Some World Series get remembered for one big swing. This one gave us about a dozen. By the time the final out landed at Rogers Centre in the early hours of November, the phrase “Dodgers vs Blue Jays” had stopped meaning just a matchup on a schedule and started meaning something closer to a seven-game fever dream — extra innings, a pinch-hit grand slam nobody saw coming, a 22-year-old pitcher making grown analysts run out of adjectives, and a finish so dramatic that longtime baseball writers were comparing it, unprompted, to the greatest World Series ever played.
If you missed it, or you watched it and just want the whole thing laid out clearly, here’s the complete breakdown.
How We Got Here
The Los Angeles Dodgers came into the 2025 World Series as defending champions, chasing something no team had managed in a quarter century: a repeat title. The last club to pull that off was the 2000 New York Yankees, and that drought alone tells you how hard back-to-back championships actually are in modern baseball, with deeper playoff fields and more parity than ever.
Standing in their way were the Toronto Blue Jays, a team that had finished last in their division not that long before making this run — which made their World Series appearance itself feel like a genuine underdog story before a single pitch of the Fall Classic was even thrown. Toronto hadn’t won a championship since 1993, and every player in that clubhouse knew exactly how long that drought had stretched.
Two very different stories, both converging on one series.
The Middle Games: Chaos, an 18-Inning Marathon & a Series Tied Up
Game 3 is where this series first tipped from “good baseball” into “this might be historic.” The Dodgers and Blue Jays played 18 innings — nearly two full games crammed into one night — and Toronto walked away on the wrong side of it. For a team that had played so well up to that point, it was the kind of gut-punch loss that can either break a club’s spirit or, somehow, forge it.
It looked like it might break them. Then Game 4 happened, and the Blue Jays answered emphatically, beating the Dodgers 6-2 to even the series at two games apiece. That win mattered enormously — not just for the standings, but for belief. Losing an 18-inning marathon and coming back two days later to blow the doors off a series-tied win takes a specific kind of resilience, and Toronto had it.
From there, the series kept swinging. Game 6 saw the Dodgers celebrating again, pushing Toronto to the brink, but the Blue Jays had already proven all series long that they weren’t going to fold quietly. That set the stage for a Game 7 that neither fan base will forget anytime soon.
Game 7: The Night Dodgers vs Blue Jays Became Legend
If you only remember one game from this series, it’s this one.
Shohei Ohtani started the night on the mound for Los Angeles, and it wasn’t a smooth outing early — he faced a bases-loaded jam in the second inning, the first time all season he’d faced a hitter in that exact situation, and got out of it by blowing a 99 mph fastball past Andres Gimenez. He’d thrown 42 pitches through just two innings, clearly searching for his rhythm, but he found enough of it to keep his team in the fight.
Then came the ninth inning, and this is where the game tips into baseball folklore. Miguel Rojas — the Dodgers’ No. 9 hitter, a second baseman known more for his defense than his bat — stepped up with one out against Toronto closer Jeff Hoffman and hit a game-tying home run. It was his first extra-base hit of the entire postseason, arriving at literally the biggest possible moment. In doing so, Rojas joined Hall of Famer Bill Mazeroski as only the second player in World Series history to hit a game-winning or game-tying home run in the ninth inning of a Game 7. That’s not just a nice stat. That’s a sentence that gets read on broadcasts for decades.
The game rolled into extra innings, and in the 11th, catcher Will Smith stepped up against Blue Jays pitcher Shane Bieber and launched the home run that ultimately decided the championship. It marked six years running that a player named Will Smith had been part of a World Series-winning team — a strange little footnote that baseball fans love to point out.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who’d thrown 96 pitches the day before, still found a way to factor into the win and was named World Series MVP for his performance across the series, picking up his third win of the Fall Classic in the process.
Final score: Dodgers 5, Blue Jays 4. Los Angeles became back-to-back champions. Toronto walked away with nothing but a season that came agonizingly close to history.
What It Meant for the Blue Jays
Numbers don’t really capture what that locker room looked like afterward. Ernie Clement, who’d become one of the breakout stars of Toronto’s playoff run, stood in the middle of the clubhouse well after midnight, unable to stop crying, telling reporters he’d been at it for an hour and thought he was done. He wasn’t. Shortstop Bo Bichette talked about the group teaching him what a team really means, calling it maybe the most valuable lesson of his career. Manager John Schneider moved from player to player, offering hugs, in a clubhouse he’d famously never needed to call a single team meeting for all season — because, in his words, a great clubhouse runs itself.
That’s the part box scores never show. The Blue Jays didn’t just lose a game. They lost the ending to a season that had genuinely brought a fractured last-place roster all the way to Game 7 of the World Series, one inning short of the franchise’s first title since 1993.
Quick Series Snapshot
| Detail | Information |
| Series Result | Los Angeles Dodgers defeat Toronto Blue Jays, 4-3 |
| Deciding Game | Game 7, Dodgers win 5-4 (11 innings) |
| Series MVP | Yoshinobu Yamamoto |
| Game 7 Turning Point | Miguel Rojas’ game-tying HR in the 9th inning |
| Game-Winning Hit | Will Smith’s HR off Shane Bieber, 11th inning |
| Longest Game | Game 3 — 18 innings |
| Dodgers’ Title Count | 9th World Series championship |
| Historic Note | First back-to-back champions since the 2000 Yankees |
| Blue Jays’ Last Title | 1993 |
Why This Series Will Be Talked About for Years
Baseball writers don’t throw around the phrase “greatest World Series ever played” casually, and yet more than one did exactly that after this one wrapped. Between an 18-inning marathon, a 22-year-old delivering a pitching performance nobody expected, the first pinch-hit grand slam in World Series history, and a Game 7 that needed extra innings and two separate legendary home runs to settle, this series had almost everything a baseball fan could ask for.
For the Dodgers, it’s another piece of history — a repeat title that puts them alongside an incredibly short list of teams who’ve managed the feat. For the Blue Jays, it’s a season that deserves to be remembered not as a loss, but as the run that brought a last-place team one inning away from a championship. Dodgers vs Blue Jays wasn’t just a matchup this year. It was a full seven-game story, and by the time it ended, it had earned its place in World Series history either way.
