World Series 2025: For the Blue Jays, missed chances and missing batters were their downfall in epic Game 3 vs. Dodgers Jordan ShustermanOctober 28, 2025 at 6:28 PM 0 LOS ANGELES — Nathan Lukes' left cleat landed on first base with force — but not quite in time.
- - World Series 2025: For the Blue Jays, missed chances and missing batters were their downfall in epic Game 3 vs. Dodgers
Jordan ShustermanOctober 28, 2025 at 6:28 PM
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LOS ANGELES — Nathan Lukes' left cleat landed on first base with force — but not quite in time.
In an 18-inning World Series Game 3 loaded with untimely and haunting outs for both teams, this one — a groundout with the bases loaded to end the top of the 12th inning — was particularly painful. Lukes was facing lefty Clayton Kershaw, a pitcher in the final days of his legendary career who was never expected to be appearing in any semblance of high leverage for Los Angeles this postseason.
But with two outs and the lefty Lukes scheduled to hit, Kershaw was stunningly summoned as the eighth Dodgers pitcher of the night, tasked with escaping the jam and preserving the tie. After an eight-pitch battle, Kershaw got Lukes to chase a slider below the zone that would have been ball four and an RBI walk but instead was a soft rollover to second baseman Tommy Edman, who scooped the ball with his glove and flipped it to Freddie Freeman at first a half-second before Lukes stepped on the bag.
Once his inning-ending out was confirmed by first-base umpire Alan Porter, Lukes removed his helmet, held it above his head and spiked it into the grass in disgust. It was perhaps the most relatable moment of the night, an outburst of frustration that nearly every player in both dugouts could empathize with — not to mention the 52,654 paid spectators who unknowingly opted in to nearly seven hours of postseason baseball that was equal parts exhilarating and excruciating.
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The vast majority of said spectators left happy, however, thanks to Freddie Freeman's walk-off home run in the bottom of the 18th inning, which secured a 6-5 victory that gave Los Angeles a 2-1 advantage in the series. Lukes' Blue Jays, on the other hand, departed this October classic exhausted and empty-handed, left to ponder an endless assortment of what-ifs. Lukes' squandered run-scoring opportunity and subsequent helmet spike represented just one in a series of disappointing and unfortunate sequences that ultimately sealed Toronto's fate on the wrong side of this historic World Series clash.
"We tried everything we could. They did the same thing," Vladimir Guerrero Jr. said through interpreter Hector Lebron. "In the end, they came up with the victory."
Scan the work of art that is the Game 3 box score, and you'll find several triumphs for Toronto over the course of the game. Alejandro Kirk hit a go-ahead, three-run blast off Tyler Glasnow as part of a quintessential Blue Jays offensive barrage in a four-run fourth inning. Guerrero added two more hits to his burgeoning October résumé and didn't strike out once in eight trips to the plate. Left-hander Eric Lauer tossed an unthinkable 4 ⅔ scoreless frames in extra innings for his longest outing in two months. Toronto held Mookie Betts, Will Smith and Max Muncy to a combined 2-for-21 with zero runs scored and zero runs batted in.
But overshadowing the scattered successes were the Blue Jays' array of missteps on both sides of the ball and at several critical junctures of the game. Toronto made baserunning outs at three different bases: Bo Bichette was picked off at first base in the second inning, when he thought Daulton Varsho had drawn ball four and began walking to second base; Isiah Kiner-Falefa was thrown out at third base in the ninth while trying to advance on a line drive that ricocheted off Freeman's glove; and Davis Schneider was thrown out at home in the 10th inning while trying to score from first on a Lukes double into the right-field corner.
On the mound, in the fifth inning, lefty reliever Mason Fluharty was unable to get either of the two left-handed hitters he was brought in to tame, surrendering a double to Shohei Ohtani and a single to Freeman that allowed Los Angeles to tie the game at 4-4. Afforded a lead via a Bichette RBI single in the seventh, another key reliever promptly floundered in the bottom half, when Seranthony Dominguez failed to exercise heavily advised caution against Ohtani, leaving a first-pitch fastball right down the middle for the game's greatest player to smash over the left-field wall for a game-tying homer and his fourth extra-base hit of the game.
And finally and fatefully, there was Brendon Little's poorly placed sinker to one of this generation's greatest hitters in Freeman, whose picturesque, left-handed swing sent everyone home.
"Guys just trying to stay locked in, make sure they're putting together good at-bats and going out there and doing their job," Lauer said afterward. "Honestly, it's one of those games where it feels like it's never gonna end, so everybody's trying to end it themselves and just do their jobs."
"It tests your mental toughness for sure," third baseman Ernie Clement said. "You find a way to lock in each time you go out on defense, and you try to find a way to get on base for the boys when you're hitting."
Almost four hours passed between Ohtani's game-tying homer in the seventh and Freeman's walk-off blast, a maddening stalemate highlighting both teams' struggle to score. But while the Dodgers' lineup cycled through their avalanche of All-Stars to no avail, the Blue Jays faced an added challenge in their quest to score in extras: Four of their best hitters were no longer in the game.
This difficult circumstance was the product of some bad luck and some strategic decisions that backfired in brutal fashion. It began in the top of the seventh, when leadoff man and designated hitter George Springer injured his right side on a swing, forcing his immediate exit and prompting Ty France to replace him mid at-bat. It was France's first plate appearance since Sept. 21, and he eventually struck out. Later the same inning, after Bichette drove in Guerrero with an RBI single, skipper John Schneider opted to pinch-run for Bichette with Kiner-Falefa, with an eye toward managing Bichette's workload as he continues to play through a left knee injury that has limited his mobility.
The next inning, Schneider pinch-ran Myles Straw for Addison Barger after Barger reached on an error to lead off the inning, a calculated risk intended to put the speedy Straw in position to score the go-ahead run. But he did not, and thus, he remained in the lineup for the rest of the game. A similar sequence unfolded in the 12th, when Kirk reached with a leadoff walk and was replaced by backup catcher Tyler Heineman in search of improved wheels; that inning ended with Lukes falling short against Kershaw. Heineman went on to bat three more times, while the sweet-swinging Kirk watched helplessly from the dugout.
By the end of the 18-inning marathon, the hitters who replaced Springer, Bichette, Barger and Kirk had combined to go 2-for-17 with six strikeouts. While it would be unfair to label any of these substitutions as egregious from a strategic standpoint, considering the state of the game when they occurred — and the Springer exit was strictly bad fortune — it's undeniable that the humungous downgrade in batter quality from the starters to the bench bats came back to bite the Blue Jays.
In the end, the loss certainly wasn't for lack of effort or determination from Toronto, and Schneider was proud of how hard his team fought.
"They were in the right mindset and the right head space the entire time," he said. "I give my guys so much credit for playing the way they did."
"We grinded, battled our tails off," said Clement, who extended his postseason hitting streak to nine games with a fourth-inning single but went hitless in seven other trips to the plate. "Tired as hell, but yeah, credit to them. They kind of just outlasted us and made the big play when they needed to."
"In the moment, it's more mental," Clement continued when asked if a long game like Monday's has more of an impact on the mind or the body. "Tomorrow, we'll probably feel the physical a little bit, but you just try to bounce back and get ready to go. It's obviously, you know, tiring, but we're gonna come out firing."
While Toronto found itself on the losing end of an epic Game 3, the winning team too had to endure nearly two full ballgames worth of mental and physical exhaustion en route to victory, setting the stage for an ultra-intriguing Game 4 on Tuesday. Shane Bieber vs. Ohtani already stood out as an especially compelling starting pitching matchup, but it now carries even more weight following a game in which nearly every pitcher on each roster had to throw — not to mention Ohtani's historic effort at the plate that surely expended more energy than usual.
The Blue Jays might have lost this battle, but the war is far from over.
"The Dodgers didn't win the World Series today. They won a game," Schneider said. "These guys are going to be ready to go tomorrow."
Source: "AOL Sports"
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