The Empire Strikes Back: Dodgers Knot series behind Yamamoto Gem

Opportunity knocks for everyone. In some cases, opportunity knocks, rings the doorbell, shouts into your Ring camera, throws pebbles at your bedroom window, then walks to the convertible in the driveway and starts singing “Thunder Road.”

Kevin Gausman And Yoshinobu Yamamoto were both great, but all duels end with one man standing and the other getting stabbed. Yamamoto turned in his second straight complete game, giving him his first streak of complete playoff games in 24 years. Gausman fell off the rope in the seventh inning as the home run went by Will Smith And Max Muncy gave the visiting team the lead for good. The Dodgers’ 5-1 victory wasn’t as dazzling as Toronto’s home run celebration the night before, but it evens the series.

Gausman was virtually out of the first inning. He had two strikes to his name Freddie Vrijmanwho had fouled on a splitter near his ankles, then on a middle-middle fastball, then another heater on his hands. Gausman went back to the splitter, the pitch that made him famous, and buried another.

Just not deep enough. Freeman reached down and hit the ball to right field for a double. Two pitches later, Smith followed a slider out along the outside edge of the plate and looped to center to plate Freeman.

In the bottom of the inning, George Springer took a big fastball from Yamamoto and hit it into the left field corner for a double. The next pitch got stuck Nathan Lucasbut his Texas Leaguer fell among the Dodgers defensive grenades and put runners on the corners for the meat of the Blue Jays order.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has responded over the past month when an opportunity arose. In what everyone north of the Rio Grande could see was a huge moment. Guerrero poked and parried one splitter after another, but sputtered when Yamamoto reached into his Mary Poppins bag of pitches and pulled out a 2-2 curveball. Alejandro Kirk And Daulton Varsho then moved on quickly, and suddenly the Blue Jays had lost their chance to put their boot back where it had been twenty hours earlier.

Yamamoto and the Dodgers continued to give Toronto opportunities. Ernie Clemens continued his streak as the luckiest hitter in the world when Freeman inexplicably caught a pop-up in the field off guard:

Ernie Clement gets a single here on a missed catch by Freeman.

He now has a 58% first-pitch swing rate this Postseason.

The average league swing percentage on the first pitch was 32% in reg. season.#WorldSeries pic.twitter.com/DyHQEl88mb

— Inner Edge (@IE_MLB) October 26, 2025

Runner first, no one out, xBA .000. Nothing came of it.

Finally, in the third, the Blue Jays got on the board. Springer carried a Yamamoto fastball off his forearm, advanced to third on Guerrero’s one-out single and scored on Kirk’s sacrifice fly. But Toronto scored just one this time, and Yamamoto found his footing and put the Blue Jays down in order over the next four innings.

That one run kept the Jays in it, as after Smith’s single in the first inning, Gausman retired the next 17 batters. This was classic Gausman, almost all fastball/splitter. It goes with the arm, but with God knows what vertical break and with God knows what speed. Hit it if you can.

Most Dodgers couldn’t do that. Teoscar Hernández faced Gausman three times and struck out each time, tied up and cooked like a roulade. Gausman was thrown out midway through the sixth inning in five of his six career postseason starts; this time he not only skated through six, he got the first of the seventh on his first pitch of the inning, and only his 66th of the evening. Of Johannes Smoltz in the booth, Gausman paced for one Jac Morris-ish complete 10-inning game.

But while Gausman gobbled up outs, he did so in a way that foreshadowed things to come.

The Gausman splitter is great. It’s divine. It’s unsportsmanlike. To throw it effectively, he must also throw his four-seater; the fastball is the jab, the splitter is the power punch. This regular season, opponents hit .230 and hit .380 against Gausman’s fastball, which is actually pretty good for a four-seamer. Last season they hit .281 and hit .475, which is less the case.

If you go for Gausman, you get the fastball.

For six innings, the Dodgers didn’t get a fastball at all. And that’s not because it couldn’t be hit. The Dodgers swung at 25 of Gausman’s 49 fastballs, smoked just three and put 14 in play. This is where these were located:

More than half of Gausman’s hit fastballs registered as “Hard Hit” by Baseball Savant’s definition. But of the first twelve fastballs the Dodgers put into play, only one traveled further than 300 feet. Last night, Varsho hit a rare left-on-left home run Blake Snellmade possible by one of the worst pitches you’ll ever see Snell throw, a center-center pipe shot that should hit any average-power hitter 400 feet without breathing heavily.

In the fourth, Gausman threw a pitch to Freeman that was even easier to hit. First throw, higher in the zone, only 150 km/h. Freeman got most of it and drove it towards Varsho at 175 km/h, but he didn’t get it all. Two pitches later, Smith took an equally meaty fastball and went under. Gausman ended the sixth with a draw Shohei Ohtani And Mookie Betts for consecutive pop-outs.

As good as Gausman was, he kind of got away with it. In the seventh his luck ran out. This was arguably a better pitch than the one the Dodgers had been hitting into the ceiling all night, hard to the right and into Smith’s hands. But he put his arms in and the ball went:

Two batters later, Muncy followed with an opposite-field shot on a nearly identical pitch. That was enough for Gausman, and the Dodgers went to work with two insurance policies that were ubiquitous Louis Varland.

The Blue Jays never fought back. Because sometimes, when the opportunity presents itself, Yoshinobu Yamamoto sneaks up behind it, covers his face with a cloth soaked in chloroform, and hides his unconscious metaphorical body behind a metaphorical topiary.

Sorry, I got carried away.

By the time the game ended, it was hard to remember that Yamamoto looked really shaky through the first three innings. He left fastballs in bad spots, ran deep counts and weaved through traffic. If the Blue Jays had converted three consecutive runners on base into more than one run, they might have seen the face again. Emmet Sheehan makes when he tries to make himself invisible during a nine-run inning.

But after Guerrero singled to put Springer in position to score the Jays’ lone run, Yamamoto didn’t allow another baserunner the rest of the evening.

Yamamoto ended the night with a string of 20 consecutive Toronto hitters retired. Combined with Gausman’s streak of 17 batters earlier in the game, this was the first time in Major League playoff history that both starters retired 14 or more batters in a row in a postseason game.

You’d think these two right-handed pitchers, both masters of the splitter, would have similar styles. Not so. While Gausman drove almost exclusively two pitches, Yamamoto sprinkled all six of his in different proportions throughout the order each time:

After overexposing his splitter early, he retreated mid-game, leaning on his cutter and then his broken gear, before returning late to his moneymaker, as Lynyrd Skynyrd closed with “Freebird.”

As the innings turned and Yamamoto’s pitch count remained within a reasonable range, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts never found a reason to take his starter out.

When Justin Verlander retired 13 Yankees over nine innings in Game 2 of the 2017 ALCS, marking exactly one year since the last full postseason game. It was eight years to the day before the next one – Yamamoto, in Game 2 of the NLCS against Milwaukee. Yamamoto repeated the trick at his next start, eleven days later. In doing so, he became the first pitcher since then Curt Schilling in 2001, and the first Dodger since Orel Hershiser in 1988, to throw a complete game in consecutive postseason starts.

Like Gausman, Yamamoto wasn’t on a 30-whiff strikeout binge. He had 15 whiffs and eight strikeouts, which is good, but not spectacular. But he didn’t let anyone out. He threw 73 strikes out of 105 pitches. When he gave up the hard contact, he kept it on the ground.

The exemplary Yamamoto at-bat late in the game was the one that ended the seventh for me. Toronto manager Johannes Schneider reached for his last card to play, Bo Bichettewho went 1-for-2 with a walk on one knee in Game 1.

Bichette threw the ball into the hole — 110 mph, the third-hardest hit ball of the night for either team — but within Betts’ reach. The Dodger shortstop, clearly aware of the fact that Bichette could not escape the tide in his current condition, took ample time to execute an accurate throw. Betts and Yamamoto did exactly what was needed to win. No more and no less.

The air of invincibility is gone after a boat race in Game 1, but the Dodgers will undoubtedly come home happy with a break in Toronto. After tasting canvas for the first time since (I would argue) last year’s NLCS, they did to the Blue Jays what they had done to the Brewers and Phillies the past two rounds: waited for their opponent’s ace and crossed the line late. When the opportunity presented itself, the Dodgers answered.