TORONTO — Well, seven of those would have made for a very dull World Series.
Returning to the scene of their 2025 triumph, the Dodgers got two-run home runs from Freddie Freeman and Teoscar Hernandez in the first three innings and cruised to a 14-2 victory over the Toronto Blue Jays on Monday night in the first game of their three-game, lower-stakes rematch.
The game drew a raucous crowd of 40,991 to Rogers Centre, hoping to relitigate the 2025 World Series outcome. The polite Canadian fans held a grudge against nearly every Dodger, booing loudly as the starting lineup was announced. Even Kyle Tucker, who wasn’t part of last year’s World Series, got the treatment from Jays fans who felt jilted (again) when he signed with the Dodgers and not the Blue Jays as a free agent.
Only Hernandez, a fan favorite during his days in Toronto, was exempt from the fans’ airing of grievances. They might have regretted going soft on Hernandez when he took Jays starter Max Scherzer deep in the first inning.
Scherzer struggled through just two innings. Like Jays fans after Game 7, he felt ill – in his case, apparently from a flu bug that has affected some of his teammates as well.
Josh Fleming wasn’t party to Canada’s disappointment last year. He didn’t pitch in the majors at all, spending the season in Japan. Fleming replaced Scherzer and gave up Freeman’s two-run home run, a 438-foot drive that also threatened to leave the country.
The Dodgers piled on from there, adding a single run in the fourth inning without a hit (a hit batter, two walks and a sacrifice fly) and another in the fifth on three hits and a run-scoring double play.
Some of the loudest boos before the game were reserved for Dodgers starting pitcher Justin Wrobleski. The left-hander precipitated a benches-clearing incident during Game 7 last year when he hit Andres Gimenez with a pitch and confronted him for complaining when he seemed to be asking for it. Jays fans took Gimenez’s side.
Wrobleski gave the fans nothing to cheer about when he took the mound on Monday. The Jays pushed across a first-inning run on a leadoff walk, a Kazuma Okamoto double and a bloop RBI single by Ernie Clement. But Wrobleski didn’t allow another hit in his five innings and only three more baserunners (two walks and a third strike passed ball by Dalton Rushing).
Shohei Ohtani continues to be atop the Toronto hit list for not being on a plane here more than two years ago. He homered in the sixth inning, his third in the past four games. Rushing went deep in the seventh and again in the eighth, completing a four-hit game and packing three home runs into rare consecutive starts Sunday and Monday.
The Dodgers have hit 14 home runs in the first four games of this road trip.
The hits of all kinds kept coming Monday. Freeman added an RBI double to his homer and Andy Pages had yet another multi-hit game, going 2 for 4 with a two-run double. He has multiple hits in six of his past seven games. Hernandez helped himself to a four-RBI night, adding a two-run single to his home run.
The Jays fans finally got a small – really small – measure of revenge when Game 7 hero Miguel Rojas pitched the ninth for the Dodgers and gave up a run.
More to come on this story.