TORONTO – Some cried, some comforted, some stared blankly amid the resonant silence that only the harsh finality such a devastating baseball loss can bring.
Together for the last time, the 2025 Toronto Blue Jays mourned defeat in a World Series Game 7 that will rate among the Fall Classic’s greatest contests, which is the coldest of comforts for those on the wrong end of the result.
They lamented the many little things that could have broken a little bit differently and changed the outcome, three of their four losses to the now two-time champion Los Angeles Dodgers settled in coin-flip games, especially the winner-take-all finale that started so well Saturday night and ended so dreadfully in the early minutes of Sunday morning.
And, most of all, they grieved for the end of their time together, the breakup of a bond each described as unique within a competitive, ruthless and often mercenary-like industry that more often than not fails to meld disparate parts into a greater whole, having become a rare exception to the rule.
“It's hard, it's hard to replicate, like, true love,” said veteran right-hander Chris Bassitt, in many ways at the centre of the culture the team built during a remarkable season, but also one of seven pending free agents on the roster. “You can try to replicate this. A lot of people will try. And it just, it's not really possible, for the most part. This group is really, really special. And, man, the ending obviously just sucks.”
Sucks is understating the pain of a 5-4, 11-inning finale, to have come so close to the game’s ultimate prize, to know how hard it is to get there and to wonder when that opportunity might come again.
Buoyed by Bo Bichette’s three-run homer off Shohei Ohtani in the third inning, the Blue Jays led 4-2 through seven and, after failing to plate an Ernie Clement leadoff double for some insurance, 4-3 through eight when the third championship in team history, a long-awaited complement to the back-to-back titles of 1992-93, slipped from their grasp.
Miguel Rojas clipped a Jeff Hoffman slider in the ninth to tie the game. In the bottom half, Daulton Varsho ripped a chopper that Rojas picked to his right at second base and threw home to get Isiah Kiner-Falefa, instructed to take only a conservative lead to avoid risk of being doubled off, by a half-step, maybe less. Clement followed with a drive to left-centre field that Andy Pages, inserted as a mid-inning defensive replacement, chased down despite colliding with left-fielder Kiké Hernandez. After one tight-rope escape in the 10th inning by Seranthony Dominguez, when the Dodgers loaded the bases with one out, the Blue Jays served up another flat slider, this one from Shane Bieber, and Will Smith sent it over the wall in left.
The team that made rallying its trademark tried to pull off one more comeback in the bottom of the 11th, as Vladimir Guerrero Jr., whose emergence as a post-season force bodes well for the future of the franchise, hit a leadoff double and was sacrificed to third by Kiner-Falefa. But Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who pitched a complete game to win Game 2 and six innings for a second victory in Friday’s Game 6, walked Addison Barger before blowing up Alejandro Kirk’s bat with an 0-2 splitter away, producing a groundball to short that Mookie Betts converted into a game-ending double play.
As the Dodgers celebrated, the Blue Jays sulked away, as shattered as their catcher’s lumber.
“You dream about that moment of being able to win it for your team,” said Varsho. “It's going to take me a while to figure out and process and be able to kind of reflect on it. It hurts right now. You put pressure on yourself to get the job done. Yamamoto's a great pitcher. I took a bastard pitch and put it in play. Rojas made a great play. I did my job putting it in play. It just didn't work out for us.”
Said Hoffman: “That (pitch) cost everybody in here a World Series ring, so it’s pretty (expletive). Got to execute better in that spot.”
Said Bieber: “This one stings – it’s going to sting for a while. That’s the reality of it. This game’s not for the faint of heart.”
Said Clement: “I’d go to war with Jeff Hoffman every day of the week. I want him on the mound. I want Biebs on the mound. Those are guys who I would take a bullet for. And 99 times out of 100, those guys get the job done. I feel for those guys so much. I had a chance to win it there in the ninth and didn't get it done. I want that one back, too, just like those guys I'm sure want those pitches back. … Just wasn't our night.”
The impact was such that manager John Schneider, who said with pride all season long that he didn’t need to call a single team meeting, broke the streak in the aftermath.
“I said thank you probably about 10 times. And that was the main message,” he relayed. “I’m sure I’m going to talk to them all again, but I said thank you. I said, I'm sorry that we're feeling this way right now. It definitely could have been the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of emotions. So I said thank you. And this is a group that I'm never going to forget. They're going to have a place in my heart, every single one of them. That was the gist of it.”
Others spoke, too.
Varsho praised George Springer, who, like Bichette, grinded through injury in the Series, for telling the group that, “we've earned a lot of respect from a lot of people in this game this year. You go through the season, nobody expects you to do what we did and just happy for all these guys in the clubhouse. Best teammates I've ever had, best team I've ever been on. Can't say thank you enough to everybody who grinded every day.”
Max Scherzer, the pending free agent who allowed only one run over 4.1 innings, said he told his teammates, “something to the effect of me being 41 years old, I never thought I could love baseball this much. Just so proud of everybody. My love for the game was so strong because of their love for the game and going to battle with these guys.”
Relayed Kevin Gausman: “Max said it perfectly, ‘Baseball isn't fair a lot of times.’ I'd still take this team against anybody. And I'd say that over and over again. We just didn't come out on the right side of things. Really, it took eight games for them to beat us four. So be proud of what we accomplished.”
They accomplished plenty.
At 94-68, they improved from 2024’s crash-and-burn by 20 games to claim the American League East for the first time since 2015. Then, they beat the New York Yankees in the ALDS, rallied from deficits of 2-0 and 3-2 to beat the Seattle Mariners in the ALCS and then brought a 3-2 lead home from Los Angeles.
Up until the Rojas homer, the Blue Jays were on the cusp of delivering on the promise of a core that had struggled to break through in years previous, and in a way, so many other talented groups before them left their potential unfulfilled.
Guerrero – the ALCS MVP and a force all post-season long – and Bichette – the pending free agent whose homer off Ohtani was destined for a place in franchise lore – remain without the championship legacy that also eluded past franchise greats like Carlos Delgado, Roy Halladay, Vernon Wells, Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion and Josh Donaldson.
Over four hours and seven minutes, a Rogers Centre crowd of 44,713 fluctuated between angst and elation and agony, a fitting roller-coaster capper to one of the most remarkable seasons in team history. The bond they built factored into the way they deployed the roster, finding ways to max out not only their 26 men in the majors, but also their larger 40-man group.
The Blue Jays found ways around adversity all season long. They began the year with FanGraphs projecting their odds of winning it all at just 2.8 per cent. An early-season injury to Scherzer threw their rotation into limbo. Anthony Santander, their prime free-agent signing, hurt his shoulder in May and essentially missed the rest of the season. Andres Gimenez missed time with an injury. Yimi Garcia needed season-ending surgery. They nearly let their AL East lead slip away in the final week, needing to win their final four games to keep pace with the Yankees, taking the title by virtue of their tiebreaker.
Regardless, they kept finding ways to fill the various voids. Clement, who ended up setting a single post-season record with 30 hits, Nathan Lukes, Barger, Davis Schneider, Myles Straw, Eric Lauer, Braydon Fisher and Mason Fluharty all emerged to play key roles. Trey Yesavage completed a five-level surge to provide a major spark at the end. A theme of their season was someone different every night.
“I went individually to each one of my teammates to tell them how proud I am of them for the job that they did the entire year, and all the things that they accomplished this year individually and as a team,” Guerrero said through interpreter Hector Lebron. “There were a lot of doubts from the beginning about this team. Obviously, we didn't finish the way we wanted to finish. But I feel very, very proud of my team, the way we played the entire year. Definitely, we gained a lot of respect.”
The challenge will be in maintaining it, especially now that the questions come. Bichette, Bassitt, Scherzer, Dominguez, Kiner-Falefa and Ty France are all free agents, while Bieber, who has a player option for next year, is expected to decline and join them.
Asked if he aims to pitch again in 2026, Scherzer said, “it’s going to take some time to give a full answer to that, but there's no way that was my last pitch.”
The rotation will be a major focal point given that three-fifths of it are eligible for the open market, although Bassitt said, “I hope I have another chance with this group. I really do. I love this group. I love these guys. You just never know. But I would love to have another shot with this group.”
No question will be as important as Bichette, who showed his mettle playing on a sprained PCL in his left knee during the World Series, and it’ll be hard for the Blue Jays not to wonder what might have been had he – and Springer, for that matter – been fully healthy.
Asked if the uncertainty of his future compounded the pain of the World Series loss, he simply replied, “yeah, I think so.”
The off-season ahead to figure all that out is nigh, which only made the abrupt ending all the more jarring.
“This clubhouse is truly special,” Kirk said when asked what he’ll remember most. “They don't play for the name on the back, they play for the Toronto Blue Jays. That's really hard to see on a lot of teams. I'm going to remember that forever.”
Said Scherzer: “I've had some really tough ones before. The loss is so tough because you're so close to everybody. This team had that, we had that closeness, we had that camaraderie and that type of passion, not only for the game, but for each other, this one stings.”
Added Straw: “It just sucks. We wanted to do it for the country, for everybody. Sometimes baseball can be rough. And that was a rough one. But if I could do it all over again, I’d take this same group of guys every single year, the rest of my career. If you could give me this team, I’d sign up right now.”
The reality is he can’t, and the Blue Jays will be different in 2026, and it will be hard for them to be better than this group, one that turned the franchise around from a breaking point a year ago. Sad as the ending in Game 7 was, and was it ever sad, the immediate goodbye that followed was even sadder.
