TORONTO — On Wednesday, the longest night of the Dodgers’ season got dragged into the early hours of the next morning.
In Game 5 of the World Series, the team had been embarrassed on its home field, getting shut down and outplayed in a loss to the Toronto Blue Jays that sent them to the airport with their season on the brink.
When the players arrived at LAX later that night, they were already preparing for a lengthy flight back to Toronto. Then, they were forced to sit on the tarmac and wait a little more.
First, as the team charter taxied to the runway, a fuel pump alert came on in the cockpit, forcing the aircraft to return to its gate. That turned out to be a false alarm, with a mechanic finding only a malfunction with a warning light. But the delay required the plane to be refueled. And the fueling truck, as luck would have it, broke down before it reached them.
The delay grew so long that, at one point, the players — who fly separately from the coaching staff and the rest of the organization’s traveling party — contemplated staying the night in Los Angeles, and trying to fly out again in the morning.
But by then, they had already stewed on their Game 5 clunker long enough.
They wanted to get to Toronto, prepare for an off-day workout Thursday, and begin the daunting task of trying to save their season.
“I gave our players an option to not workout today, because of the long series and 18 innings [in Game 3] and the travel and all that stuff,” manager Dave Roberts said the next afternoon. “And not one guy took the option. So that was pretty exciting for me. It just speaks to where these guys are at. … We’re gonna keep going, and keep fighting.”
Keep going, the Dodgers did on Friday night.
With their backs against the wall, they fought their way to a Game 7.
In a 3-1 defeat of the Blue Jays that scuttled a potential Halloween-night, championship-clinching party at a sold-out Rogers Centre, the Dodgers did just enough to keep their season alive.
They took an early lead, scoring three runs in the third inning with an aggressive game plan against Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman in the third.
They got six strong innings from Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who yielded just one run on five hits and six strikeouts.
Then they won the game on a mind-bending double-play in which Kiké Hernández caught a line drive in left and threw out a runner who had strayed too far from second base.
Now, they will live to see one final day, setting up the first seventh game in a World Series since 2019. They ensured they didn’t have to head back to the airport yet, delaying their return flight home to Los Angeles one more night.
After being passive at the plate and hitting from behind in the count all night in Game 5, the Dodgers came out with a different plan of attack for Game 6: Be aggressive, swing often, and don’t live in fear of striking out or making mistakes.
It didn’t lead to pretty results early. In the first two innings, the team made six-straight outs, struck out five times, swung at 22 of Gausman’s first 32 pitches, and whiffed on 12 while fouling off several mistake fastballs.
Undeterred, however, the Dodgers kept hacking.
And in the top of the third, they finally came to life.
Tommy Edman was ready for a first-pitch fastball and sent a one-out double to the right-field corner. Will Smith barrelled up a splitter Gausman left just high enough to trade places with Edman on an RBI double to left.
Two batters later, with walks to Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman having loaded the bases, up came Mookie Betts — who was dropped in the batting order again in Game 6, occupying the cleanup spot for the first time in his career since the 2017 postseason.
Entering the night, Betts was just three-for-23 in the World Series, and hitting .164 since the start of the National League Division Series. The Dodgers had been encouraged by his off-day work, in particular, with Roberts noting his mechanics looked the best they had all series. But his first time up, he had taken an ugly first-pitch hack at a center-cut fastball before eventually grounding out to extend his slump.
This time, Betts looked in trouble again. He swung through an elevated fastball to fall behind 1-and-2. He chased another heater above the zone that was barely fouled off. Gausman, however, went back to his four-seamer for a third-straight time on the next pitch. With his best swing of the series, Betts squared it up and sent a two-run single screaming through the infield.
As he pulled into first base, he clapped toward the dugout, then slapped his hands against his thighs in an outburst of relief.
It had given the Dodgers their first inning scoring more than two runs since Game 4 of the NL Championship Series, nearly a full two weeks prior.
The Dodgers wouldn’t score again against Gausman, who completed a six-inning start by retiring the final 10 batters he faced.
Yamamoto, coming off complete games in his previous two postseason starts, gave one run back in the fourth but also limited the damage after that in a six-inning start, finishing his night by stranding two runners on base in the sixth.
Roberts rolled the dice in the seventh inning, turning to rookie left-hander Justin Wrobleski to face the bottom of the Blue Jays order. He gave up a two-out double to Ernie Clement, but bounced back by striking out Andrés Giménez to retire the side — letting out a fired-up yell as he walked off the mound.
Then, as the Dodgers stranded a bases-loaded opportunity in the eighth, Roki Sasaki got ready for a six-out save, taking the mound for only the second time this series.
Sasaki had to grind to get through the eighth, leaving two runners stranded by retiring Bo Bichette and Daulton Varsho back-to-back.
Then, in the ninth, the game reached its climax with a stunning, dramatic ending, on Hernández’s stunning double-play to get Barger at second and end the game.
Simply getting to that point required its own sequence of dramatics. Sasaki hit Alejandro Kirk with an 0-and-2 splitter that slipped out of his hand to lead the inning off. Barger followed with a line drive to left-center that was hit so hard, it got wedged in the wall for a ground-rule double.
That break would prove critical for the Dodgers, forcing Barger — who had raced all the way home after the Dodgers outfield threw their hands up and the umpires called the play dead — to return to second as Roberts went to the mound to make a pitching change.
In came Tyler Glasnow, who might have started Game 7 had he not been needed to put out the fire. On his first pitch, he got Clement to pop up. Then, Giménez hit the ball to Hernández, starting the double-play that will allow the Dodgers to carry on the fight.
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