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As the 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 could 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 game, both managers said they were close to sending a position player to the mound in a game of utmost importance.
Still, neither was immediately in favor of adopting the automatic runner rule used in the regular season since 2020, in which each team starts each extra inning with a runner on second base. Among 209 extra-inning games this season, all ended in 13. In the ghost runner’s six seasons, the Dodgers’ longest was a 16-inning victory 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, you have to go through the attrition game of pitching,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
Will Klein, the series-record 10th pitcher for Los Angeles, doubled his previous career high with four innings and 72 pitches. Yoshinobu Yamamoto had warmed up and was slated to enter the 19th, two days after throwing 105 pitches to win Game 2 in his second straight complete game.
“If Yamamoto couldn’t have taken the ball in the 19th, it probably would have been Miguel Rojas. So that’s kind of where we were at,” Roberts said in reference to a second baseman who made four mop-up pitching appearances during the season.
Little pitched 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 before a position player.
Blue Jays manager John Schneider wasn’t sure he would prefer to extend the ghost runner into 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 it goes away. But with that, I think you have to structure your roster accordingly to try to handle some of those situations.”
Report from the Associated Press.
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