It was said that the Los Angeles Dodgers were angry after being humiliated by the Toronto Blue Jays in the opening game of the World Series on Friday night.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto certainly pitched like he was absolutely furious.
Toronto’s bats were silenced in Game 2 by a dazzling performance from the Dodgers starter, who allowed just a lone sacrifice fly to Alejandro Kirk over nine brilliant innings. The Jays had just four hits on the night, two of them bloops, and not one after the third inning.
The Dodgers eventually won 5-1, evening the series at a game apiece.
If the Jays launched rockets on Friday, Saturday brought a whole mess of wet firecrackers.
Yamamoto, a 27-year-old from Japan in his second year in the majors, worked with a repertoire that seemed frankly unfair. He struck out Nathan Lukes on a 97-mile-an-hour fastball and froze Daulton Varsho on a 77-mile-an-hour curveball, while also mixing in a sharp, hard split-fingered fastball.
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Good pitches are often called filthy. This stuff was disgusting. Gross. Cover-your-eyes nasty. You get the idea.
Other than a shaky first inning, Yamamoto had Blue Jays hitters off balance all night, in a way they had not been since Game 5 against Seattle in the American League Championship Series, more than a week ago.
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Yamamoto struck out eight Toronto batters and threw 105 pitches for a complete game, which is the modern baseball equivalent of spotting a unicorn.
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A Rogers Centre crowd that began the night rocking and joyous, with franchise legend Joe Carter throwing out the ceremonial first pitch and then hamming it up with the present-day Jays, ended up resigned to its fate as Yamamoto mowed down hitter after hitter. Hopefully not too many attendees were stewing over the prices they had paid on the resale ticket market.
Toronto’s inability to do much of anything at the plate made an unfortunate victim of starting pitcher Kevin Gausman, who was quite filthy himself through six innings before surrendering a pair of solo home runs in the seventh, to Will Smith and Max Muncy.
For a team that has talked so much about the brotherhood and camaraderie that they share in a tight clubhouse, Gausman could be forgiven for wondering if he has caused some sort of offence to his teammates given the lack of run support they have given him.
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Gausman also pitched well in both of his starts against Seattle — Games 1 and 5 of the ALCS — but the Jays lost both. Toronto’s potent offence, the best of any playoff team by some distance, backed Gausman with just four runs across his last three starts.
Gausman’s departure after those seventh-inning home runs turned things over to the Blue Jays bullpen, which exposed the soft underbelly of the team.
The Dodgers tacked on two more runs against a series of Jays relievers, more evidence for the pre-series theory that whichever team is forced to go to its bullpen first is in trouble.
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And, as if to prove that when things go sideways in the baseball playoffs, they often go really sideways, Toronto’s normally reliable defence helped Los Angeles score both of those runs.
Alejandro Kirk failed to block a pitch in the dirt that allowed a runner to score, and Andres Gimenez tried to turn a double-play on a slow grounder with the bases loaded instead of taking the force out at home. That decision allowed the Dodgers’ fifth run to score when the double-play attempt was unsuccessful.
Given the wet noodles that the Jays were waving at Yamamoto, an extra run felt like it might as well have been a grand slam.
Indeed, the Japanese sensation struck out the side in the eighth inning, at a point in the game when the vast majority of starting pitchers have long since been sent to the showers.
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And so now it is off to Los Angeles for the next three games. The Jays will be disappointed to have given up the home-field advantage they brought into the series, but all is not lost. Toronto is 3-2 on the road in these playoffs, and they went to Seattle in the last round, having lost twice and promptly won the next two.
Perhaps more importantly, the Jays’ emphatic Game 1 win proved that they could trade punches with the defending World Series champions and their roster of All-Stars. The Jays haven’t rolled over and had their tummies rubbed.
Sometimes, a baseball team runs into a pitcher who is simply unhittable. The hard thing to fathom is that, with the way Yamamoto has been pitching — he also threw a complete game in the National League Championship Series, which is downright freaky — he was still not the Dodgers’ choice to be the Game 1 starter. The Los Angeles rotation is that good.
If the series does end up coming back to Toronto, Yamamoto would likely be the Game 6 starter for the Dodgers. It’s probably best for Jays fans not to think about that possibility just now.
