The Toronto Blue Jays advanced to 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 on their home field by taking a winner-take-all Game 7, 4-3, to make the franchise’s first World Series berth since 1993 and set up a matchup 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 from Mariners pitcher Eduard Bazardo 381 feet to the left-center field stands for a lead that would not be relinquished.
Because Toronto finished with a better regular-season record, it will have home-field advantage for the World Series, starting with hosting Game 1 on Friday and Game 2 on Saturday.
The Dodgers won two of the three games the teams played this season in early August.
“It takes so much work and perseverance to get to this point, and I love this entire group,” Blue Jays manager John Schneider said postgame. “It’s so fitting —bottom of our order gets it done again. There’s probably no other person on planet Earth that I want up other than George Springer and his October magic.”
Only eight players on Toronto’s 40-man roster were alive when the team last made the World Series in 1993, when it won a second consecutive title. The championships were followed by 21 consecutive seasons without so much as a playoff berth.
Including their postseason return in 2015, the club has made the playoffs five of the last 10 years but never broken through to win the pennant until this season, when it won 94 games — a 20-win improvement over 2024 — under manager John Schneider.
They began the postseason by beating the New York Yankees in the divisional series, then opened the ALCS by immediately falling into an 0-2 hole. Wins in Seattle evened the series, as did another in Game 6, in which Toronto staved off elimination thanks to Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s sixth home run of the postseason, a franchise record.
The Blue Jays are the first team since the 1996 Yankees to lose the first two games at home of a best-of-seven series, only to ultimately win the series.
