There hasn’t been an eight-game World Series since 1921. But even eight games’ worth of baseball was not enough to anoint an MLB champion in 2025. Nine innings into Game 7 of a series that included a double-length Game 3, the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays were knotted at three wins apiece plus four runs apiece, as Saturday night in Ontario turned into Sunday morning.
It took two more frames to break the Blue Jays’ hearts and cement the Dodgers’ dynasty. With two outs in the top of the 11th, L.A. catcher Will Smith smashed a slider from Toronto’s Shane Bieber 390 feet to left field to put the Dodgers ahead 5-4. And in the bottom of the inning, with Smith behind home plate, Game 6 starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto finished Game 7 by inducing a double-play ball off the bat of Alejandro Kirk that stranded Vladimir Guerrero Jr. 90 feet from a tie. For the second time in two days, the Jays’ dreams were dashed by a game-ending double play, as for the first time ever, a World Series or a winner-take-all postseason game ended on a double play with the winning run on base. After trailing 3-2 in the series and 3-0 and 4-2 in Game 7, the Dodgers came back to go back-to-back, becoming MLB’s first team to repeat as champion since 2000.
Through all the uproar last winter about L.A. buying championships and destroying baseball, one factor was supposed to safeguard the sport from Dodgers dominance: the game’s unpredictable playoffs. October humbled the Dodgers in the first seven seasons of their 13-year (and counting) postseason-appearances streak, in addition to the three that followed their 2020 title. In 2023, the Diamondbacks, who would go on to win a pennant, held the Dodgers to two runs in each game of an NLDS sweep. Since then, though, the Dodgers have broken baseball’s guardrails. Neither the sport’s small-sample randomness nor the latest final boss they faced in October, the unflinching, hell-bent Blue Jays, could keep these Dodgers down. And now the Dodgers are a dynasty second only to the concurrent dynasty of Will Smiths.
A two-title winning streak might sound a little light for a dynasty. Adjusted for an era of 30 teams, 12 playoff spots, and four playoff rounds, though—the era of the draft, free agency, revenue sharing, and sabermetric analysis—the Dodgers deserve a place on the competitive pantheon. This is what a modern MLB dynasty looks like: L.A. has won three of the last six World Series and made five of the last nine. Over that nine-season span, the Dodgers have compiled a .627 winning percentage across the regular season and postseason, a pace of 101.5 wins per 162 games. They haven’t missed the playoffs since 2012, the year Mark Walter bought the team.
Like the Dodgers themselves, this postseason peaked at the right time. Game 7 was a wild capper to a tournament that showed baseball to its best advantage between late September and early November: one of the best final games in one of the best World Series in one of the best postseasons ever. There’s a strong statistical case for dispensing with those one ofs. According to Baseball Reference data compiled by Michael Mountain, Game 7’s cumulative change (644 percentage points) in championship win probability added—a sort of net excitement score—was the most of any AL/NL postseason game. The Fall Classic’s cumulative change in cWPA (1,401 percentage points) was the most of any postseason series. And the postseason’s cumulative change in cWPA (2,702 percentage points) was the most of any year.
With the exception of the 16-team 2020 playoffs, this postseason was the mostseason by total games played: 47 out of a possible 53, with seven of 12 series going the distance. Naturally, more games mean more opportunities for changes in championship probability. But even if we count only championship series games or later, 2025 is no. 1 out of 56 seasons in which that round has been played. If we count only division series games or later, 2025 is no. 1 out of 32 seasons in which that round has been played. However we slice it, 2025 is on top, and the numbers match the moments and the names: Shohei and Vladdy; Yamamoto and Yesavage; Springer and Polanco; Skubal and Schlittler; Kershaw and Scherzer; Misiorowski and Snell; Cal and Carpenter; Clement and Kiké; Barger and Judge. While the winner was predictable, the day-to-day drama wasn’t, and spectators’ time was well spent. In the U.S., Canada, Japan, and beyond, audiences saw both the best baseball teams and the best baseball.
By cWPA, the Dodgers’ pitching and hitting World Series MVPs were actual MVP Yamamoto and Smith, respectively: All-Stars on nine-figure contracts that run for a decade or more, the kind of high-profile, high-dollar heroes who define the Dodgers. The cWPA runner-ups in each category, though, were Will Klein and Miguel Rojas: a minimum-salary rookie reliever who was traded to the Dodgers in June and didn’t make their playoff rosters in the first three rounds; and a utility infielder who’d made nine trips to the plate in the postseason before Game 3 and had been hitless for a month before Game 7.
The Dodgers wouldn’t have won the series without Smith hammering his homer or Yamamoto harkening back to a time of more resilient starters. Yamamoto threw the first pitch of the Dodgers’ season in Tokyo on March 18, and he hurled the last in Toronto on November 2. After going the distance in Game 2 for the second consecutive start—thereby doing twice in a row what no postseason starter had accomplished even once in a postseason since 2017—and pitching six innings in Game 6, the Dodgers’ Japanese ace held the Blue Jays scoreless for the final 2 2/3 in Game 7. The winner-take-all contest was set up to be another Shohei Game; instead, it was the Yoshi Game. The 27-year-old righty became the first pitcher to be credited with three wins in the same World Series since Randy Johnson pulled off that feat to end the Yankees’ dynasty in 2001, and Yamamoto is the first ever to record three wins on the road. He came close to accounting for all four Dodgers W’s: Yamamoto was warming for the 19th when Freddie Freeman wrapped Game 3.
But there wouldn’t have been a bottom of the ninth for Yamamoto to enter in Game 7 if not for Rojas. Sandwiched in the order between two postseason standouts, Kiké Hernández and Shohei Ohtani, Rojas versus a righty seemed like the easy out, the breather between the real dangers to the Jays. Instead, it was Rojas who tagged homer-prone closer Jeff Hoffman with a one-out, full-count dagger to left that silenced Rogers Centre. It was Rojas’s second homer of the season against a same-handed pitcher, and the fourth of his career against a same-handed slider.
Rojas also burned the Blue Jays in the bottom of the ninth, when Daulton Varsho sent a chopper his way with one out, the bases loaded, and the infield in. Rojas gloved it, staggered, and regained his balance just in time to fire the ball to Smith, who was waiting with his glove outstretched and the tip of his toe on the plate—barely—to force out potential winning runner Isiah Kiner-Falefa.
Rojas, aware of how close he had come to taking too long, gathered his breath and slowed his heart with his hands on his knees. Sometimes, calling baseball a “game of inches” oversells the margin of victory, and undersells the hysteria. This was a game of inch, as was Game 6 with its ninth-inning wall wedgie. Had IKF taken a slightly larger lead in the ninth in Game 7—or perhaps had he run through the plate instead of sliding, or had Rojas taken an instant longer to recover from his stumble or gotten a little less on his throw—Varsho’s grounder would have walked off L.A.
In a game and postseason full of perplexing baserunning decisions, this lack of a lead—the night after Addison Barger was doubled off of second to end Game 6—may have been the most costly. “[The coaches] told us to stay close to the base,” Kiner-Falefa later explained. “They don't want us to get doubled off in that situation with a hard line drive. … They wanted a smaller lead and a smaller secondary, so that's what I did.” IKF wouldn’t have been in the game if he hadn’t had to run for the hobbled Bo Bichette. On the bases, Bichette’s bad knee limited him to home-run-trot top speed. Between his compromised play and a beat-up George Springer doing his best Black Knight impression—not to mention the absence of injured starter José Berríos—the Jays were further from full strength than L.A.
Of course, an inch or inches may have made the difference on any number of swings or plays: Varsho’s diving catch of a sinking liner hit by Teoscar Hernández with the bases loaded in the fourth, and Guerrero’s leaping grab in foul territory to end that inning; Vlad’s pinpoint throw and reception to end the seventh on a bang-bang double play; Muncy’s snag of Andres Giménez’s viciously sliced liner with a runner on second and no outs in the eighth; Andy Pages’s clutch catch on an Ernie Clement would-be walk-off fly in the ninth, over toppled teammate Kiké; Seranthony Domíngez feeling for and barely beating Kiké to the first-base bag on a 10th-inning, two-out, based-loaded grounder. As with Freeman’s walk-off blast in Game 3, Smith’s 11th-inning solo shot was a game-winner that didn’t come close to telling the full story of the contest it decided.
Although the benches briefly cleared during Game 7, no punches were thrown. In the last ABS-unassisted game in MLB history, no umpiring mistake obviously swung the proceedings. And no notorious managerial move marred the majesty of this series (though Schneider was a little loose with the free passes and sac bunts). The focus was where it belonged: on the players’ performance.
Granted, the managers put those players in position to strut their stuff. Though Dodgers fans dreaded a fatal Blake Treinen jump scare until the second the Dodgers dogpiled, Dave Roberts avoided making that mistake (or many others) in the last two games. Every button Roberts pushed panned out: dropping Mookie Betts to the cleanup spot in Game 6, which brought him to the plate to deliver his lone RBIs in the series via a two-run single in a two-run game; benching Pages and starting Rojas in Games 6 and 7; putting Pages in for defense in the ninth in Game 7, one batter before his full-contact catch sent the game into extras. And, in the end, trusting the supposedly unavailable Yamamoto to deliver eight outs on zero days’ rest. Was that dramatic decision—the sort of off-script, break-glass-in-case-of-emergency move that used to backfire for the Dodgers—wise? Once it works, its wisdom doesn’t matter.
Prior to the series, I wrote about how starter-centric this postseason’s pitching had been—especially out of the bullpen. The Fall Classic continued the trend. Of the two teams’ 73 innings pitched apiece in the series, 54 of the Dodgers’ and 52 of the Jays’—including 42 percent of the two teams’ combined relief innings—were thrown by regular-season starters. That pattern persisted in Game 7, as starter Shohei Ohtani, pitching on short rest (albeit a lot longer than Yamamoto’s), exited in the third after free-agent-to-be Bichette, possibly playing his last game for the Jays, disintegrated a slider for a three-run dong.
Aside from four outs from Justin Wrobleski, L.A. stuck with starters the rest of the way, deploying their other three rotation arms and Emmet Sheehan. The Blue Jays needed a little less length, thanks to a tank-emptying effort by Max Scherzer, the oldest starter ever in a winner-take-all World Series game. Scherzer, the worst starter in baseball by runs-based WAR over his final five outings of the regular season, was left off the ALDS roster but regrouped to make three post-ALDS starts in ALCS Game 4 and World Series Games 3 and 7 that gave the Jays good chances to win. He left with the lead in Game 7 after 4 1/3, and Jays skipper John Schneider used three starters (Chris Bassitt, Trey Yesavage, and Bieber) and three relievers (including Louis Varland in his record 15th postseason appearance) to piece together the rest of the game.
That the Dodgers ultimately were unbeaten doesn’t mean they were unbeatable. The Reds and Brewers may have made them look that way, but the Blue Jays—the AL’s answer to the Brewers—didn’t go down easily. If anything, they raised their game at the end of a torrid October.
At Vin Scully’s retirement ceremony in 2016, Sandy Koufax recalled, “Before the World Series, Vin would go to church and pray there’d be only heroes, no goats.” Five years later, before the last World Series he lived to see, Scully went to Twitter and prayed for goatless games again. Had he lived to see this series, he would have been pleased by how it turned out: Not only did the Dodgers win, but there were no glaring goats in Game 7 or the series at large, à la Phillies reliever Orion Kerkering in NLDS Game 4. The Dodgers won the series, but the Blue Jays didn’t deserve to lose it. They outhit, outscored, and outdefended the Dodgers, but L.A. made its meager runs count.
The Dodgers’ negative-eight-run differential is tied with the 1996 Yankees’ for the second worst by a World Series winner. The Jays posted a .745 OPS in the series (compared to the Dodgers’ .658) and boasted six of the series’ top eight hitters; in the wild-card era, only three pennant winners (the 2007 Red Sox, 2018 Astros, and 2002 Angels) have hit better. By situational wins, Guerrero’s offensive output trailed only Carlos Beltrán’s in 2004 on the all-time single-postseason leaderboard; his .241 wRC+ (derived from a .397/.494/.795 slash line) ranks fifth among hitters with at least 50 plate appearances in a single postseason, and his 89 trips to the plate is a postseason record.
Vlad impressed not only at the plate, but with his hustle and agility in the field and on the bases; everyone knew he could hit, but those who hadn’t watched the Blue Jays regularly until October discovered how he can impact games beyond the batter’s box. As much as this loss stings for Jays fans, who were two outs away from their first title since 1993, the blow would have been worse if Vlad were an impending free agent—as he was slated to be before his April extension—instead of a franchise cornerstone who’s signed for 14 more years.
Vlad had ample assistance from Springer and Kirk, as well as two less likely but even more potent partners at the plate: Addison Barger (who hit .367/.441/.583) and Ernie Clement (.411/.416/.562), the latter of whom lacked the big boys’ pop but bested Vlad by one hit to set his own postseason record. There were pitching surprises, too, none more pleasant than the 22-year-old Yesavage, who’s now pitched in twice as many postseason major league games as regular-season games. I observed in late September that Yesavage was among the rookie pitchers on playoff teams who had “played load-bearing roles in the pennant race,” but I didn’t anticipate how instrumental a part he would play in October. Yesavage, who was drafted last year, wasn’t widely ranked among the game’s top 100 prospects this spring, and started the season in A ball, has already amassed more than twice the career cWPA of Bassitt, his 36-year-old, 11-year-veteran teammate. Yesavage surrendered a solo dinger to Max Muncy in the eighth that put L.A. in Rojas-homer range of a tie, but his Game 5 gem will go down in legend.
The Jays came up short, but they didn’t come up empty: They went worst-to-first in the AL East; they banished the stain of their failure to win a postseason game in the five years preceding this run; they made their organization a more desirable destination; and they left their fans with indelible memories of the highlights and lowlights that led to the greatest cumulative change in cWPA that any individual playoff team has ever endured. “It’s hard to replicate true love,” Bassitt said when asked about the odds of re-creating the kind of camaraderie with another team that Toronto just enjoyed. Jays fans feel much the same about a relentless squad that honed its capacity for contact, power, and patience at the plate, coupled with fine fielding.
Asked to describe the Dodgers after Game 7, Schneider uttered one word: “talented.” The Dodgers didn’t buy a title—titles aren’t truly for sale—but they bought themselves the best chance to win one. This series and postseason were so riveting that reducing all that action to a referendum on MLB’s competitive balance and economic structure would be a bit of a shame—but the Dodgers did win, so some reckoning is inevitable.
To act as if this outcome were preordained would be to embody the xkcd “Sports” comic. Had Toronto converted its 91.3 percent chance to win with one out in the ninth, up by one run, the Dodgers breaking baseball wouldn’t be the biggest baseball story of the offseason. (At least, not less they completed their expected pursuit of top free agent Kyle Tucker.) I was all ready to write a column about how, in the end, the Jays didn’t need Shohei Ohtani, as their fans had chanted at him in Game 1; nor did they need Yoshinobu Yamamoto, or Roki Sasaki, or Teoscar Hernández. (Sherzer outpitched Ohtani, after all.) No, I would have written; the lesser free agents and internal options they settled for when they whiffed on their top targets—not just the ones who went to L.A., but also Juan Soto, Corbin Burnes, and so many, many more—sufficed. The Dodgers, I would have concluded, couldn’t quite defeat baseball’s natural barrier to a repeat. It would have made for a satisfying story.
The alternate universe in which I would have published that piece would have been the same as this one, on a fundamental level. But in our world, an inch (or inches) away from that other one, the final score told a different tale. The Jays missed out on Yamamoto and signed Hoffman; the former was the winning pitcher, and the latter blew a lead. That the opposite could easily have been true won’t assuage Jays fans’ suffering, even if it casts doubt on the idea that the Dodgers’ win was inevitable.
Compared to almost any team except the Dodgers, the Jays—a big-market team with the AL’s best record and the league’s second-wealthiest owner, third-largest individual player contract, and fifth-largest payroll—would have been miscast as an underdog. “David won, didn’t he?” asked Clement before the series started, but one wouldn’t typically expect a David to have home-field advantage. The two teams weren’t even built that differently, in terms of acquisition method; the Jays were one of four teams whose roster featured fewer homegrown players than L.A.’s, and they were tied for fourth in total free agents, trailing the Dodgers by one.
Against the Dodgers, though, the Jays were outclassed (if not exactly outplayed). The wattage of celebrities at the two teams’ respective home games seemed symbolic of their stars’ on-field fame: In L.A., LeBron, the Biebs (Justin, not Shane), Brad and Leo, Sydney and Charlize, and Harry and Meghan; in Toronto, Brandon Nolan, Geddy Lee, Jerry O’Connell, and a subset of the Schitt’s Creek cast. (Fine, Drake was in attendance too.) The difference between the competitors’ payrolls in raw dollars (setting aside the competitive balance tax) was roughly equivalent to the gulf between the Jays’ spending and that of the 22nd-ranked Brewers’. The Dodgers were both the preseason favorites and—even after a lackluster regular season—the heavy favorites (by baseball standards) when this series started.
The idea that the Dodgers took it easy during the regular season to save their strength for the playoffs depends on the dicey assumption that they didn’t care about securing a first-round bye, as well as the notion that their many arms on the injured list were just resting up for October. The regular-season Dodgers didn’t choose to win only 93 games because they couldn’t be bothered to turn it on until October; for much of the season, they simply weren’t any better than that. But the Dodgers’ deep resources did allow them to qualify for the playoffs while licking wounds that would have finished any other team. And once they got healthy, they got great—unlike last year, when they won despite serious flaws.
Playoff teams’ rosters diverge more from their regular-season counterparts than they used to, and whether by luck or design (or, to echo a quote often attributed to an old Dodger, the residue of design), the Dodgers leveled up in October more than any other team during the divisional era. Not only was the team that won the World Series the best version of the 2025 Dodgers, it may have been the best version of the Dodgers during their current run. “It was our firm belief that this was the most talented team we were bringing into October,” a champagne-soaked Andrew Friedman said after the NLCS, when asked to compare this club to previous models he’s built.
This year, the Dodgers drew 4 million fans and grossed $1 billion in revenue. And although their lineup is old (and looked it lately), they’ve assembled a farm system that ranks somewhere from the best to third best. They deserve credit for making the most of their institutional advantages—in contrast to plenty of teams that don’t maximize their payrolls and potential—but those advantages do exist. Is this unfair? Yes, but baseball always has been. Could it be made more fair? Probably. Whether the Dodgers’ success is such an existential threat to a sport that’s seemingly thriving that it necessitates a salary cap—without, in all likelihood, the reasonable salary floor that the more miserly owners would probably balk at—well, I wouldn’t say so. But I wouldn’t say that other teams’ fans shouldn’t feel frustrated, either.
I doubt the Dodgers’ win will affect the owners’ pursuit of a cap or the likelihood of a lost season in 2027; the owners would have wanted to restrict spending regardless, as they always have. And while L.A.’s repeat may make non-Dodgers fans more sympathetic to the owners’ position, public opinion doesn’t pull up a seat at the bargaining table.
But there’s a little life left in the league’s CBA yet, and one more precious, stormy season before the labor battle is joined. A lot can happen in the hundred days that precede pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training. But there’s one thing we can count on: Come Opening Day, the Dodgers’ odds of three-peating will probably be higher than the odds of any other single team snapping their streak.
Thanks to Michael Mountain for research assistance.
