TORONTO — The Dodgers barely had time to dry off from Toronto and the parade before stepping onto a different kind of stage. Jimmy Kimmel brought five of them out together—Will Smith, Kiké Hernández, Tyler Glasnow, Blake Snell, and manager Dave Roberts—and it felt like Los Angeles got one more lap around the field. It was loose. It was funny. It kept circling back to how hard that World Series was and how wild it is that they won two in a row.
Kimmel started by pointing out that even Blue Jays fans in the audience were cheering. Roberts smiled at that and said, “We talked about dynasty. I think we answered that dynasty question.” He admitted there was a point in the Series “it looked a little bleak,” but added, “I was talking to Guillermo [Kimmel sidekick Guillermo Rodriguez] earlier and he said he kept the faith. I’m sure everyone in Los Angeles kept the faith.” Kimmel jumped in to say his Rodriguez had even called the trip to Toronto and said they’d win Game 6 and Game 7, throwing in the ubiquitous 6-7 gesture for good measure. “I’m too old to do that,” Roberts laughed.
They got into the parade next. Glasnow called it “incredible.” He continued, “The amount of people, it was insane.” Kimmel turned to Snell, who was doing this for the first time, and asked if he’d ever even been to something like that. Snell, who is from the Seattle area, remembered doing it when his Seahawks won the Super Bowl, but it was a different experience, “Yeah, but in the crowd. In the crowd weaving trying to get to the street.” It was a good reminder of what this run means for guys who had to watch the Dodgers celebrate from the other side when they were with Tampa Bay.
Glasnow got the hometown question. Kimmel said, you’re from L.A., you grew up a Dodgers fan, who was your guy? Glasnow said, “I really liked Shawn Green a lot. Honestly, Kershaw’s not that much older than me, but I remember watching him in high school. He’s probably my favorite.” Then Kimmel asked how many tickets he had to buy for the postseason. Glasnow said, “A couple hundred for the whole postseason… it was wild.” Pressed on price, he said, “It’s like 60-ish thousand. I didn’t pay for all those though. I’m not that nice.” The whole studio cracked up.
Kimmel wanted to know about the night they won it in Toronto. “We shut the hotel down,” one of them said. Another added it was set up either way, “It was kind of a mixture of both. You don’t know what’s going to happen in Game 7, so it’s either a celebration or drown your sorrows.” Kimmel summed it up: “You knew there was going to be drinking.” Kiké, who has basically become the team’s late-night ambassador, was asked how many drinks he’d had since Saturday. “A few,” he said, to which Kimmel then played Kike’s now viral “love your nipples” quote to radio broadcaster David Vassegh.
Then came the story that’s going to live on Dodgers Twitter for a while. Kimmel asked who went the hardest at the team party. Multiple guys said, “Kirby Yates.” Smith explained, “He got a pretty good legendary tattoo.”
“I ruined it,” Hernandez said, admitting to posting the pic on social media. Then came the full reveal: “He got the Kirby character from Super Smash Bros. holding the World Series trophy.” The best part was the setup: “Kirby’s been in the big leagues for like 12 years. Never won a World Series. And since his rookie year, he’s been saying if we ever win the World Series, I’m going to get an ass tattoo of the Kirby character holding a World Series trophy. And that happened last night around 1:00 a.m.”
Kimmel circled them back to baseball and to the thing everyone in L.A. is still talking about: how Yamamoto kept bailing them out. He asked Roberts if he’d ever seen anything like 17 innings from one guy in the World Series. Roberts said, “Not really. Not with that guy. I’ve never seen anything like it. Never imagined anything. If you ever see him, his stature, he’s not a big frame guy, but just mentally, I’ve never seen anything like it.” He joked that Shohei is “more the robot,” but made it clear Yamamoto “really stepped up big for us like all these guys did.”
Will Smith got his moment because catching 18 innings is absurd. Kimmel said he’d looked up the world record for holding a squat and it was two hours. “The game was six hours and 39 minutes,” Kimmel said. Smith just shook his head. “Yeah, it was long. Horrible. I started cramping up in like the 13th inning. Was getting fluids, food. I don’t know. We just kept going.” Roberts jumped in to say the trainer kept coming to him and saying Smith was cramping. “I was like, ‘He is not coming out,’” Roberts said. Smith nodded: “I wasn’t coming out. I wasn’t coming out for sure.”
They even revisited that ninth-inning chaos in Game 7, the one where Kiké got flattened and the Dodgers almost lost the World Series on a a screaming fly ball over the outfielders’ heads. Kiké told it like a movie: “I’m thinking about my entire life as I’m following this ball.” He said he thought the only thing he had to worry about was the wall. “World Series on the line. I’m going to run through it.” Then out of nowhere Pages comes flying in. “My teammate posterized me,” Kiké said. On the ground, he thought, we just lost. Then Pages tapped him and said, “Did you catch it?” Pages said yes. “Oh yeah, let’s go,” Kiké yelled. The crowd loved that one.
Kimmel showed the play at the plate too, the one where Smith barely kept his foot on home. He asked, “Did your foot come off that plate?” Smith grinned. “I mean, clearly it did, but not at the wrong time.” He said he didn’t feel it come off and only got nervous when the replay started on the scoreboard. “I was like, I’m pretty sure he’s out.” Kimmel said that’s the drama of baseball, how it can swing from the greatest moment of your life to the worst in a blink. Smith agreed: “Yeah, that would have stung.”
To close it out, Kimmel tried to get Kiké to guarantee a three-peat. Hernández, who just became a free agent, smiled and said, “I’m currently unemployed, so I don’t know if I’ll be back. If I’m back, three-peat. And then if I’m with another team, good luck to them.” That got a big laugh and felt like what the night really was. Five Dodgers, still smelling like champagne, joking about tattoos and hotel parties, but also quietly reminding everyone what it took to win this thing.
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