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As the bullpens emptied and the Dodgers and Blue Jays played late into the night, Toronto second baseman Isiah Kiner-Falefa had a discordant thought.
“There was a point where I thought we might see two position players in the World Series going back and forth,” he said.
A day after the Dodgers won 6-5 on Freddie Freeman’s 18th-inning home run off Brendon Little to take a two-games-to-one lead in the best-of-seven matchup, both managers said they were about to have to send a position player to the mound in an all-important game.
However, neither was immediately in favor of adopting the automatic runner rule used in the regular season since 2020, in which each team begins each extra inning with a runner on second base. Among the 209 extra-inning games this season, all ended on the 13th. In the six seasons with the ghost runner, the longest was the Dodgers’ 16-inning victory over San Diego on August 25, 2021.
“Baseball in its truest form and part of winning a seven-game series is that if you have games like that, then you have to go through the battle of attrition with the pitching,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
Will Klein, Los Angeles’ series-record 10th pitcher, doubled his previous career highs with four innings and 72 pitches. Yoshinobu Yamamoto had warmed up and was ready to enter the 19th, two days after throwing 105 pitches to win Game 2 in his second straight complete game.
“If Yamamoto couldn’t have gotten the ball in the 19th, it probably would have been Miguel Rojas. So that’s where we were,” Roberts said, referring to a second baseman who made four appearances as a cleanup pitcher during the season.
Little came on in the 17th for the Blue Jays and Shane Bieber, their scheduled starter for Game 4 on Tuesday, was in the bullpen and would have followed him to the mound. Rookie Trey Yesavage, scheduled for Wednesday’s Game 5, would have been the last pitcher to arrive before a position player.
Blue Jays manager John Schneider wasn’t sure he was in favor of extending the ghost running back to the postseason.
“I’m kind of a traditionalist when it comes to baseball,” he said. “It’s kind of unique because that’s how you play for 162 and then that goes away. But with that, I think you have to structure your roster accordingly to try to handle some of those situations.”
Information from The Associated Press.
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