The Toronto Blue Jays advance to the World Series and will face the Los Angeles Dodgers
The Toronto Blue Jays qualified for the World Series on Monday by defeating the Seattle Mariners and winning the American League pennant.
The Blue Jays survived the American League Championship Series at home by winning a winner-take-all game 7, 4-3, to clinch the franchise’s first World Series berth since 1993 and set up a game against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The pivotal moment came in the bottom of the seventh inning with Toronto trailing 3-1. With runners on second and third base with one out, George Springer crushed a sinker off Mariners pitcher Brian Waugh 381 feet to left-center field to establish a lead that would not be relinquished.
Because Toronto finished the regular season with a better record, it will have home-field advantage in the World Series, starting with hosting Game 1 on Friday and Game 2 on Saturday.
The Dodgers have won two of the three games the teams have played this season in early August.
“It takes a lot of work and perseverance to get to this point, and I love this whole group,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said after the game. “It’s very fitting – the bottom of our request is that we do it again. There’s probably no one else on planet Earth I’d want other than George Springer and his magic in October.”
Only eight players on Toronto’s 40-man roster were alive when the team last reached the World Series in 1993, when it won its second straight title. The championships were followed by 21 consecutive seasons without a playoff berth.
Including their postseason comeback in 2015, the club has made the playoffs five times in the past 10 years, but had never managed to win the pennant until this season, when it won 94 games — a 20-win improvement from 2024 — under coach John Schneider.
They started the postseason by beating the New York Yankees in the Division Series, then opened the ALCS by immediately falling into an 0-2 hole. The wins in Seattle evened the series, as in Game 6, where Toronto avoided elimination thanks to Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s sixth home run in the postseason, a franchise record.
The Blue Jays are the first team since the 1996 Yankees to lose the first two home games of a best-of-seven series, only to win the series in the end.