Blue Jays look on as the Dodgers run onto the field.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
The emblematic modern defeat of a Toronto team – the one that sent the city into a spiral of permanent doomsaying and self-pity – was a hockey loss in the first round of the playoffs. What’s Toronto going to do with choking a World Series away with two outs to go?
The Jays had Game 7 won. The crowd was certain of it. As it ended, just after midnight, you could tell that not a one of them could accept the result.
What do you like about baseball? Because this Game 7 had it. Ridiculous catches, a bench-clearing non-brawl, terrible gaffes, emotional farewells, huge hits, had it in the bag, let it out, got it back in, out again, back in again, back out. There was enough sturm und drang in this one night to fill a whole season of Bach.
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With the Dodgers trailing by one in the ninth, it was set up so that Shohei Ohtani would be the last hitter of the game and then the Toronto celebration could begin. Perfect cinema. The man before him, Miguel Rojas, hit a solo home run to tie it.
With two out in the eleventh, Dodger catcher Will Smith put a ball over the wall in left. As he rounded the bases, the only other thing moving in the stadium was the Dodgers bench. All 40,000-plus other people were still.
In the bottom of that inning, the Jays had Vladimir Guerrero on third with one out. The game ended on a double play. The Dodgers won it 5-4.
Jays fans say thank you to the Blue Jays players and they expect the team to be back in the World Series in 2026.
I have watched a million games of all sorts over the years. I’ve never watched one that comes anywhere close to this one.
This wasn’t just a Toronto landmark moment. Given the stakes, it was one of the greatest games of baseball ever played. Maybe the greatest. That probably doesn’t help you much right now.
Right now, you’re fixating on small things.
What if the Jays had made it to the 19th inning of Game 3? Dodger manager Dave Roberts said later that he was probably going to send infielder Rojas out to pitch that inning. Until that Freddie Freeman home run, L.A. was going to give that game up.
What if Addison Barger had made it back to second in the bottom of the ninth in Game 6? George Springer was up next. A single would have tied the game. Springer singled to start Game 7. In Blackjack terms, you’d say Barger torched the deck.
And then there’s a hundred moments on Saturday night to obsess over forever.
Far smaller sporting letdowns have made us hysterical, so this is not to suggest that Toronto will handle it well. I expect the city to handle things as it always does – poorly. But if you want to be a serious city, you need serious sporting disasters.
New York blew an ALCS they were leading 3-0. Boston lost a World Series because their first baseman didn’t feel like bending all the way over. Montreal has Rick Monday. Vancouver had a Stanley Cup final in the bag, then they cut the bottom of the bag open, and then they tried to burn the town down. That’s losing.
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What does Toronto have? 4-1 with 10 minutes left in the third? Pathetic, really. It was a quarterfinal.
What the Jays have just done is titanic by comparison. It is the city’s sporting Everest, even if it ended up falling off the edge.
Up three games to two on the best team in the world, coming home, your two most experienced starters ready to go, your best line-up on the field, the whole town going wild for the first time in 30-plus years, up 3-0 and then 4-2 in the final games, and they couldn’t close it out. Epic.
Until Saturday night, the last time this city played in and lost a major championship was 1960. The population of Toronto at the time was around 700,000. This place was a burg and the Leafs were winning so regularly, losing a Stanley Cup would barely have registered. Everything since then has been small beer.
Toronto Blue Jays supporters react while watching game seven of the MLB World Series baseball championship between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers at the Rogers Centre, inside the Rec Room bar in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, November 1, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos OsorioCarlos Osorio/Reuters
Saturday’s nuclear meltdown at Rogers Island? That is a loss you can be proud of.
It’s something a young baseball fan can hold on to until she’s old. If the Jays never win again, the bitter embers of the 2025 World Series will keep her warm her whole life.
If you feel bad about it, don’t. This is the whole point of caring about a bunch of strangers who get paid a thousand times what you do to run around in stretchy pants.
In return for your money and attention, they give you big feelings. Most years they don’t even give you that. When the feelings are finally delivered, nobody guarantees they will be good.
If you find yourself stuck in bed for an extra hour this morning, running over the batting order in your mind, thinking that you could manage this team better than the so-called professionals hired to do the job, and finally decide to get up so that you can go somewhere where there are other people so that you can yell about it, you got exactly what you paid for.
Blue Jays reflect on the team's gut-wrenching loss to Los Angeles in Game 7 of the World Series, the closest the team has come to the championship in more than 30 years.
The Canadian Press
In time, you will remember how much fun this past month was. Soon after that, you’ll start to appreciate it. These moments are perishingly few anywhere, because they only happen when your team doesn’t win very often.
Had L.A. lost this World Series, no one in L.A. would really care. A few die-hards maybe, but not a critical mass of the town. Their team won last year. They think they’ll win next year.
It won’t matter in New York that they didn’t make it past the second hurdle. If not the Yankees, then it’ll be the Rangers, or the Knicks, or the whoevers.
It mattered in Toronto because it had been so long since it had last happened, and there is zero indication that any other team is going to manage it any time soon. It may not turn out that this was a one-and-done, but it felt that way. That’s a civic windfall you can only reap if you’ve spent many years investing in hopeless cases.
I say this without irony: Congratulations to the Toronto Blue Jays on that loss. It was a masterpiece of the form.
It is a gift to live in a place where such a trivial thing meant so much to so many. For 29 remarkable days in October (and November) they made us feel like we were in something together.