TORONTO — Addison Barger wouldn’t say he was feeling restless, per se, but when the Toronto Blue Jays utility man was waiting to find out just when he’d be entering Game 1 of the World Series, it was, as he describes it, “stressful.”
On Friday night, Barger wasn’t in the starting lineup since Los Angeles Dodgers ace Blake Snell is a lefty, so the 25-year-old Barger spent more than two hours of the game warming up with a pitching machine while watching the game on TV. “You have to be mentally locked into the game, knowing that any moment you can be in there,” Barger explained.
Well, his moment came in the sixth inning, and what a momentous, historic one Barger turned it into.
The stage sure was set: Earlier in the inning, the Blue Jays had taken a 5-2 lead, there was just one out and the deck was loaded.
Barger strode up to the plate and worked a 2-1 count, and then he took the fourth pitch he ever saw in the World Series and he launched it over the centre field wall at the Rogers Centre, authoring the first-ever pinch-hit grand slam in World Series history while more than 44,000 fans lost their minds.
“I was losing my mind too,” a grinning Barger said, standing in the clubhouse after a resounding 11-4 win over the Dodgers to open the World Series, the first win on this stage for the Blue Jays in more than three decades. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is crazy.’”
It sure was crazy, because Barger did it after coming off the bench, while pinch-hitting. “I mean it’s hands-down one of the hardest things to do in baseball,” Nathan Lukes said. “What he did was special.”
Barger sent an 84.5 mph slider 413 feet, with a 106.2 exit velocity. L.A. had brought in its second reliever of the night, Anthony Banda, since Barger usually has a tougher time against southpaws, and so he didn’t have designs on doing what he did.
“Obviously they brought in the lefty for me, and I was just trying to put the ball in play, get a run home, hopefully,” Barger said. “That was kind of my only goal and it ended up working out better than that.”
Indeed it did. Toronto had a three-run lead before Barger’s Fall Classic debut, but he blew the game wide open in what was a very lucrative sixth inning for the Blue Jays: Nine runs in all, the most scored in a single inning at the World Series since 1968.
Four of those runs came off the bat of a guy who was a Blue Jays sixth-round pick in 2018, who made his MLB debut six years after that in 2024, and who’s making his playoff debut.
Consider this, too: “He slept on my couch last night,” said Davis Schneider, who Barger replaced in the lineup in the sixth. “He’s built for the moment. He goes up with a plan every single time. It couldn’t happen to a better dude.”
Myles Straw has been in the league eight years, and called Barger “one of the funniest guys I’ve ever played with,” though Straw wasn’t getting into details of exactly what makes Barger hilarious.
“I mean I don’t want to say anything to the public, but it’s funny the way he thinks about the game and how he plays. It’s interesting. But that’s what makes him who he is and that’s why we all love him. Because there’s no one else like him, I promise you that,” Straw said. “Yeah, he’s got some loose screws for sure.”
Those loose screws sure seem to be coming in handy so far on the biggest stage in baseball, and against the defending champion Dodgers. Barger hit a single in his final at-bat of the night to move to a perfect 2-0 in the World Series.
His grand slam was the punctuation mark on a game that was emblematic of how the Blue Jays got here, with big performances up and down the lineup. Before the sixth, the Blue Jays hadn’t led this game. By the end of the inning they led by nine runs, and everybody had pitched in. Some did more than once.
The sixth went like so: Bo Bichette walked. Alejandro Kirk singled. Daulton Varsho was hit by a pitch to load the bases. The Dodgers replaced Snell with reliever Emmet Sheehan. Ernie Clement hit an RBI single. Lukes walked to score another. Andres Gimenez singled to score Varsho. George Springer grounded into a force out at home. L.A. brought in Banda, and Barger cleared the bases to make it 9-2.
Before the sixth inning was over, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. singled and Kirk hit a two-run shot to make it 11-2 Toronto, and the crowd hit an absolute boil.
“It was just madness,” Barger said, of the atmosphere.
If you ask Bichette, the all-star shortstop who made his return to the field (at second base) after an agonizing seven weeks on the shelf due to injury, it was more than madness when Barger hit that grand slam.
“That was something I never felt before in my entire career,” Bichette said. “I felt like I left my body and I was on the field with him.”
With his first swing of the World Series, Barger fouled off a sinker. With his second, he went yard to blow open the game against the reigning champions and ensure a resounding Game 1 victory. Barger didn’t have to think about whether he could’ve scripted a better World Series debut for himself.
“No, not really,” he said, with a laugh. “I think that’s probably as good as it gets.”
All the stress that led up to that moment, then, was no doubt worth it.
— With files from Ben Nicholson-Smith and David Singh
from Sportsnet.ca https://ift.tt/sIbD12o
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