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As the bullpens emptied and the Dodgers and Blue Jays played late into the night, Toronto second baseman Isiah Kiner-Falefa had a discordant thought.
“There was a point where I thought we might see two position players in the World Series come and go,” he said.
A day after the Dodgers won 6-5 on Freddie Freeman’s 18th-inning home run off Brendon Little to take a two-game-to-one lead in the best-of-seven game, both managers said they were on the verge of having to send a position player to the mound in a game of utmost importance.
Yet neither was immediately in favor of adopting the automatic runner rule used in the regular season since 2020, in which each team starts each extra inning with a runner on second base. Of the 209 overtime games this season, all ended on the 13th. In the six seasons with the ghost runner, the longest was the Dodgers’ 16-inning win over San Diego on August 25, 2021.
“Baseball at its truest and part of winning a seven-game series is, if there are games like that, having to go through a battle of attrition with the pitchers,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
Will Klein, the series-record 10th pitcher for Los Angeles, doubled his previous career high with four innings and 72 pitches. Yoshinobu Yamamoto had warmed up and was about to enter the 19th, two days after throwing 105 pitches to win Game 2 in his second straight complete game.
“If Yamamoto couldn’t have gotten the ball in the 19th, it probably would have been Miguel Rojas. So that’s kind of where we were,” Roberts said in reference to a second baseman who made four cleanup pitching appearances during the season.
Little entered in the 17th for the Blue Jays and Shane Bieber, their scheduled starter for Game 4 on Tuesday, was in the bullpen and reportedly followed him to the mound. Rookie Trey Yesavage, scheduled for Wednesday’s Game 5, would have been the last pitcher before a position player.
Blue Jays manager John Schneider wasn’t sure he would be in favor of extending the ghost runner into the playoffs.
“I’m more of a traditionalist when it comes to baseball,” he said. “It’s pretty unique because that’s how you play for 162 and then it goes away. But with that, I think you have to structure your squad accordingly to try to handle some of those situations.”
Associated Press reporting.
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