The Empire Strikes Back: The Dodger Knot Series Behind The Yamamoto Gems

Opportunity knocks on everyone’s door. In some cases, opportunity knocks on the door, rings the doorbell, yells at your ring camera, throws pebbles at your bedroom window, then walks out to the convertible in the driveway and starts singing “Thunder Road.”

Kevin Gausman and Yoshinobu Yamamoto are both great, but all duels end with one guy standing while the other guy gets stabbed. Yamamoto finished the game for the second time in a row, making it his first consecutive playoff appearance in 24 years. Gausman came off the wire in the seventh inning, and homers from Will Smith and Max Muncy gave the visitors the lead for good. The Dodgers’ 5-1 victory wasn’t as dramatic as Toronto’s home run party the night before, but it tied the series.

Gausman was almost out in the first inning. He threw two at-bats to Freddie Freeman, who fouled him at the ankle, then a mid-center fastball, then another hot ball from his hands. Gausman returned to the Splitters, the ballpark that made him famous, and buried another.

Just not deep enough. Freeman reached and hit the ball to right field for a double. Two pitches later, Smith followed a slider over the outside edge of home plate and looped it to center, loading Freeman.

In the bottom of the inning, George Springer took a fat fastball from Yamamoto and hit it into the left field corner for a double. The next pitch jammed Nathan Lux, but his Texas Leaguer fell between the Dodgers’ defensive cannonballs, putting runners on the corners to get the Blue Jays’ order.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has spent the past month responding when the opportunity comes. Everyone north of the Rio Grande saw a big moment as Guerrero poked and deflected splitter after splitter, but was left fuming when Yamamoto reached into his Mary Poppins pitch and hit a 2-2 curveball. Alejandro Kirk and Daulton Varsho moved quickly thereafter, and suddenly the Blue Jays had squandered an opportunity to restore their boots to where they had been 20 hours earlier.

Yamamoto and the Dodgers kept giving Toronto chances. Ernie Clement continued his streak as the luckiest hitter on the planet when Freeman inexplicably popped a ball across the infield:

Ernie Clement scored a single on a Freeman catching error.

He now has a swing rate of 58% in the first game of the postseason.

The average swing rate in the first game of the league is 32%. season.#worldseries pic.twitter.com/DyHQEl88mb

— Inside Edge (@IE_MLB) October 26, 2025

1st, no one out, xBA .000. Nothing happened.

Finally, in the third quarter, the Blue Jays got on the board. Springer, wearing a Yamamoto fastball on his forearm, advanced to third on Guerrero’s single and scored on Kirk’s sacrifice fly. But Toronto only scored one run this time, and Yamamoto found his footing, beating the Blue Jays in order over the next four innings.

That run kept the Jays in the game, as Gausman retired the next 17 batters after Smith’s first-inning single. This is classic Gausman, almost all fastball/splitting ball. It was done on the side of the arm, but God knows how fast the vertical break was. Fight if you can.

Most Dodgers can’t do that. Teoscar Hernandez faced Gausman three times and each time he was struck out, tied up, and cooked like meatloaf. Gausman has been pulled in the middle of the sixth inning in five of his six career playoff starts. This time, he not only skated six balls, but also got the first of the seventh ball on the first ball of the innings, and his 66th of the night. With John Smoltz in the booth, Gausman is pacing himself and preparing for a 10-inning complete game like Jack Morris.

But when Gausman wolfed out, he did so in a way that was a sign of things to come.

Gaussman’s separator is huge. It’s godlike. It’s not athletic. To pitch effectively, he also needs to throw his four-seam; the fastball is a jab and the split ball is a power punch. Opponents hit .230 on Gausman’s fastball and slugged .380 on Gausman’s fastball during the regular season this season, which is actually pretty good for a four-seamer. Last season, they had a .281 hitting percentage and a .475 slugging percentage, with the latter hitting slightly lower.

If you’re going to get Gausman, you’re going to get the fastball.

Through six innings, the Dodgers didn’t get a fastball at all. It’s not because it’s unhittable. The Dodgers hit 25 of Gausman’s 49 fastballs, called just three and allowed 14 of them into games. Here are their locations:

According to Baseball Savant’s definition, more than half of the fastballs hit by Gausman are labeled “hard hits.” But of the first 12 fastballs the Dodgers threw, only one traveled more than 308 feet. Last night, Washoe hit a rare left-to-left home run off Blake Snell, one of the worst pitches you’ll ever see Snell throw, a hit in the middle that any hitter with average power should hit 400 feet without taking a breath.

In the fourth inning, Gausman threw a pitch to Freeman that, if anything, was easier to hit. The first pitch, which is higher, is only 93.6 mph. Freeman had most of the success, but not all of it, driving his way to Varsho at 108.4 mph. Two pitches later, Smith caught an equally meaty fastball and got under it. Gausman tied up Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts with back-to-back popouts to end the sixth inning.

As good as Gausman was, he still got away with it. In the seventh game, his luck ran out. Arguably, that’s better than the pitches the Dodgers banged on the ceiling all night, swerving hard to the right and falling into Smith’s hands. But he put his arms away and the ball flew out:

Two batters later, Muncy hit a reverse pitch on nearly the same pitch. It was a success for Gausman, and the Dodgers got two more insurance runs with help from the ubiquitous Luis Wallander.

The Blue Jays never fought back. Because sometimes, when the opportunity came, Yoshinobu Yamamoto would sneak up behind it, cover its face with a chloroform-soaked rag, and hide its unconscious, metaphorical body behind a metaphorical pruning.

Sorry, I got a little carried away.

At the end of the game, it was hard to remember that Yamamoto looked really inconsistent through the first three rounds. He keeps his fastball in bad spots, makes deep counts, and works in traffic. If the Blue Jays convert three consecutive leadoff runners on base into more than one run, they may again see the look on Emmett Sheehan’s face as he tries to make himself invisible through the ninth inning.

But after Guerrero’s single set up Springer’s only run for the Jays, Yamamoto didn’t allow a runner on base all night.

Yamamoto ended the night by retiring 20 consecutive Toronto batters. Combined with Gausman’s 17-hit streak earlier in the game, it was the first time in major league postseason history that two starters retired 14 or more consecutive batters in a postseason game.

You might think that both right-handers, both masters of distribution, would have similar styles. Not so. Gausman rode almost just two pitches, while Yamamoto sprinkled all six of his pitches in varying proportions each time in the order:

After overexposing his splitter early on, he retreated mid-game, leaning on his cutter and then his crappy stuff before returning to his money machine, just like Lynyrd Skynyrd ended with “Freebird.”

Yamamoto’s pitch count stayed within reasonable limits as the innings went on, and Dodgers manager Dave Roberts never encountered a reason to take his starter out.

When Justin Verlander struck out 13 Yankees in nine innings in Game 2 of the 2017 ALCS, it had been a full year since his last complete postseason game. Eight years ago, Yamamoto was in Game 2 of the NLCS against Milwaukee. 11 days later, Yamamoto repeated the trick in his next tournament. In doing so, he became the first pitcher since Curt Schilling in 2001 to pitch complete games in consecutive postseason starts and the first Dodgers pitcher since Orel Hershiser in 1988.

Like Gausman, Yamamoto hasn’t had a 30-strikeout spree. He allowed 15 batters and eight strikeouts, which was good but not spectacular. But he didn’t take anyone with him. He threw 73 strikes in 105 pitches. When he gave up the hard contact, he dropped it to the ground.

To me, Yamamoto’s batting late in the game was exemplary, and he was the one that ended the seventh inning. Toronto head coach John Schneider reached for his final card – Beau Bichette, who went 1-for-2 on one knee in Game 1.

Bichette hit the ball in the hole — at 107.7 mph, the third hardest hit of the night for either team — but within range of Betts. The Dodger shortstop apparently realized that Bichette couldn’t ride the wave in his current situation and spent a lot of time preparing for accurate pitches. Bates and Yamamoto did exactly what was needed to win. No more, no less.

The air of invincibility had faded after winning Game 1, but there was no doubt the Dodgers would go home satisfied in Toronto. After getting their first taste of the canvas since (I think) the NLCS last year, they did to the Blue Jays what they did to the Brewers and Phillies the past two rounds: wait for the opponent’s ace and get to the line late. When the opportunity presented itself, the Dodgers responded.