Both the Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles Dodgers are facing pressures ahead of Game 6 of the World Series tonight. But after something of a reversal of fortunes, it’s the Dodgers who are fighting to stay alive, while the Jays see a chance to write their storybook ending.
With a 3-2 lead in the best-of-seven series, Canada’s team is just one win away from securing its first championship in more than three decades, while the heavily favoured Dodgers now face the possibility of elimination.
Blue Jays manager John Schneider says his ballclub is eager to take its swing at a World Series title in front of a home crowd at Toronto’s Rogers Centre.
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“Whenever you start a spring training, this is kind of where where you want to end up,” Schneider said Thursday. “This is the story of the 2025 Blue Jays. Pretty cool.”
Game 6 will see Jays pitcher Kevin Gausman match up against the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The two last faced each other in Game 2, when Yamamoto pitched a complete game, and the Dodgers won 5-1.
However, the Jays skipper may be downplaying the pressure his team is under to deliver a championship for a Canadian fanbase hungry for World Series glory.
Yet fans, analysts and even the Dodgers themselves, now seem to believe that the real pressure is on Los Angeles, a storied ballclub on the brink of post-season elimination.
“We’ve got to find a way to win one game,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said Thursday.
To repeat their World Series title, the Dodgers must beat the Blue Jays twice in a row at Rogers Centre. That could be difficult, given Toronto’s strong record when playing at home this season.
Baseball writer Ken Rosenthal says the struggling Dodgers must pull off back-to-back wins in Toronto, a city where fans are “eagerly and loudly anticipating the team’s first World Series title since 1993. “
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Jays superfan Lesley Mak says the team has some cushion as there are two games left where they could win it all.
“And they will win it all,” she said via email. “Because they’re the better team.”
The players have a lot to say about how close they are to winning it all, but acknowledge that there’s still work to be done.
“There’s seven games for a reason, you gotta win four of them,” Davis Schneider told reporters after their 6-1 Game 5 win over the Dodgers Wednesday.
“We just gotta win one more, and hopefully we don’t have to go to Game 7,” said Schneider, whose leadoff homer on the first pitch of Game 5 put the Jays on the scoreboard very early.
“The job is not done yet,” said Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who followed Schneider to the plate in Game 5 and hit another solo home run, marking the first time a World Series game started with back-to-back homers.
Veteran starter Max Scherzer says the Jays can’t get complacent as they head into Game 6.
“Obviously, one step closer, but things can change in a heartbeat — we’ve seen it,” said Scherzer, the 41-year-old, two-time World Series champion who’s looking to add to that total.
“We know we gotta come out and play ball, we gotta play our game, we gotta find a way to win and just go 1-0.”
Jerry Howarth, the longtime play-by-play man for Blue Jays radio broadcasts who called Toronto’s last World Series games in 1992 and 1993, says this is a team that doesn’t get thrown by the ups and downs of a baseball season.
He says that’s what has helped them all the way through the current playoff run.
“They simply take it one game at a time without ever looking back or forward,” the retired broadcaster said in an email.
The Dodgers are the defending champions, and the winners of two of the past five World Series titles (2020 and 2024).
Yet they find themselves on the brink of being eliminated by Toronto after back-to-back losses in Games 4 and 5.
“Baseball is a hard game, and it’s been hard for us the last two days,” said Freddie Freeman, the Dodgers first baseman, after the loss on Wednesday.
But the MVP of the 2024 World Series also says the Dodgers shouldn’t be counted out.
“We’ve been in a similar situation before, like we were last year, and we can do it again,” said Freeman, pointing to the Dodgers’ comeback from a 2-1 series deficit in the playoffs last year.
That happened in a divisional series against the San Diego Padres, which saw the Dodgers claw their way to eventual victory in a best-of-five series, but that was at a lower level of the playoffs.
And more importantly, L.A. wasn’t facing the 2025 Blue Jays — a team that vanquished the New York Yankees, downed the Seattle Mariners and now has the Dodgers up against the wall.
Some sports pundits are now signalling that their earlier expectations of Dodgers dominance may have been overstated.
“I’m afraid the massively favored Los Angeles Dodgers just lost the World Series to the Toronto Blue Jays,” sports commentator Skip Bayless wrote on X, just days after he sarcastically scoffed at Toronto’s chances.
Los Angeles Times sports writer Bill Plaschke said after Game 5 that the Dodgers no longer look like the team to beat.
“The former heavy favorites are now the decided underdogs,” he wrote in a column after the Jays beat the Dodgers 6-1 on Wednesday.
Game 6 gets underway Friday in Toronto at 8 p.m. ET.
