{"id":170352,"date":"2025-11-02T11:59:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T11:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/greatest-words-in-sports-try-telling-that-to-blue-jays-after-heartbreaker-usa-today\/"},"modified":"2025-11-02T11:59:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T11:59:10","slug":"greatest-words-in-sports-try-telling-that-to-blue-jays-after-heartbreaker-usa-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/greatest-words-in-sports-try-telling-that-to-blue-jays-after-heartbreaker-usa-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Greatest words in sports? Try telling that to Blue Jays after heartbreaker – USA Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

TORONTO \u2013 It might have been easier \u2013 for the mind and soul \u2013 if the Toronto Blue Jays simply offered token resistance in the bottom of the ninth inning of World Series Game 6, down 3-1 and assured of a Game 7<\/a> and November baseball, regardless.
Succumb meekly to Los Angeles Dodgers<\/a> rookie closer Ro\u0304ki Sasaki, and the postgame vibes would\u2019ve been muted but rote after right-hander Yoshinobu Yamamoto mastered them for the second time in eight days.
Get \u2018em tomorrow. Sometimes you just gotta tip your cap. All hands on deck in Game 7<\/em>.
Alas, these are the 2025 Blue Jays, MLB leaders in comeback wins, incapable of anything but big feelings and bigger goals that almost always, against the odds, come to fruition.
Yet this time, one sinking line drive and the ultimate youthful mistake on the basepaths left one of the greatest hitters in postseason history on deck, robbed of the chance to tie or win the game. And now everyone \u2013 the Dodgers and Blue Jays, a collection of 44,710 title-hungry Toronto fans, the hundreds of cops deployed in anticipation of championship bedlam in The Six \u2013 must come back tomorrow night and try again.
Game 7, the greatest words in sports?
Tell that to a club that got the tying runs on base and the World Series-winning run to the plate with nobody out, the temporary stage Major League Baseball constructs for championship celebrations poised and ready for a strike force to guide it onto the ersatz surface of Rogers Centre, where, if the ball fell properly, Rob Manfred would award the Commissioner\u2019s Trophy to the Blue Jays.
That stage never moved.
If only Addison Barger did the same when Andre\u0301s Gime\u0301nez\u2019s sinking fly to shallow left field got hauled in by Dodgers playoff legend Kike\u0301 Herna\u0301ndez<\/a>.
The ever-heady Herna\u0301ndez spotted Barger drifting too far off second base, jacked up and too eager to score the game-tying run. Instead, it was an unprecedented World Series \u00a0walk-off result of the worst kind for the home team: 7-4 double play, game over, and George Springer \u2013 he of the 23 career postseason home runs, including a three-run shot to win ALCS Game 7 \u2013 on deck for his Joe Carter moment<\/a>.
Instead, Barger drifted too far off the second base bag, dead man\u2019s land. Herna\u0301ndez, promptly yet casually, spiked a one-hop throw to second baseman Miguel Rojas.
And Barger, all limbs and long hair flailing into second base, was out by a mile.
You could say Rogers Centre was deflated, but then again, it hardly had a chance to get fully going, so quick was the rally, so sudden the end.
The Blue Jays, winners of 105 games, regular season and playoffs, have done more than enough to deserve a championship. Yet the tiniest fraction of it \u2013 nine innings of winning baseball in a year they\u2019ve done it dozens of times \u2013 still remains to be completed.
\u201cSaying you deserve it is kind of tricky. To deserve something, you have to finish the job,\u201d says Blue Jays rookie starter Trey Yesavage, whose epic postseason may yet require one more climb up the Rogers Centre mound. \u201cYou can have all these accolades in the regular season and thus far in the playoffs.
\u201cBut deserving something only gets you so far. We need to show up tomorrow.\u201d
Barger has shown up throughout October for these playoffs, just a week removed from busting open World Series Game 1 with a grand slam. He put the Blue Jays in position to steal a game by scorching a ball 105.5 mph into the left field gap, so hard it wedged into the wall.
The ground-rule double didn\u2019t change what would have been: Barger on second as the tying run, nobody out. Ernie Clement\u2019s pop-up against Tyler Glasnow brought up Gime\u0301nez, a No. 9 hitter but a playoff savior this month.
He did what he could against Glasnow, stroking the ball toward left. Given Gime\u0301nez\u2019s dearth of opposite-field power, Herna\u0301ndez was playing shallow and closing quickly.
If only Barger could see what almost everyone else could: That it was a relatively routine fly ball, that freezing and retreating almost immediately was the move.
\u201cI was pretty surprised he got to it,\u201d Barger said in the Blue Jays clubhouse. \u201cOff the bat, I thought it was going to go over the shortstop\u2019s head.
\u201cI didn\u2019t think it was going to travel that far. It was kind of a bad read.\u201d
And not the way any club wants to go into a Game 7.
In a funereal Blue Jays clubhouse, some tried covering for Barger.
\u201cI thought it was a hit. I thought it was getting down, a thousand percent,\u201d says infielder Isiah Kiner-Falefa of his vantage point on the play. \u201cKike\u0301 made a great play right there. Aggressive mistake.
\u201cYou make a mistake, you want it to be aggressive. That\u2019s how we play. It didn\u2019t work out for us tonight.\u201d
And there was the sense the Blue Jays still possessed that esprit de corps, this notion that no cause is ever lost, that victory – second and third, nobody out – was expected, and will come their way next time.
“Throughout the regular season, we\u2019re in that spot, it\u2019s a walk-off win,” says Gausman. “Nobody out, guys on second and third. We\u2019ve come back so many times. Everybody kind of just expecting, yeah, we\u2019re going to win this game.”We didn\u2019t, obviously. But we did have an opportunity to win. At least we didn\u2019t kind of go down with no fight.”
Yet there was the undeniable residue that comes with opportunity lost. Not that all is lost: These fellows bounced back from an 18-inning loss in Game 3 to win the next two at Dodger Stadium, putting them in this enviable position in the first place.
The chins will be up come Saturday evening. Yes, there\u2019s still a chance. But it\u2019s impossible to ignore that a golden one just passed them by.
\u201cWe had a chance to close them out. But we didn\u2019t so we\u2019ll just turn our attention to tomorrow,\u201d says infielder Bo Bichette. \u201cGame 7, Game 60 in the regular season, we\u2019ll show up ready to play, ready to compete, and give it everything we got.
\u201cWe thought we had a chance to win it today. But we didn\u2019t get it done.\u201d<\/p>\n

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TORONTO \u2013 It might have been easier \u2013 for the mind and soul \u2013 if the Toronto Blue Jays simply offered token resistance in the bottom of the ninth inning of World Series Game 6, down 3-1 and assured of a Game 7 and November baseball, regardless.Succumb meekly to Los Angeles Dodgers rookie closer Ro\u0304ki […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":170353,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-170352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170352\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}