgers completed their climb back atop the summit. Smith went deep. Yamamoto closed it out.

Now, and forever, the Dodgers have secured legendary status.

“This is a legacy that is gonna be remembered forever,” Rojas said. “I don’t know if this is the best team ever assembled or anything like that. You guys tell me after. But it’s pretty close to being one of the best teams ever.”

At the very least, these Dodgers have now completed one of the most accomplished runs in Major League Baseball history.

They are the first team to repeat as champions since the New York Yankees from 1998-2000. They became just the sixth franchise to win three World Series in a six-year period.

Most impressively, they did it all this year under the weight of unprecedented expectations.

“Everyone in spring training was expecting us to win,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said. “That’s really hard to do … I think that’s what makes it that much sweeter.”

After all, they were not so much playing against their opposition this season, as they were for a place among the sport’s immortal ranks.

These Dodgers had the most star-studded roster in the majors. They had a record-setting payroll, by luxury tax calculations, of roughly $415 million. They were also pilloried by the narrative that their hoarding of high-priced talent would make their dominance bad for baseball.

Dominance, however, is not what defined this season.

The starting rotation was ravaged by injuries early in the year. An inconsistent lineup and bullpen led to a second-half slump. They still won 93 games, and grinded out their 12th division title in the last 13 years. But at times, Rojas said, “we were asking a lot of questions in the clubhouse: Is this team good enough?”

Their elongated postseason path provided a resounding answer, as the Dodgers navigated an October march that actually stretched from Sept. 30 to Nov. 1 — and then, in extra innings of Game 7, the early hours of Nov. 2.

“We just kept going one pitch at a time, one day at a time,” Smith said. “Keep believing in ourselves. Keep believing in how good we are. Keep believing we’re the best team in baseball. Keep believing in each other.”

That belief was pushed to the limit Saturday. Three innings in, the Dodgers’ best-laid plans had backfired in an early implosion.

Starting on just three days’ rest, after throwing 93 pitches in Game 4 of this epic Fall Classic, Ohtani struggled mightily in his Game 7 start, lacking feel for his stuff while clearly running low on gas.

In both the first and third innings, Ohtani was so slow getting to the mound after hitting the previous half-inning, he needed the umpires to grant him extra time to throw his warm-up pitches. And after surviving trouble in each of his first two frames, he hung a slider to Bichette in the third that was hammered for a score-opening, stadium-shaking, nearly second-deck three-run homer.

“Oh, shoot,” Lakers legend and Dodgers part-owner Magic Johnson thought from his Rogers Centre suite. “This place is probably the loudest stadium I’ve ever been in.”

On the mound, Ohtani bent down to his knees as manager Dave Roberts came out to remove him.

During the pitching change, however, the Dodgers tried to steady their emotions.

“This game is not over,” Rojas implored his teammates around the mound. “We’re gonna keep fighting. We’re gonna keep going.”

The fact that Rojas was on the field Saturday was far from from a certainty earlier in the day.

The night before, in his first start since Game 2 of the division series, the veteran infielder had tweaked a lingering intercostal injury after completing an awkward game-winning double-play at second base, and getting forcefully mobbed by his teammates in the on-field celebration.

When Rojas woke up Saturday, his left rib cage was aching. He had trouble raising his arm above his head.

“Doc was texting me and asking if I could go,” Rojas said. “I told him, ‘Hey, let me get to the stadium and hit [to see].’”

After some lengthy pregame treatment, and a few pain-relieving injections, Rojas ultimately got in good enough shape. “He Toradol’d up,” Roberts quipped. When Rojas took pregame batting practice on the field, even owner Mark Walter noticed how good his swing looked, remarking to those around him, “He’s hitting it pretty hard.”

Thus, Rojas was slotted in the No. 9 spot in the lineup.

And when he came up in the ninth, he represented the Dodgers’ second-to-last hope.

At that point, the team had gotten back within 4-3, thanks to a string of strong relief appearances from Justin Wrobleski (who had been involved in a benches-clearing incident in the fourth after hitting Andrés Giménez), Tyler Glasnow, Emmet Sheehan and Blake Snell that helped control the deficit, plus an eighth-inning home run from Max Muncy that cut the Blue Jays’ two-run advantage in half.

With Ohtani lingering on deck, Rojas had only one objective: “Get on base for Shohei,” he said. “I’m not a home run hitter. I wasn’t trying to hit a home run.”

In fact, as Rojas dug in against right-handed Blue Jays closer Jeff Hoffman, he had yet to go deep against a right-hander all season.

This time, though, he worked a good at-bat, timed up Hoffman’s fastball on a pitch he fouled into the stands, then took a confident swing at a full-count slider that caught the wrong part of the zone.

“It was down and in, where I do all my power,” said Rojas, who had seven long balls this year.

Home run No. 8 was a line drive that just kept carrying, sailing over the Blue Jays’ bullpen down the line in left to stunningly tie the game and turn Rogers Centre silent.

“The game honors you, and right there the game honored him,” Roberts said of Rojas, the 36-year-old who, despite being a free agent this winter and contemplating retirement at the end of next year, has been one of the vocal and emotional leaders of the team even in a reserve role.

“Absolutely incredible,” Freeman added. “It saved our year.”

And soon, riding that renewed life, the Dodgers had a decision to make on the mound.

In the bottom of the ninth, Snell got in trouble with a one-out single and walk. Roberts then went to the bullpen to make a move he never expected. After Game 6, Yamamoto was the one pitcher he was certain would be unavailable for Saturday’s finale. But Yamamoto had other ideas, informing club brass he could be an option if needed.

Roberts had only planned to do so in an emergency situation. But with the winning run at second, this qualified.

“There’s certain players that want moments,” Roberts said. “And Yoshi is a guy that I just completely implicitly trust.”

The outing didn’t start smoothly. Yamamoto hit his first batter to load the bases. Then he gave up the ground ball Rojas fielded at second, and fired home for a force-out Smith only completed with a last-second toe tap of the plate. After that came the fly ball in the gap that left Hernández lying face down after his collision with Pages.

“I was gonna pull a Willie Mays, and then he tackled me,” Hernández joked. “I was just down because I thought we lost. But he came up and said, ‘Are you OK?’ [I responded], ‘Do you have the ball!’ He’s like, ‘Yeah.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, let’s go!’”

To extras it went, where the Dodgers squandered their own bases-loaded opportunity in the top of the 10th, Yamamoto retired the side in the bottom half of the inning, and Smith finally came up in the 11th and delivered the game-winning swing, launching a hanging slider from Shane Bieber over the left-field fence.

“I was just hoping I got enough,” said Smith, himself still less than a month removed from returning from a broken hand.

“We didn’t lead until we needed to,” Freeman declared.

For the final three outs, the Dodgers stuck with Yamamoto. And though the Blue Jays got runners on the corners, he snapped off his trademark splitter to induce the game-ending double-play from Alejandro Kirk, breaking his bat on a chopper Betts (a Gold Glove finalist in his first full year at shortstop) fielded himself and threw across the diamond.

“I knew he was capable of a lot,” Friedman said of Yamamoto, the Japanese star the Dodgers signed for $325 million last offseason. “But I didn’t think anyone was capable of doing what he did tonight.”

Then again, for so much of Saturday, the Dodgers didn’t look capable of coming back either.

“I mean, big-picture-wise, we didn’t play very well,” Friedman acknowledged. “But those big pivotal moments is where our guys really showed up.”

That’s been the real ingredient to the Dodgers’ success in recent seasons, the elixir behind all their expensive star power. They’ve built a culture, a camaraderie that even a Game 7 deficit couldn’t fluster.

They rode it to a championship, and a dynasty now cemented.

“We’ve put together something pretty special,” Roberts said afterward, beer-soaked champagne googles fixed around his head. “To do what we’ve done in this span of time is pretty remarkable. I guess, let the pundits and all the fans talk about if it’s a dynasty or not. But I’m pretty happy with where we’re at.”