After Game 1 of the World Series provided an 11-4 blowout, Game 2 offered a completely different tone — it was an old-fashioned pitching duel between two of baseball’s premier aces, Kevin Gausman and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
Runs were much tougher to come by this time around at Rogers Centre, as both starters battled to outduel each other. And through the first two-thirds of this evenly-battled contest, it seemed like neither hurler was going to blink.
It was a masterful display of pitching on both sides, and each starter was trusted to pitch deep into Game 2 — a rarity during this time of year, with managers guarding against the third-time-through-the-order penalty.
For Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider, that’s exactly what burned him in the seventh inning of Saturday’s 5-1 loss. After retiring Freddie Freeman to open the frame, Gausman threw six straight fastballs to Will Smith, who deposited the final one he saw beyond the left-field wall to break the 1-1 tie.
Two batters later, Max Muncy connected on a solo homer of his own to give the Los Angeles Dodgers a two-run lead, the final pitch of Gausman’s first World Series appearance.
Prior to Smith’s home run, though, Gausman had been excellent. Leading up to that pivotal at-bat, the veteran righty had retired 17 consecutive hitters, including six via strikeout. So, as you can likely imagine, Toronto’s coaching staff trusted their eyes heading into that inning.
“I trusted Kev to get out of that. Even though it is the third time, you kind of watch what he’s [been] doing,” Schneider said of the decision to send Gausman back out in the seventh.
“He’s one of our best pitchers, and I thought he did a really good job navigating. So it was anyone’s game for the taking and they [the Dodgers’ lineup] just made a couple big swings there off Kev.”
For someone who had been pitching as well as Gausman had, it’s tough to argue with that decision. In theory, it was the right call. It came down to the 34-year-old needing to execute, which, against Smith and Muncy, he failed to do.
The rest of the night, however, Gausman did so flawlessly.
After the Dodgers neutralized Trey Yesavage’s unicorn splitter in Game 1, they didn’t have an answer for Gausman’s, which induced eight whiffs on 13 swings (62 per cent) and was responsible for five of his six punchouts. And he used it just 35 per cent of the time, the lowest usage of his five post-season starts by half a percentage point.
Gausman also executed his fastball extremely well — Schneider made a point to bring that up — particularly in the bottom-third quadrant of the strike zone. That helped disguise his knee-breaking splitter, which falls off the table halfway to home plate when it’s working the way he wants it to.
In the end, it was just a pair of fastballs to Smith and Muncy in the seventh that Gausman will want back as this best-of-seven series now shifts to Los Angeles. Still, any time you’re up against a performance like Yamamoto’s, anything shy of perfection is bound to leave you wanting more.
Speaking of perfect, that’s precisely how the Dodgers’ hurler concluded his second straight complete game, retiring all 20 of his final batters faced — becoming the first game in post-season history where both starters retired at least 17 consecutive batters, per MLB researcher Sarah Langs. And, if you can believe it, Yamamoto was more efficient in this start than he was in Game 2 of the NLCS — throwing six fewer pitches.
But Gausman was just as efficient entering the seventh, averaging 8.6 pitches per inning from the second through the sixth — exactly one pitch fewer than Yamamoto in that same span.
“I thought Kev matched him [Yamamoto] pitch for pitch, really,” Schneider said of the pitching duel in Game 2. “They both had low pitch counts. It was kind of a classic pitchers’ duel and they made a couple more swings.”
Toronto’s offence did a great job of making Yamamoto throw 23 pitches in the first, mirroring Blake Snell’s 29-pitch opening frame in Game 1. But they let a prime scoring chance slip past them, with runners on the corners and zero outs before the heart of the order — featuring Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Alejandro Kirk and Daulton Varsho — was retired in order.
That was the Blue Jays’ “best chance” to ensure it’d be another busy day for the Dodgers’ struggling bullpen. Instead, they received the night off, preventing this lineup from facing former starter, now-turned-closer Roki Sasaki — whom the organization heavily pursued last off-season and hosted him during an in-person visit at Rogers Centre.
This series, now tied 1-1 after the first two games, feels deservedly so. These are two evenly-matched rosters going head-to-head for the World Series — Toronto, seeking its first since winning back-to-back 32 years ago, and Los Angeles, striving to become baseball’s first repeat champion since the New York Yankees (1998-2000).
Things are just getting started here in what figures to be a series that’ll likely return to this city next weekend — barring a sweep for either side, of course.