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TORONTO -- Thirty-two years of frustration and failure, of disappointment and self-loathing, of trauma worn as a badge of honour, burst in magnificent fashion Friday night. The sixth inning of Game 1 of the World Series was an exorcism. Toronto, one of the world's great metropolises, a city that has loved its baseball team through decades of it not loving back, screamed and bellowed and remembered what championship baseball looked like. And the Toronto Blue Jays, architects of an 11-4 devastation of the heavily favored Los Angeles Dodgers, did more than just author one of the greatest offensive innings in World Series history.
They showed the world what they were already certain of coming into the 121st World Series: They are no pushovers.
"We've had a genuine feeling for a long time that if we just played a certain brand of baseball, that we then will win the game," Toronto right-hander Chris Bassitt said, and he's right. In an era of copious strikeouts, the Blue Jays don't. In a time of shoddy defense, the Blue Jays play clean. And even against a juggernaut like the Dodgers, a team full of late bloomers and second chancers can look like a dominant force.
Nothing personified that like the bottom of the sixth. It was one of the great half-innings in World Series history, a nine-run frenzy filled with everything the Blue Jays' offense does well. Toronto entered the series with by far the best offense in Major League Baseball this postseason, scoring 6½ runs a game, nearly two more than Los Angeles. The sixth illustrated how.
Starting with a six-pitch walk, adding a single, drawing a hit-by-pitch on the ninth pitch of the at-bat and chasing two-time Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell set the tone. A single scored the first run and gave the Blue Jays a 3-2 advantage. A nine-pitch walk scored another run and a single one more. And after a tapper to the mound drew the first out on a force play at home, Blue Jays manager John Schneider called on his third pinch hitter of the inning, Addison Barger.
The last week for Barger has been hectic to say the least. On Monday night, the Blue Jays ousted the Seattle Mariners in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series to clinch the pennant. The next morning, Barger said, he flew to meet his wife at the hospital for the birth of their third child. A day later, he booked back to Toronto for the Blue Jays' workout -- but didn't have anywhere to stay.
"They set up a place, but I was like, for a few days, I'm not paying for a hotel room," Barger said. "I know that sounds crazy, but I'm just trying to save a buck."
So after crashing on the couch of Blue Jays outfielder Myles Straw for a couple days, Barger spent Friday night with teammate Davis Schneider, sleeping on a pullout couch in the living room of the hotel suite that overlooks Rogers Centre from center field. Barger wasn't exactly comfortable -- Schneider said he heard squeaks from the bed as Barger tried to find peace -- but it didn't impede him from unleashing the biggest hit of his young career.
On a 2-2 slider from reliever Anthony Banda, Barger rocketed a ball over the center-field fence for the first pinch-hit grand slam in World Series history, unleashing chaos inside the domed stadium, where primal screams bounced off the roof and reverberated to create a tsunami of sound.
The Blue Jays' expertise in this particular style is nothing new -- they won the most games in the AL this season precisely because they're so adept at grinding at-bats like sandpaper to pitchers' souls -- but to see it on this stage, against a Dodgers team that limited Milwaukee to four runs in the entire National League Championship Series, hammered home the fact that Toronto will not be not just another layover on Los Angeles' path to back-to-back championships.
The deluge continued. A Vladimir Guerrero Jr. single. Another home run, from catcher Alejandro Kirk, who went 3 for 3 and had drawn a nine-pitch walk in the first, when the Blue Jays made Snell throw 29 pitches and forecast his early exit. All told, Toronto saw 44 pitches, scored nine runs -- the third most in a single World Series inning and the most since 1968 -- and turned a 2-2 nailbiter into an 11-2 stomping.
This is who the Blue Jays are. They've got a superstar (Guerrero) and a veteran of playoff wars (George Springer) and a returning All-Star (Bo Bichette, who played for the first time since Sept. 6, at a position, second base, that he hadn't manned since he was in AAA six years ago). The rest of their lineup is stocked with players who have bought into Toronto's philosophy that as long as they don't beat themselves, they're good enough to outlast anybody -- even a team as talented as the Dodgers.
"If we don't strike out and we don't give outs away and we essentially don't beat ourselves and don't give up home runs, we're going to win the game," Bassitt said. "It's not about facing any team. It's just the belief in our team that no matter who we play, this brand can win."
It's the kind of brand that has made the city fall in love with the Jays all over again. Toronto knows baseball heartbreak. After consecutive championships in 1992 and 1993, the Blue Jays fell into a pattern of perpetual mediocrity. Even when they were good in the mid-2010s, they fell short in the ALCS. Their last three postseason berths ended in wild card series sweeps. They tried to get Shohei Ohtani in free agency. He went to the Dodgers. They tried to get Juan Soto in free agency. He went to the New York Mets. The Blue Jays, snakebitten for decades, entered 2025 with little hope for a turnaround.
Baseball is funny that way, though. Sometimes a team coalesces around an idea, and that idea turns into an ethos, and that ethos fuels a revolution. And the Dodgers are so good that all of this joy, this wellspring of emotion and excitement, could be short-lived. Maybe this was the apex of a season that was great, just not great enough.
Or perhaps the 44,353 at Rogers Centre were onto something when, with two outs in the ninth and Ohtani at the plate, a chant started to percolate through the stadium.
"We don't need you," Blue Jays fans said to the best player in the world. They didn't need him this season. They didn't need him Friday. They didn't need him going forward.
It was hubristic, but that's understandable. For the last 32 years, Toronto hasn't experienced a night like this. They've had moments, sure. The Jose Bautista bat flip. The Edwin Encarncion home run. All of it, ultimately, for naught. This time, though? With this team of true believers? In a city that's living a dream?
The rest of the World Series will provide the answer. On this night, however, it was true. The Toronto Blue Jays needed only themselves. And they were plenty.
