LOS ANGELES — Might as well cancel the parade permit.
Barring the improbable, the Dodgers aren’t going to need it. They are slumping offensively at the absolute worst time, their bullpen continues to leak, and the Toronto Blue Jays have shown the ability to step through every door that the Dodgers leave open. Which is similar to the way Toronto erased a 2-0 series deficit in the last round against the Seattle Mariners.
Bottom line, a team can clinch this World Series at home after all. Toronto will have two cracks at it, after a 6-1 victory on Wednesday night in a Dodger Stadium where the fans morphed from enthusiastic to sullen over the course of the evening.
The Dodgers’ offense was a concern going into Game 5, after an output of three runs in 20⅔ innings, going back to the seventh inning of Monday night’s 18-inning marathon. That one had a successful ending, but the Dodgers stumbled Tuesday night and slumbered Wednesday against Trey Yesavage, who began the 2025 season in Class-A Dunedin and now could end it by earning a World Series ring.
The Dodgers did nothing against the 6-foot-4 right-hander with the extreme over-the-top delivery. Kiké Hernández had the only whimper of protest, attacking a high four-seam fastball in the third inning and putting it in the left field pavilion to cut Toronto’s lead to 2-1. Otherwise, they were 2 for 19 against Yesavage, infield singles by Teoscar Hernández in the fourth and seventh innings.
It was probably an omen when Blake Snell, the left-hander signed as a free agent last winter with occasions like this in mind, gave up two home runs in the game’s first three pitches. Davis Schneider ambushed him with a first-pitch missile into the left field pavilion, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. followed with an 0-and-1 bomb to left field that made it 2-0 and had many in the crowd squirming before their seats were even warm.
This is the way the Blue Jays operate: They keep chipping away, a sacrifice fly here, a couple of RBI singles there, and all of a sudden it’s 6-1 and the Dodgers haven’t come close to scoring after Hernández’s home run.
And while you’re at it, forget that David vs. Goliath narrative so popular among those (including a sizable bloc of owners) insisting that baseball needs a salary cap. The Blue Jays, owned by the Rogers communications conglomerate, had baseball’s seventh-highest payroll ($255,230,405) according to Spotrac, and are not clipping coupons. Aside from Guerrero Jr., son of a Hall of Famer and perhaps headed in the direction of Cooperstown himself, they might not have many household names south of the 49th Parallel, but Canada’s team is now just 27 outs away from being able to call itself a world champion.
How can the Dodgers avoid that in the next few days? Maybe there is a path. After all, they were a game from elimination in the National League Division Series against San Diego in 2024, and wound up getting past that and winning the whole thing.
Reminded of that Wednesday night, Teoscar Hernandez noted that he had no intention of thinking about last year or anything but “what happened today. We know what we can do, and that’s the only thing that we have to think about. … It’s just baseball. Things aren’t happening right now. And you have to keep battling, trying to take good at-bats and trying to get on. That’s the only thing that we can do, and, you know, just erase whatever happened in the first five games and just concentrate on Game 6 on Friday.”
Step one would be to get another brilliant outing from Yoshinobu Yamamoto on Friday night at Rogers Centre, and more importantly to back it up with some offense against Game 6 starter Kevin Gausman. Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman talked about it before the game, about keeping the line moving, worrying less about the big swing and more about getting runners on base and building rallies.
“We just need to check down and have, like, almost a 0-1 mindset and just build innings, extend ’em, work counts, be who we are,” Freeman said before the game. “We are always a team that gets starters 70 to 90 pitches by the 4th, and we’ve got to do that again and just build innings, keep putting pressure on ’em, and not have quick 1-2-3 innings.”
They didn’t get that done Wednesday, and they’re now hitting .159 (15 for 94) dating to the seventh inning of Game 3.
“It doesn’t feel great,” Manager Dave Roberts said afterward. “You clearly see those guys (the Blue Jays) finding ways to get hits, move the baseball forward, and we’re not doing a good job of it. I thought Yesavage was good tonight mixing his fastball, slider, and the split.
“But, yeah, you still have to use the whole field and take what they give you, and if they’re not going to allow for slug, then you’ve got to be able to kind of redirect and down club – or club down – to take competitive at-bats. … You know, those guys are doing it. But again, we have that ability. We’ve got to make some adjustments.”
“We’ve been in elimination games, a core group of these guys, and we got to find a way to win a game,” he continued. “That’s it.”
If they can do so and force a Game 7, well, stranger things have happened.
If not, they will have let history slip away in their attempt to become MLB’s first repeaters in a quarter-century.
“You just gotta win one game,” third baseman Max Muncy said. “It’s not gonna be easy. But you can’t think (yet) about trying to win two games on the road.”
The Dodgers believe, because they have no choice. As for their fans? The noise and the stress they can create with it faded Wednesday, and by the late innings those fans remaining among the announced crowd of 52,175 were ignoring those irritatingly frequent “MAKE SOME NOISE” entreaties on the video board.
“If you’re still here, you’re a real Dodger fan …” said one of the hype guys before the bottom of the ninth, but that wasn’t quite the flex he thought it was. For those who left, maybe the team didn’t give them much reason to stay.
There’s still a chance for a parade through the streets of downtown L.A. But as of now, that too is fading.
jalexander@scng.com