LOS ANGELES — For many years, the World Series room at the Baseball Hall of Fame had a life-sized cardboard cutout of Sandy Koufax in triumph. The great Dodger lefty was beaming, leaping off a mound with his arms thrust to the sky. Visitors could crowd around it and pretend they were part of the 1963 championship celebration.
The Los Angeles Dodgers gave up more runs to the Toronto Blue Jays on Tuesday than they did in their tidy sweep of the New York Yankees that October. The Blue Jays solved Shohei Ohtani, on the mound and at the plate, in a 6-2 victory in Game 4 at Dodger Stadium that evened the World Series, two apiece.
In doing so, the Blue Jays made certain that the final game of the 2025 season will take place in Toronto, not here. While seven road teams have clinched a World Series in the Dodgers’ home park, the Dodgers themselves have done it only once. Koufax’s Hollywood finish remains a singular moment in Dodgers history, forever out of reach of actual re-creation.
To players, it doesn’t really matter where they clinch a championship. The champagne goes down easy anywhere, and their fiercest bonds are with each other. If most had a choice, of course, they would rather win at home — an enticing vision for the Blue Jays, who drew around 30,000 to a Game 4 watch party at Rogers Centre.
“Very cool,” said an impressed Shane Bieber, the winning pitcher on Tuesday. “They deserve it. They deserve to end it on our terms and in Toronto. I’m excited for that opportunity.”
Toronto starter Max Scherzer has won two titles away from home: he clinched in Houston while playing for Washington, and in Arizona while playing for Texas. As for the chance to win this World Series in Toronto, Scherzer said, “It’s not even on my radar.”
Sandy Koufax (left) and John Roseboro (right) celebrate a World Series victory in Los Angeles in 1963, the only time the Dodgers have ever won the title at home. (AP Photo / File)
The Dodgers’ Mookie Betts, likewise, has won multiple championships without doing so in his home park. Also like Scherzer, he has zero preference where he does it or how long it takes.
“I don’t care how many games it goes,” said Betts, who has celebrated a title at Dodger Stadium — but as a member of the Boston Red Sox in 2018. “I don’t expect how many games. That’s for you guys to predict.”
Most people tend to forecast six- or seven-game series, since both teams are coming off a pennant-clinching high. But 11 of the last 21 World Series have been decided in four or five games, and only one of the last 11 has been clinched by the home team. That was in Boston in 2013, when the Red Sox finished off the St. Louis Cardinals in six.
Boston’s other three titles in this century have all been clinched on the road. So have all three of the San Francisco Giants’ championships. In the history of the World Series, only 54 titles have been clinched by the home team, compared to 65 by the road team. One World Series, during the pandemic in 2020, was held at a neutral site.
Naturally, that was a Dodgers championship. They wore white for the finale, but it wasn’t a pure home game. Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, is 1,421 miles from Chavez Ravine.
The World Series has long been a 2-3-2 format, and when a team loses its first two games on the road, a home clincher is impossible. That’s how it happened for the Dodgers in 1955, 1965 and 1981. In all three of those championship runs, they recovered to sweep their home games, then wrapped things up on the road in Game 6 or 7.
In 1959, the Dodgers held a three-games-to-one-lead on the Chicago White Sox with Koufax on the mound for Game 5 at the L.A. Coliseum. Koufax was still young and wild, but actually pitched a gem in a 1-0 loss to Bob Shaw. The Dodgers clinched in a Game 6 blowout at Comiskey Park.
More recently, the Dodgers have simply been too dominant to get the World Series back to Los Angeles. In 1988 and 2024, they won the opener on a walk-off homer — Kirk Gibson against the Oakland A’s the first time, Freddie Freeman against the Yankees last year — then won again in Game 2. They returned to L.A. with a trophy, ready for a parade.
Clinching on the road can be awkward. In 1988, as the Dodgers mobbed Orel Hershiser after the final out, the public-address system in Oakland cued up, of all things, the theme song to “The Golden Girls.” They wanted to waste no time, apparently, in thanking loyal A’s fans for being a friend, as you can clearly hear in the background:
I asked Hershiser about this once and, as you might expect, he had no recollection of the music choice. If that World Series had returned to Los Angeles, could the mighty A’s have recovered? Nobody in the 213 area code cared to find out.
Besides, the forever voice of the Dodgers, Vin Scully had warm, richly detailed memories of road clinchers, especially the two times in his career that the Dodgers won it all at Yankee Stadium. Scully, who died in 2022, shared those stories with me in 2010 for a two-part profile in The New York Times.
Since the Dodgers’ only path to a 2025 title will again have to end on the road, what better way to end this little history lesson than pulling up a chair with Scully?
On the cathartic 1955 victory party, after Brooklyn won Game 7 in the Bronx: “The one thing I remember, Walter O’Malley and several of the other executives, they took me in a car, so I wasn’t on the team bus. And they took me to the Lexington Hotel, and they had a suite and we sat around for a while, and then we scattered because we were having the victory party in Brooklyn at the Bossard Hotel. And I had a date, so I went to pick her up. And it was an interesting feeling, in Manhattan it was the fall and football was in the air, two hours after the baseball game, it was winter, it was football.
“We drove through the tunnel … and it was like V-J Day and V-E Day all rolled into one in Brooklyn. They were dancing in the streets. It was just one monumental block party. And when we got near the Bossard Hotel, the streets were lined with people. They had sawhorses to restrain them – although the people were very good, they weren’t about to do anything – but they took our cars about a block from the hotel, and we had to walk down the street into the hotel, like you were in a parade, with people cheering. I know the girl that I was with, a terrific girl named Joan Ganz — she went on to invent Sesame Street — and we walked down the street together into the Bossard Hotel where all hell was breaking loose, and that was amazing.”
On a much more subdued toast in 1981, after the L.A. Dodgers wiped out the Yankees in Game 6: “I remember in ’81, I did the game, my wife was with me, and I thought I would celebrate with the team. I guess Peter O’Malley never liked to turn them loose — he was afraid he’d never get them back — so when they won, at Yankee Stadium, the team left town. I was doing football in those days as well, so I was leaving the next day to do a game somewhere. And here’s my wife and I saying, ‘Wow, we don’t have anybody to celebrate with.’ And we were staying at George Steinbrenner’s hotel, the Carlyle, and I remember I went into the bar and I said to the bartender, ‘Could I buy a bottle of Champagne?’ So the bartender, looking around, he said, ‘Yeah, I’d be happy to do it, as long as Mr. Steinbrenner doesn’t see me helping you celebrate.’ So we went up and ordered potato chips and a glass of Champagne. That was our celebration.”