As bullpens emptied and the Dodgers and Blue Jays played into the night, Toronto second baseman Isiah Kiner-Falefa had a jarring thought.
“There was a point where I was, like, we might see two position players in the World Series going back and forth,” he said.
A day after the Dodgers won 6-5 on Freddie Freeman’s 18th-inning home run off Brendon Little to take a two games to one lead in the best-of-seven matchup, both managers said they were getting close to having to send a position player to the mound in a game of utmost importance.
Yet, neither was immediately in favor of adopting the automatic runner rule used in the regular season since 2020, in which each team starts every extra inning with a runner at second base. Among 209 extra-inning games this season, all ended by the 13th. In the six seasons with the ghost runner, the longest was the Dodgers’ 16-inning win over San Diego on Aug. 25, 2021.
“Baseball in its truest form and part of winning a seven-game series is if there are games like that, then to have to go through the battle of attrition with pitching,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
Will Klein, the Series-record 10th pitcher for Los Angeles, doubled his previous career highs with four innings and 72 pitches. Yoshinobu Yamamoto had warmed up and was set to enter in the 19th, two days after throwing 105 pitches to win Game 2 in his second consecutive complete game.
“If Yamamoto couldn’t have taken the ball in the 19th, it was probably going to be Miguel Rojas. So that’s kind of where we were at,” Roberts said in a reference to a second baseman who made four mop-up pitching appearances during the season.
Little entered in the 17th for the Blue Jays and Shane Bieber, their scheduled starter for Game 4 on Tuesday, was in the bullpen and would have followed him to the mound. Rookie Trey Yesavage, scheduled for Wednesday’s Game 5, would have been the last pitcher in before a position player.
Blue Jays manager John Schneider wasn’t sure he would favor extending the ghost runner to the postseason.
“I’m kind of a traditionalist when it comes to baseball,” he said. “It’s kind of unique because that’s how you play for 162 and then that goes away. But with that, I think you got to structure your roster accordingly to try to handle some of those situations.”
Reporting by The Associated Press.
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