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Jays in six? A winner-take-all Game 7? We’ll know by the end of the night if the baseball season is going to extend for one more day. Plus: The Nationals have a new manager, and The National has a baseball writer … sorta. I’m Levi Weaver, here with Ken Rosenthal. Welcome to The Windup!
Tension: Keys to Game 6 tonight
For Blue Jays fans, the hope is that tonight is the last night of the 2025 baseball season. For Dodgers fans, November baseball sounds nice. For the rest of us, it has been super entertaining to watch these two teams square off.
Here’s what you need to know before Game 6:
For the Dodgers, extending the series with a win tonight will require two things.
First, can Yoshinobu Yamamoto continue what has been a jaw-dropping postseason run? His last two starts have been complete games. His postseason ERA in four starts is 1.57, and he’s 3-1 (his lone loss was, until the World Series began, the Dodgers’ only loss this postseason).
He’s not a huge strikeouts guy, but I can’t help wondering if that helped him succeed in Game 2, when he pitched a complete game. The Blue Jays are excellent at making contact, putting the ball in play. That’s less of a problem when a pitcher’s strength lies not in a ton of strikeouts, but in bad contact.
The second is the offense. Yes, Shohei Ohtani had a historic Game 3. But of the usual starters, the top two batting averages are the Hernándezes (Hernándi?), Teoscar (.286) and Kiké (.273).
Just for contrast, here are the hitters in the Blue Jays lineup with postseason batting averages higher than Teoscar Hernández’s:
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — .415
Ernie Clement — .391
Addison Barger — .346
Bo Bichette — .313
Nathan Lukes — .309
For the Blue Jays, the path to glory has two doors. Win tonight with Kevin Gausman on the mound, or do it tomorrow with … well, we don’t know yet. Game 7s tend to be all-hands-on-deck affairs.
Some good news for Toronto: It should have George Springer back for games 6 and 7. Jays manager John Schneider said Springer could have been available to pinch hit if needed in Game 5, and the extra day of rest between games should be enough to get him back into the lineup.
Yamamoto. Gausman. 8 p.m. ET on Fox (or stream on Fubo — you can try it for free here). Let’s go.
More Game 6: Katie Woo has a preview here with all the storylines we’ll be watching for.
Ken’s Notebook: Notes from the World Series
On four Blue Jays:
- Davis Schneider’s stance(s) — Most hitters are rather particular about their stances. Schneider is not most hitters. He likes to mimic hitters he admires, and his most recent fascination was the Dodgers’ Will Smith. Schneider says imitating other hitters gets his mind off his own swing, and his hands and body still get to the right spots. Earlier this season, he mimicked Bobby Witt Jr. and Giancarlo Stanton, and hit two home runs in Colorado as Aaron Judge. Blue Jays hitters will encourage him from the bench as if he is the hitter he is imitating, yelling, “Here we go, Stanton!” or, “Let’s go Will!”
- Ernie Clement’s exit velo — His eighth-inning single in Game 5 was his hardest-hit base hit of the postseason, at 103.7 mph. Clement is batting .391 overall, but his average exit velocity of his 25 hits is just 86.4 mph. That’s more than 8 mph below the average on all hits in the regular season, which was 94.5 mph. Clement clearly is benefiting from batted-ball luck, but his contact ability is making some of that luck, too.
- Bo Bichette’s clutch hits — Par for the course that he has driven in a run in each of the last three games. Bichette led the majors during the regular season with a .381 batting average with runners in scoring position, and he’s 2-for-2 in the postseason. “In a way he’s been our heart and soul on the offensive side all year,” Clement said. “To have almost 100 RBIs and not hit 20 homers, I don’t think that happens very often.” (Bichette had 18 homers and 94 RBIs.)
- Louis Varland, two-sport athlete — No wonder he’s such a bulldog: Varland was a wrestler at North St. Paul High School in Minnesota, and still holds the school’s record for matches won, even though he missed his sophomore year with a knee injury. Coming out of high school, he contacted every college in the Northern Sun Conference but Concordia-St. Paul, where his older brother, Gus, already was pitching. Louis wanted to compete against Gus, but it turned out Concordia-St. Paul was his only Division II offer. The other schools interested in him were all Division III.
Plus a Dodgers note:
- Alex Call’s upgrade — The Dodgers acquired him at the deadline from the Washington Nationals for two minor-league pitchers. Call still can’t believe his good fortune, going from a last-place team to the defending World Series champions. “I have to be the big winner of the trade deadline,” he says. “They’ve got the best roster ever assembled. And they wanted me.”
Youth: Nats hire Butera as manager
One more managerial vacancy has been filled. The Washington Nationals have hired Blake Butera — no relation to Sal or Drew — and at 33 years of age, he’s the youngest MLB manager since Frank Quilici, who was a slightly younger 33 when he took over the Twins job in July 1972. (Recognize that name? He was our Baseball Card of the Week back in August.)
Butera previously worked as the Tampa Bay Rays’ director of player development. He had been in the Rays system since he was drafted in 2015, but his playing career didn’t last very long. By 2018, he was the youngest manager in the minor leagues, at the helm of the short-season Hudson Valley Renegades (which are now the High-A affiliate of the New York Yankees).
Butera is the first Washington manager hired by new president of baseball operations Paul Toboni, who was hired in late September. The Nats haven’t had a winning record since winning the World Series in 2019, and a rebuild that appeared to be emerging from rock bottom took a step back last year, as the team won just 66 games (after winning 71 each of the previous two).
With the Nationals off the board, the Padres, Braves and Rockies are the three teams yet to hire a manager for next season.
Read This: Speaking of The National(s)
This is my favorite non-baseball baseball story of the year.
Matt Berninger is the lead singer of The National. If you aren’t familiar with The National, congratulations on your healthy relationships, regular exercise routine and generally positive outlook on life. They’re one of my favorite bands.
Brendan Quinn has a great story on Berninger here, centering on a writing practice that grew out of a bout with writer’s block. Berninger finally had an idea, but was stuck on an airplane with no notebook and a dead phone. So he reached into his bag and pulled out a baseball he and the band had kept on them — what better way to break up the monotony of the tour life?
Berninger scribbled a few lines on the ball and decided he liked the feel of it. In the ensuing years, he’s bought “dozens upon dozens of baseballs” off eBay and uses them as lyric scratch pads.
It’s a cool insight into the writing process of one of the best. (And it’s technically a baseball story.)
Handshakes and High Fives
Big scandal in the player agent world: Jim Murray, most recently of WME Sports — who represents Ian Happ, Adam Ottavino and Anthony Volpe, among others — has been banned for four years and fined $100,000 by the MLBPA for “double dealing” during negotiations between the union and the league around the shortened 2020 season.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts once famously stole a base that helped the 2004 Red Sox come back from a 3-0 deficit in the ALCS. Those days … are over.
Richard Deitsch has a great column here on Sean McDonough, who called the World Series — including Joe Carter’s walk-off to win it — the last time the Blue Jays were in the Fall Classic.
Every story I read about new San Francisco manager Tony Vitello makes me more interested to see what the 2026 Giants are going to do. Unprecedented success? Absolute trainwreck? I have no idea, but I’m very excited to see it. He was officially introduced yesterday, putting on a professional uniform for the first time.
Most-clicked yesterday: The Toronto Star piece on Davis Schneider’s backstory.
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