LOS ANGELES — Toronto’s closer did a whole lot of chirping in the fourth inning. By the ninth, Dodger bats let their bats do the talking.
The World Series already had enough drama. Extra innings. Long at-bats. A crowd at Rogers Centre convinced it was watching the end of a 30-year wait. What it didn’t really have, up to that point, was any real bad blood. Then Justin Wrobleski ran a 96 mph fastball in on Andrés Giménez and everything spilled onto the field. Reliever Jeff Hoffman was one of the loudest Blue Jays in the middle of it. Which is why what happened five innings later felt so perfect from a Los Angeles point of view.
MLB.com described it as benches and bullpens clearing “in an instant” after Giménez barked at Wrobleski and the Dodgers rookie stepped toward the plate to let him know he wasn’t going to be disrespected. “I wasn’t trying to hit him,” Wrobleski said afterward. “It looked like he was trying to get hit. Yeah, he was trying to get hit and then he got hit and then proceeded to tell me, you know, whatever he told me. I’m not going to take disrespect like that. I’m going to ask you what your problem is.”
That should have been the end of it. The Dodgers had already defused the real danger, which was Wrobleski getting tossed out of Game 7. Max Muncy made sure of it. “My first reaction was like, ‘Hell yeah, don’t back down to this guy. Go get him,’” Muncy said on Foul Territory. “And then immediately I was like, ‘Oh crap, we need him to stay in this game.’ … The umpires all came up to me and they’re like, ‘If you didn’t get him out of there, we’re probably going to have to toss him.’”
So the Dodgers behaved like the team that had been there. They pulled their pitcher out of traffic. They let Toronto do the barking from across the diamond. They let Glasnow come in and strand the runners. They went back to work.
What stuck with the Dodgers, though, was how loud Toronto was during something that was, as MLB.com wrote, “almost certainly unintentional.” You could hear it in the way reliever Will Klein talked about it back in LA. “We kind of saw it coming because of that whole thing when we cleared benches and Hoffman was yelling at Miggy,” Klein said. “Then he was the first to walk away and you’re like, does he have it? If you’re going to talk and then walk away, it was kind of inevitable Miggy was going to hit that off him.”
Read that again. “Inevitable.”
That is how the Dodgers felt when Miguel Rojas stepped in against Jeff Hoffman in the ninth, Toronto clinging to a 4–3 lead, two outs away from a parade. This was the same Rojas Hoffman had been chirping at in the fourth-inning mess. This was the same Dodgers clubhouse that had watched its rookie lefty get jawed at in a World Series Game 7. And this was the same bullpen that, as Klein said, was not going to get pushed around. “It shows it doesn’t matter what you’ve done in the past,” Klein said. “It’s what you can do. Everyone on the team loved that for him. That was such a huge moment.”
So when Rojas got a pitch he could handle and sent it over the wall to tie the game in the ninth, it felt inside that dugout like everything had come back around. The guy who talked was the guy who got beat. The guy who kept his head and backed his teammate was the guy jogging around the bases in Game 7 of the World Series.
That is why Klein’s line hits so hard. “If you’re going to talk and then walk away, it was kind of inevitable Miggy was going to go hit that off him.” That is straight from the dugout. That is how the Dodgers processed it. That homer was not just clutch. It was payback to a mouthy reliever, all wrapped up in October timing.
It all started because Wrobleski refused to let Giménez sell the hit-by-pitch. “I’m not going to take that,” Wrobleski said. “It is what it is. That’s part of the game.” Then Muncy refused to let the umpires decide Game 7 in the fourth inning. “We got to make sure he stays in this game,” Muncy said. Then five innings later, Rojas refused to let Hoffman finish his story.
Baseball loves symmetry. This one wrote itself. The Blue Jays got loud in the middle. The Dodgers got loud on the scoreboard at the end.
Everybody noticed. Klein noticed. “It just showed you weren’t going to beat us,” he said. Muncy noticed, because he was the one who had to play bouncer while Toronto was shouting from 90 feet away. Wrobleski noticed, because he was the one getting yelled at for a pitch he said he did not mean to hit a No. 9 hitter with.
From the Dodgers’ side, it came down to this: if you’re going to talk smack in a World Series Game 7, you better finish it. Hoffman didn’t. Rojas did. And Los Angeles gets to remember it that way forever.
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