TORONTO — Thirty-two years of frustration and failure, disappointment and self-loathing, trauma worn like a badge of honor, burst forth in magnificent fashion Friday night. The sixth inning of Game 1 of the World Series was an exorcism. Toronto, one of the greatest metropolises in the world, a city that loved its baseball team for decades without loving it back, screamed and screamed and remembered what a baseball championship was like. And the Toronto Blue Jays, architects of the 11-4 devastation of the heavily favored Los Angeles Dodgers, did more than just create one of the greatest offensive innings in World Series history.
They showed the world what they were already certain of going into the 121st World Series: They are no pushovers.
“We’ve had a sincere feeling for a long time that if we just play a certain type of baseball, we’ll win the game,” Toronto right-hander Chris Bassitt said, and he’s right. In an era of copious strikeouts, the Blue Jays aren’t doing it. In an era of poor defense, the Blue Jays are playing clean. And even against a heavyweight like the Dodgers, a team full of late players and second chances can look like a dominant force.
Nothing personified that like the end of the sixth. It was one of the great half-innings in World Series history, a nine-run frenzy filled with everything the Blue Jays offense does well. Toronto entered the series with by far the best offense in Major League Baseball this postseason, scoring 6½ runs per game, almost two more than the Dodgers. The sixth illustrates how.
Starting with a six-pitch walk, adding a single, hitting a hit by pitch on the ninth pitch of the bat and chasing two-time Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell set the tone. A single scored the first run and gave the Blue Jays a 3-2 advantage. A nine-pitch walk scored another run and a single added one more. And after a tapper on the mound resulted in the first out on a force play at home, Blue Jays manager John Schneider called on his third pinch hitter of the inning, Addison Barger.
The past week has been eventful for Barger. On Monday night, the Blue Jays ousted the Seattle Mariners in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series to clinch the pennant. Barger said that the next morning he flew to meet his wife at the hospital for the birth of their third child. A day later, he returned to Toronto for Blue Jays practice – but he had nowhere to stay.
“They opened up lodging, but for a few days I wasn’t paying for a hotel room,” Barger said. “I know it sounds crazy, but I’m just trying to save money.”
So after crashing on Blue Jays outfielder Myles Straw’s couch for a few days, Barger spent Friday night with teammate Davis Schneider, sleeping on a sofa bed in the living room of the hotel suite that overlooks the Rogers Center from center field. Barger wasn’t exactly comfortable — Schneider said he heard creaking coming from the bed as Barger tried to find peace — but that didn’t stop him from unleashing the biggest hit of his young career.
On a 2-2 slider from reliever Anthony Banda, Barger lofted a ball over the center field wall for the first grand slam in World Series history, sparking chaos inside the domed stadium, where primal screams bounced off the roof and reverberated to create a tsunami of sound.
The Blue Jays’ expertise in this style isn’t new – they’ve won the most games in the AL this season precisely because they’re so adept at grinding bats like sandpaper for pitchers’ souls – but seeing it on this stage, against a Dodgers team that held Milwaukee to four runs in the National League Championship Series, hammered home that Toronto won’t be just another stop on the way from Los Angeles to back-to-back championships.
The flood continues. A single by Vladimir Guerrero Jr.. Another home run, by catcher Alejandro Kirk, who went 3 for 3 and had a nine-pitch walk in the first, when the Blue Jays forced Snell to throw 29 pitches and predicted his early exit. In total, Toronto threw 44 pitches, scored nine runs – the third most in a World Series inning and the most since 1968 – and turned a 2-2 score into an 11-2 score.
This is who the Blue Jays are. They have a superstar (Guerrero) and a veteran of the playoff wars (George Springer) and a returning All-Star (Bo Bichette, who played for the first time since September 6, at a position, second base, that he hadn’t played since he was in Triple-A six years ago). The rest of their roster is made up of players who have bought into Toronto’s philosophy that as long as the Blue Jays don’t struggle, they are good enough to outlast anyone, even a team as talented as the Dodgers.
“If we don’t strike out, if we don’t give outs and if we don’t fight and give up home runs, we’re going to win the game,” Bassitt said. “It’s not about playing any team. It’s just about believing in our team that no matter who we play, this brand can win.”
It’s the kind of brand that helped the city fall in love with the Jays again. Toronto is experiencing baseball heartache. After back-to-back championships in 1992 and 1993, the Blue Jays fell into a pattern of perpetual mediocrity. Even when they were good in the mid-2010s, they weren’t successful in the ALCS. Their previous three playoff berths ended in wild-card series sweeps. They tried to land Shohei Ohtani in free agency. He went to the Dodgers. They tried to land Juan Soto in free agency. He went to the New York Mets. The Blue Jays, snake-bitten for decades, entered 2025 with little hope of recovery.
But baseball is funny that way. Sometimes a team comes together around an idea, and that idea turns into a philosophy, and that philosophy fuels a revolution. And the Dodgers are so good that all this joy, this source of emotion and excitement, could be short-lived. It was perhaps the culmination of a season that was great, but not great enough.
Or maybe the 44,353 players at the Rogers Center were right when, with two outs in the ninth and Ohtani at the plate, a chant began to seep into the stadium.
“We don’t need you,” Blue Jays fans told the world’s best player. They didn’t need him this season. They didn’t need him Friday. They didn’t need him to move forward.
It was arrogant, but understandable. In the past 32 years, Toronto has not experienced a night like this. The Blue Jays had their moments, of course. José Bautista’s bat. Edwin Encarnacion’s home run. All this, ultimately, for nothing. But this time? With this team of true believers? In a city that lives a dream?
The rest of the World Series will provide the answer. But that night, it was true. The Toronto Blue Jays only needed themselves. And there were many of them.
