Baseball's richest team on brink of elimination

Unfathomable. Unwatchable. Unbearable. Undone.

- BILL PLASCHKE

BLUE JAYS rookie Trey Yesavage turned in a record-setting performance with 12 strikeouts.

The richest team in baseball is splitting apart at the seams, tearing under stress, fraying beyond recognition, collecting on the floor of the 2025 baseball season in heaping piles of disappointment.

Soon, the supposedly greatest collection of players in Dodgers history could be history.

Soon, in another country and seemingly in another reality, the Dodgers could lose the World Series to the Toronto Blue Jays, a hearty band of overachievers who took a three-games-to-two lead Wednesday with a workmanlike 6-1 Game 5 victory at Dodger Stadium.

The series now moves to Toronto's Rogers Centre for the final two games, if necessary, beginning Friday, and the former heavy favorites are now the decided underdogs. The Dodgers not only have to win both games at the American League's toughest home field, but they will have to do so against a seemingly destined and strongly bonded franchise attempting to win its first title in 32 years.

The Blue Jays are the Glue Jays.

The Dodgers are in pieces.

Even with the seemingly unhit table Yoshinobu Yamamoto attempting to pitch his third consecutive complete playoff game in Game 6 for the Dodgers, their task is tall.

"Right now, we're at elimination, and we've got to kind of wipe the slate clean and find a way to win Game 6 and pick up the pieces and see where we're at," said Dodger manager Dave Roberts.

We're talking a lot of pieces.

TWO-WAY STAR Shohei Ohtani strikes out in the third inning of L.A.'s 6-1 loss to Toronto in Game 5 of the World Series at Dodger Stadium. He was one of six Dodgers to go hitless.