TORONTO — Thirty-two years of frustration and failure, of disappointment and self-loathing, of trauma worn as a badge of honour, burst in magnificent fashion Friday night. The sixth inning of Game 1 of the World Series was an exorcism. Toronto, one of the world’s great metropolises, a city that has loved its baseball team through decades of it not loving back, screamed and bellowed and remembered what championship baseball looked like. And the Toronto Blue Jays, architects of an 11-4 devastation of the heavily favored Los Angeles Dodgers, did more than just author one of the greatest offensive innings in World Series history.

They showed the world what they were already certain of coming into the 121st World Series: They are no pushovers.

“We’ve had a genuine feeling for a long time that if we just played a certain brand of baseball, that we then will win the game,” Toronto right-hander Chris Bassitt said, and he’s right. In an era of copious strikeouts, the Blue Jays don’t. In a time of shoddy defense, the Blue Jays play clean. And even against a juggernaut like the Dodgers, a team full of late bloomers and second chancers can look like a dominant force.

Nothing personified that like the bottom 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 a game, nearly two more than the Dodgers. The sixth illustrated how.

Starting with a six-pitch walk, adding a single, drawing a hit-by-pitch on the ninth pitch of the at-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 to the mound drew 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 hectic 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 the next morning, he flew to meet his wife at the hospital for the birth of their third child. A day later, he flew back to Toronto for the Blue Jays’ workout — but didn’t have anywhere to stay.

“They set up a place, but I was like, for a few days, I’m not paying for a hotel room,” Barger said. “I know that sounds crazy, but I’m just trying to save a buck.”

So after crashing on the couch of Blue Jays outfielder Myles Straw for a couple of days, Barger spent Friday night with teammate Davis Schneider, sleeping on a pullout couch in the living room of the hotel suite that overlooks Rogers Centre from center field. Barger wasn’t exactly comfortable — Schneider said he heard squeaks from the bed as Barger tried to find peace — but it didn’t impede him from unleashing the biggest hit of his young career.

On a 2-2 slider from reliever Anthony Banda, Barger rocketed a ball over the center-field wall for the first pinch-hit grand slam in World Series history, unleashing 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 is nothing new — they won the most games in the AL this season precisely because they’re so adept at grinding at-bats like sandpaper to pitchers’ souls — but to see it on this stage, against a Dodgers team that limited Milwaukee to four runs in the National League Championship Series, hammered home that Toronto will not be just another layover on Los Angeles’ path to back-to-back championships.

The deluge continued. A Vladimir Guerrero Jr. single. Another home run, from catcher Alejandro Kirk, who went 3-for-3 and had drawn a nine-pitch walk in the first, when the Blue Jays made Snell throw 29 pitches and forecast his early exit. All told, Toronto saw 44 pitches, scored nine runs — the third most in a World Series inning and the most since 1968 — and turned a 2-2 nailbiter into an 11-2 stomping.

This is who the Blue Jays are. They’ve got a superstar (Guerrero) and a veteran of playoff wars (George Springer) and a returning All-Star (Bo Bichette, who played for the first time since Sept. 6, at a position, second base, that he hadn’t played since he was in Triple-A six years ago). The rest of their lineup is stocked with players who have bought into Toronto’s philosophy that as long as the Blue Jays don’t beat themselves, they’re good enough to outlast anybody — even a team as talented as the Dodgers.

“If we don’t strike out and we don’t give outs away and we essentially don’t beat ourselves and don’t give up home runs, we’re going to win the game,” Bassitt said. “It’s not about facing any team. It’s just the belief in our team that no matter who we play, this brand can win.”

It’s the kind of brand that has made the city fall in love with the Jays again. Toronto knows baseball heartbreak. After consecutive 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 fell short in the ALCS. Their previous three postseason berths ended in wild-card series sweeps. They tried to get Shohei Ohtani in free agency. He went to the Dodgers. They tried to get Juan Soto in free agency. He went to the New York Mets. The Blue Jays, snakebitten for decades, entered 2025 with little hope for a turnaround.

Baseball is funny that way, though. Sometimes, a team coalesces around an idea, and that idea turns into an ethos, and that ethos fuels a revolution. And the Dodgers are so good that all of this joy, this wellspring of emotion and excitement, could be short-lived. Maybe this was the apex of a season that was great, just not great enough.

Or perhaps the 44,353 at Rogers Centre were onto something when, with two outs in the ninth and Ohtani at the plate, a chant started to percolate through the stadium.

“We don’t need you,” Blue Jays fans said to the best player in the world. They didn’t need him this season. They didn’t need him Friday. They didn’t need him going forward.

It was hubristic, but that’s understandable. For the past 32 years, Toronto hasn’t experienced a night like this. The Blue Jays have had moments, sure. The Jose Bautista bat flip. The Edwin Encarnacion home run. All of it, ultimately, for naught. This time, though? With this team of true believers? In a city that’s living a dream?

The rest of the World Series will provide the answer. On this night, however, it was true. The Toronto Blue Jays needed only themselves. And they were plenty.

TORONTO — The bases were loaded with none out, Game 1 of the World Series was still tied, and a sold-out Rogers Centre crowd was going berserk when Emmet Sheehan came out of the bullpen in Friday’s sixth inning.

Sheehan is a 25-year-old with fewer than 150 career innings in the major leagues. Before that moment, he had checked into the middle of an inning only once before, while following an opener Sept. 15. What followed — a nine-run barrage that propelled the Toronto Blue Jays to an 11-4 rout in their first World Series game in 32 years — highlighted a glaring weakness the Los Angeles Dodgers carry into this final round:

If their starters don’t pitch deep into games, they’re in trouble.

“Just a tough game,” Dodgers ace Blake Snell said after recording just 15 outs, “but a lot to learn.”

On the eve of this World Series, the Dodgers learned Alex Vesia, one of their best relievers, was dealing with what the team described as a “deeply personal family matter” that would force his removal from the roster. Vesia’s absence essentially whittled down the list of trusted high-leverage relievers to four: Sheehan, Anthony Banda, Blake Treinen and Roki Sasaki. Two of them, Sheehan and Sasaki, are converted starting pitchers.

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts hoped to give Sheehan only clean innings in these playoffs. But when Snell’s 100th pitch plunked Daulton Varsho in the upper back to load the bases with the score tied 2-2, it was Sheehan who was called to clean up the mess. When he put the next three hitters on base, it was Banda’s turn. And by the end of Banda’s outing — featuring the first pinch-hit grand slam in World Series history, courtesy of Addison Barger, and a two-run homer by Alejandro Kirk — the Blue Jays had become the first team to score at least nine runs in a World Series inning since the Detroit Tigers in 1968.

“We just didn’t make pitches when we needed to to keep that game close,” Roberts said.

Sheehan allowed an RBI single to Ernie Clement on his second pitch, giving the Blue Jays a 3-2 lead, their first of the game. Then, he lost pinch-hitter Nathan Lukes on a full count, issuing a bases-loaded walk, and left a changeup over the plate that Andres Gimenez lined for another run-scoring single. Banda was called on to face the left-handed-hitting Barger, but Banda’s 2-1 slider caught too much of the plate, resulting in the 413-foot home run that elated Blue Jays fans. Three batters later, Kirk hit Banda’s 1-0 fastball near the middle of the zone 403 feet.

It was the first time Banda had allowed two home runs in an appearance, and it came at the worst time.

“I just didn’t do a very good job of executing,” Banda said.

With Vesia off the roster, Evan Phillips recovering from Tommy John surgery and Michael Kopech no longer considered viable, Banda and Treinen are the only remaining back-end relievers from last year’s bullpen-fueled championship run. The two relievers signed over the offseason to supplement that group, Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates, struggled throughout the year and were not deemed healthy enough to crack the World Series roster. It’s why Treinen and Banda are so critical, even during up-and-down seasons. It’s why Sheehan, a breakout starting pitcher who has allowed seven runs in 3⅔ innings this postseason, needs to pitch better.

“With the construct of our pen, we’re going to need them,” Roberts said. “We’ve got a long way to go, a lot of baseball, but they certainly got to make good pitches.”

The Dodgers’ pitching staff held the Milwaukee Brewers to four runs while sweeping them in the National League Championship Series, during which they deployed only their best pitchers. Sasaki, Vesia and the Dodgers’ four starters — Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani — accounted for all but nine of the Dodgers’ outs in that series, a byproduct of their rotation’s dominance.

In this series, though, they face a Blue Jays lineup that is every bit as patient but far more powerful than Milwaukee’s. Snell, lacking his typical fastball command and struggling to locate his changeup, needed 29 pitches to escape the first inning and ran his pitch count into the triple digits before recording his first out in the sixth. In five-plus innings, he allowed eight hits and issued three walks. When he exited, the bullpen was tasked with recording 12 outs.

Before the relievers recorded just three, the game was essentially over.

“We’re confident,” Snell said of a Dodgers team that entered the World Series with a 9-1 record in these playoffs. “We know how good we are. That was a tough game, and then they came out swinging it and had a better game. It’s four games. You got to win four.”

TORONTO — For the Toronto Blue Jays, what happened in the sixth inning in Game 1 of the World Series on Friday night — a nine-run bludgeoning in an 11-4 win over the heavily favored Los Angeles Dodgers — was not surprising. The stakes were elevated. The opponent was mighty. The confidence, stemming from their exceptional ability to annoy and frustrate opposing pitchers, did not waver.

The Blue Jays spent five innings making Blake Snell, the best pitcher through the first three rounds of the postseason, labor as they’ve made other elite pitchers labor in 2025, and it was only a matter of time before the dam broke. And when it did, when Addison Barger launched the first pinch-hit grand slam in World Series history five batters and two relievers after Snell’s exit, the Blue Jays demonstrated what they’ve been for the past six months in the franchise’s first World Series game in 32 years.

“We’re a pain in the ass,” Blue Jays outfielder Nathan Lukes said.

Toronto, which finished in last place in the American League East with 74 wins last season, is three wins from its first World Series title since 1993. Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the franchise’s cornerstone, had two hits and a walk, and Bo Bichette, Guerrero’s right-hand man since they debuted together in 2019, returned from a knee sprain to play in his first game in seven weeks at second base, a position he had never played in the majors.

But the list of contributors was long. Daulton Varsho‘s two-run home run off the batter’s eye against Snell in the fourth inning erased the Blue Jays’ deficit. Alejandro Kirk went 3-for-3 with a 9-pitch walk, 2 singles and a 2-run home run. And, of course, Barger, a left-handed hitter, came off the bench to hit a grand slam off left-hander Anthony Banda and become the second player in World Series history to hit a left-on-left pinch-hit home run seven months after beginning the season in Triple-A.

“Everyone should know who we are and what we’re about as a team,” Kirk said. “That’s why we’re here.”

Snell held opponents to two runs in 21 innings in his first three postseason starts. He compiled 28 strikeouts and five walks in the outings — one in each round against the Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies, and Milwaukee Brewers. He was the ace of the best rotation in recent postseason history that limited the Brewers to four runs in a four-game sweep in the NL Championship Series. But Snell quickly discovered that the Blue Jays’ offense — a pesky operation one through nine that made the most contact and struck out the least in baseball this season — resides on another plane. Snell finished with just 4 strikeouts while allowing 8 hits and issuing 3 walks.

“We’re a different animal right now,” Blue Jays third baseman Ernie Clement said.

Snell escaped a bases-loaded jam in the first inning, but he needed 29 pitches to secure the three outs. Kirk, symbolizing the Blue Jays’ dogged approach, saw nine of those pitches in a two-out walk. It was a game-altering scoreless inning.

“That’s about as good of an inning you can have without scoring a run,” Clement said.

Snell’s odometer read 56 pitches when he took the mound for the fourth inning and confronted Kirk again. This time, he lined the eighth pitch he saw — a 2-2 changeup on the outer half of the plate — the other way for a long single that banged off the wall just fair. Snell’s next pitch was a 96 mph fastball that Varsho hit for a two-run home run to straightaway center field. Rogers Centre erupted. Snell, for the first time in October, was bleeding.

It was the first home run Snell allowed since Aug. 29, a span of seven starts, and the first home run he gave up to a left-handed hitter this season.

“It’s just I wasn’t locating the ball,” Snell said. “It’s pretty simple. The command with the fastball wasn’t great.”

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts sent Snell out for the sixth inning, but the two-time Cy Young Award winner was out of gas. He walked Bichette to begin the frame before Kirk singled again. Snell hit Varsho with a pitch to load the bases. The sequence prompted Roberts to summon Emmet Sheehan from the bullpen to relieve Snell after 100 pitches, marking just the second time the right-hander had entered a game in the middle of an inning in his major league career.

Clement welcomed Sheehan with a go-ahead RBI single, Lukes followed with a bases-loaded walk and Andres Gimenez delivered another run-scoring single before Sheehan finally secured the inning’s first out by getting George Springer to ground into a fielder’s choice. After Barger was announced as the pinch hitter for the right-handed-hitting Davis Schneider, Roberts countered with Banda.

Barger hit the fourth pitch from Banda — an 84.5 mph slider — over the wall in center field for his second home run of the postseason. It was Barger’s second home run in 95 plate appearances against left-handed pitchers this season.

“Barg, man, he didn’t budge,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said. “He was ready to go and hit a mistake pitch.”

Three batters later, Kirk completed the demolition with a two-run home run off Banda. The Blue Jays’ nine runs were the most scored in an inning in the World Series since the Detroit Tigers scored 10 against the St. Louis Cardinals in the third inning of Game 6 of the 1968 World Series.

The Blue Jays didn’t exist then. They came along nine years later, in 1977, as one of two expansion teams in the American League. Nearly 50 years later, they’re just three wins from upsetting the defending World Series champions for the third championship in franchise history.

“We showed [we’re a powerhouse] tonight,” Lukes said. “We showed it all year. Everyone’s comparing us to David and Goliath. But I think it’s more like Goliath vs. Goliath. We’re the two last teams standing.”