{"id":241794,"date":"2025-10-26T10:21:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-26T10:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/241794\/"},"modified":"2025-10-26T10:21:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-26T10:21:07","slug":"dodgers-entered-2025-world-series-unbeatable-theyre-in-trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/241794\/","title":{"rendered":"Dodgers entered 2025 World Series unbeatable. They’re in trouble"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"play\"<\/p>\n

Dodgers and Blue Jays discuss what makes Shohei Ohtani a special player<\/p>\n

USA TODAY Sports caught up with members of the Dodgers and Blue Jays ahead of the World Series to discuss the unique talents of Shoehi Ohtani .<\/p>\n

Sports Pulse<\/p>\n

TORONTO \u2014 They began the night as close as any team in a quarter-century has come to repeating as World Series champions.<\/p>\n

Nine innings later<\/a>, the shellshocked Los Angeles Dodgers<\/a> weren’t any closer to their goal \u2013 and suddenly realize how much difficult it will be to reach it.<\/p>\n

Their ace stumbled. Their ad hoc bullpen, which hasn’t stopped taking hits from injury and terrible performance and tragic circumstance, stumbled through a nine-run embarrassment of an inning<\/a>. Their two-way superstar was mocked mercilessly by a fan base still annoyed he didn’t choose them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And by night’s end, the Toronto Blue Jays’ 11-4 victory was an undeniable reality check for a club that seemed indomitable.<\/p>\n

And now may very much be in trouble.<\/p>\n

They came into Game 1 of this World Series with nine wins in 10 playoff games this season, and a 20-6 postseason record the past two Octobers. They exited with a black eye administered by the Blue Jays’ bats, who got ace Blake Snell on the ropes and didn’t let him escape.<\/p>\n

Snell needed 100 pitches to get 15 outs, and left with the bases loaded in the sixth inning. And after a Blue Jays conga line of endless at-bats, bases-loaded walks, grand slams and wall-banging knocks were over, nine runs had crossed the plate.<\/p>\n

And two of the relievers the Dodgers expected to hold the line \u2013 right-hander Emmet Sheehan and lefty Anthony Banda \u2013 had been battered.<\/p>\n

It was Banda who made ignominious history, giving up the first pinch-hit grand slam<\/a> in World Series history to Addison Barger, a left-on-left matchup that should have favored him but for a 2-1 slider that wasn’t up and wasn’t in enough – and then it was in the right field seats, giving Toronto a 9-2 lead and shaking old Rogers Centre to its core.<\/p>\n

“They need to bounce back,” manager Dave Roberts says of Banda and Sheehan, who created the mess by committing a pair of cardinal sins in the four batters he faced – issuing a walk and then giving up an RBI single to the No. 9 hitter.<\/p>\n

“Anthony’s been very good for us, left a breaking ball up. But, yeah, with the construct of the pen, we’re going to need ’em, and so we got a long way to go, a lot of baseball, but they certainly got to make good pitches.”<\/p>\n

The Dodgers will be without top lefty Alex Vesia for the Series as he tends to a family emergency. Yet the dropoff from Vesia to Banda isn’t massive: Banda entered Game 1 having faced 48 batters the past two postseasons, and retired 32 of them, yielding just one run.<\/p>\n

But the Barger blast will be challenging to get past, as Banda joins the litany of Dodgers relievers – from big-ticket free agents like Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates to veteran stalwart Blake Treinen – who will somehow have to wash this outing very quickly.<\/p>\n

“You\u2019re just trying to find outs,’ says Banda. “It’s something that we just didn\u2019t do today as far as the bullpen.<\/p>\n

“When we do, it\u2019s lights-out. It\u2019s as simple as that, build confidence in that. But tonight was just very bad.”<\/p>\n

Snell’s night might not qualify as “very bad,” perhaps only if compared to his recent work. He entered Game 1 with a 0.86 ERA through his three playoff starts, giving up just six hits and three runs in taming Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Milwaukee.<\/p>\n

But this is Toronto. And Snell was far from indomitable.<\/p>\n

“We know how good we are. They came out swinging and had a better game,” says Snell, who walked three, hit a batter and gave up eight hits. “No excuses. There are no excuses.<\/p>\n

“I need to be better. I need to throw strikes. I know I can do that. I need to find a way to be better.”<\/p>\n

That won’t be his problem until a potential Game 5 at Dodger Stadium. In Game 2, the onus is on Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who has rescued the Dodgers before and certainly can deliver them from the grim reality of a 2-0 Series deficit.<\/p>\n

At the same time, these Blue Jays are a beast the Dodgers simply haven’t seen this season.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one game. Nothing we can do about it now. Just one game, keep moving,” says shortstop Mookie Betts.<\/p>\n

By the ninth inning, frisky Blue Jays fans mocked the great Shohei Ohtani with chants of “We don’t need you!”, a reference to their oh-so-close pursuit of the two-way superstar who ultimately signed with the Dodgers.<\/p>\n

Ohtani got some measure of satisfaction, salvaging a two-strikeout night with a garbage time two-run homer.<\/p>\n

Yet the Blue Jays fans were right. On this night, they didn’t need Ohtani. And the Dodgers may soon need further intervention to keep this Series from slipping away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dodgers and Blue Jays discuss what makes Shohei Ohtani a special player USA TODAY Sports caught up with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":241795,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[13449,2872,64,63,4034,144319,46933,5781,25423,485,104455,5138,144320,10217,5284,121032,54360,2871,1187,591,144318,6590,621,637,324,44,5109,323,335,70462,9660,144321,5108,5149,12422,85,635,127819,5787,3920,12425,907,144322,124311,47542],"class_list":["post-241794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-analysis","tag-angeles","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-baseball","tag-betts","tag-blake","tag-blake-snell","tag-blake-treinen","tag-california","tag-california-gold-rush","tag-dodgers","tag-emmet","tag-emmet-sheehan","tag-gold","tag-kirby","tag-kirby-yates","tag-los","tag-los-angeles-dodgers","tag-mlb","tag-mookie","tag-mookie-betts","tag-national","tag-national-sports","tag-neutral","tag-news","tag-ohtani","tag-overall","tag-overall-neutral","tag-rush","tag-scott","tag-sheehan","tag-shohei","tag-shohei-ohtani","tag-snell","tag-sports","tag-sports-news","tag-tanner","tag-tanner-scott","tag-toronto","tag-treinen","tag-yamamoto","tag-yates","tag-yoshinobu","tag-yoshinobu-yamamoto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}