TORONTO — After miles of home runs and miles per hour of velocity, the Dodgers will play Game 7 of the World Series thanks to two inches. 

A close but straightforward game turned into a 3–1 thriller in Game 6 when the bottom of the ninth went spooky on Halloween night. Roki Sasaki, trying to get six outs to preserve a two-run lead, hit the Blue Jays’ Alejandro Kirk on an 0–2 pitch to open the ninth. Then, on a 2–2 count, Addison Barger lined a fastball to the center field wall—where it lodged. Center fielder Justin Dean threw up his hands and the umpires agreed: ground-rule double. If the ball had landed anywhere else, it would have been a one-run game. Instead, the runners stood at second and third with one out and Andrés Giménez at the plate. Then another inch: Clement lined a ball to left field, where Kiké Hernández charged it. He fired to second base, where Miguel Rojas caught it with his foot on the bag to double off Barger by a split second. If Hernández had misplayed it, the World Series might have been over. Instead, the game was. 

For most of the night, the question was whether the lineup could sort itself out. The Dodgers had tried everything they could think of, so finally, they decided to remind Mookie Betts who he is. He is not a slugger who swings out of his spikes every time up trying to put the ball in the seats. He is not the creaky 33-year-old who needs to cheat to get to a fastball. And he is not the only person on this team who has to play better. 

“Focus on one game,” was manager Dave Roberts’s message. “Be good for one game. Go out there and compete.”

So when Betts, after getting beaten on two straight fastballs up in the third inning of a win-or-go-home World Series Game 6, lined the third one to left field to drive home the go-ahead runs and key a 3–1 win over the Blue Jays to force Game 7, the happiest person at the Rogers Centre was surely the shortstop, who howled his relief and banged at his thighs. But No. 2 might have been his skipper, who shouted and pointed at Betts. 

Roberts had tried to put a charge into Betts by publicly challenging him. The manager had tried to reassure him, both to the media and behind closed doors, by insisting that he would be fine. He had dropped him down in the lineup, from No. 2 to No. 3 and then finally, on Friday, to No. 4. 

Betts had left 24 men on base this postseason, and he was hitting .132 since the beginning of the National League Championship Series. “I’ve just been terrible,” he lamented after yet another 0-for-4 in Game 5. He added, “I wish it were from lack of effort. But it’s not. I mean, that’s all I can say.”

Perhaps that effort was the problem. Maybe he needed to remember that he wasn’t the only one scuffling—the Dodgers as a group entered the night hitting .201 in the World Series—and therefore he wasn’t the only one responsible for fixing it. So there was reason to believe that a new slot in the batting order might help. He has spent most of his career in the two-hole, but perhaps the move to the cleanup spot, where there were more run opportunities, would unlock his ability to stay short to the ball and use the whole field: Over his October career, he has hit .313 with runners in scoring position and .241 without. 

He took batting practice on Thursday’s workout day, and both he and the hitting coaches believed he’d found something. But Betts is such a tinkerer with his swing that he often finds something and loses it within a few minutes. 

“They’re going to make good pitches,” Roberts said before Game 6. “He’s going to go out there and compete. But I think that where his swing is at mechanically is as good as it’s been in a week, so I really feel good about that.”

Go out there and compete is what Roberts has been practically begging his silent offense to do all series. He openly covets his opponents’ at-bats. “You clearly see those guys finding ways to get hits, move the baseball forward, and we're not doing a good job of it,” he said after rookie right-hander Trey Yesavage held the Dodgers to one run in Game 5, while Toronto exploded for six. “I thought Yesavage was good tonight mixing his fastball, slider, and the split. But you still have to use the whole field and take what they give you, and if they’re not going to allow for slug, then you've got to be able to kind of redirect and club down to take competitive at-bats, and you see, whether it’s [Addison] Barger or [Bo] Bichette, those guys are doing it.”

For Halloween, to Roberts’s delight, the Dodgers went as the Blue Jays. Game 6 featured a rematch of Game 2, which started as a pitcher’s duel and ended in history. Kevin Gausman matched Yoshinobu Yamamoto until the seventh inning, at which point Gausman made a pair of mistakes—two fastballs that caught too much of the plate and that Will Smith and Max Muncy whacked for homers—and Yamamoto seemed only to get stronger. He completed his second straight game, the first time anyone has done that in the postseason since 2001. 

Again they looked close to even on Friday. Barger doubled to lead off the third and George Springer, returning from an oblique injury that cost him two games and visibly wincing with every swing, singled to drive in a run. 

Meanwhile, Gausman struck out six of the first seven hitters he faced. But the eighth was Tommy Edman, who doubled, and Gausman intentionally walked Shohei Ohtani, the fifth time the Blue Jays have removed the bat from his hands this series. The strategy worked the first four times, but on Friday, Will Smith lofted a double down the left field line to bring home the Dodgers’ first run. The hit marked their first with a runner in scoring position since Game 3. Freddie Freeman walked to load the bases, and then the beleaguered Betts finally barreled up that fastball. 

The sequence marked the Dodgers’ first hit with a runner in scoring position since Game 3, and their first multi-run inning since Game 4 of the NLCS. They loaded the bases again with two outs in the eighth, but failed to cash in; still, the third-inning rally held up, even as Yamamoto for the first time in three weeks went only six innings. The leaky bullpen held the lead at two, where it remained. 

The Dodgers could not have forced Game 7 without Betts. They probably can’t win it without him, either. 

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Dodgers Extend World Series in a Game 6 Win Decided by Inches.

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