After opening the 2025 Fall Classic with a bang, the Toronto Blue Jays were brought back to earth on Saturday night by a historic complete-game effort from Los Angeles Dodgers starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
Yamamoto became the first pitcher to go the distance in a World Series game since Johnny Cueto did so for the Kansas City Royals in 2015, lifting the Dodgers to a 5-1 victory that will send this best-of-seven to the West Coast tied at one.
Toronto's dominant offensive showing just a night prior made the 27-year-old right-hander's performance all the more impressive.
The Blue Jays went from 11 runs, 14 hits, three homers and four strikeouts against five different Dodgers pitchers in Game 1, to just one run, four hits, no big flies and eight strikeouts against Yamamoto all by himself in Game 2.
Now, Toronto will look to respond yet again in this post-season, heading into Monday's Game 3 at Dodger Stadium. But before the action resumes, the series will take a second to catch its breath with Sunday's off-day, and we'll check in on what American MLB analysts had to say about Yamamoto and the Blue Jays after the Dodgers got on the board with Saturday's win.
The Athletic — Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s throwback dominance secures Game 2 for Dodgers, ties World Series 1-1
Earlier in the Fall Classic's second game, it looked like the Blue Jays were playing out a script similar to the one they employed against Blake Snell on Friday.
They made Yamamoto throw 23 pitches in the first inning, putting runners on the corners with no outs. And while it left them stranded there, it seemed like Toronto had put a dent in any hopes the Dodgers had of getting a deep outing from their starter.
But after the Blue Jays scratched across a run in the third, Yamamoto rewrote that script, retiring the final 20 batters of the game.
In his game recap for The Athletic, Andy McCullough detailed what changed.
"He bested the Blue Jays inside the strike zone. The at-bats were brief and uneventful, the opposite of the approach that carried Toronto to this stage and felled Snell in Game 1. Yamamoto kept them guessing at fastballs registered in the upper 90s, sliders in the 80s and curveballs dipping into the 70s."
Yamamoto got the Blue Jays to swing and miss at 17 pitches on the night — only four individual pitchers had reached or surpassed that number of whiffs in a single game against Toronto's offence this season, and none had done so since Eury Pérez in late August.
Foul Territory — A.J. Pierzynski recaps Kevin Gausman's outing
Going up against Yamamoto on Saturday was Blue Jays ace Kevin Gausman, whose excellent outing in Game 2 was tainted by a pair of late Dodgers homers.
The 34-year-old's final line read 6.2 innings, four hits, three runs, no walks and six strikeouts, and between the end of the first and the start of the seventh, he sat down 17 straight hitters.
On the Foul Territory podcast post-game show, former big-league catcher A.J. Pierzynski gave Toronto's starter some flowers for his fastball usage.
"One thing the Dodgers do really well is they try to eliminate your best pitch as an offence. They take a pitcher's best pitch and say, 'we're not going to swing at it,' they try as an offence to say, 'we're not going to swing at the split.'
"But what happens sometimes is you get a guy like Gausman that can really throw that low fastball that stays true and is a strike, then he can steal strikes and he can steal strikeouts...
"Kevin Gausman, especially early, did a great job of exploiting that. I know the two home runs he gave up were on fastballs, but you know what? It was the seventh inning. Gausman pitched really well."
Gausman indeed earned 17 called strikes with his fastball, catching Dodgers hitters looking with the offering as they tried not to chase his splitter below the zone. It was the fourth most called strikes the right-hander had gotten with his heater in a game this season.
After navigating the ups and downs of a seven-game ALCS thriller against the Seattle Mariners, the Blue Jays are no strangers to post-season momentum swings at this point.
And after a season that's seen them pick themselves off the mat time and time again, a Game 2 loss to the Dodgers and a starter on the playoff heater of all playoff heaters surely won't be any cause for panic in Toronto's clubhouse.
USA Today's Gabe Lacques, however, laid out the daunting journey facing the Blue Jays as the series heads west, looking ahead to Game 3's Max Scherzer vs. Tyler Glasnow pitching matchup and the Shane Bieber-Shohei Ohtani blockbuster that's on tap for Game 4.
Lacques liked L.A.'s chances going forward.
"It’s all a rather jarring turn in the forecast given that in the top of the seventh inning of Game 2, the Blue Jays were locked in a 1-1 tie, getting deliciously close to getting the Dodgers’ rancid bullpen back into the equation...
"(Toronto) understands that what’s on paper may only matter so much. The Blue Jays, after 175 regular season and playoff games, are a special team, a very talented team and often – see Game 1 – a very potent one.
"It’s just that changes in the weather... can flip the World Series narrative so quickly."
Momentum tends to be fickle in baseball and hard to predict — any post-season game can change with just one swing, one pitch or one mistake — which all sets up a trio of games at Dodger Stadium where there's sure to be more than a few unexpected twists before this MLB season comes to a close.
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