DUNEDIN, Fla. — In the days, in the weeks, and especially in the moments after Game 7, the Toronto Blue Jays would have had a hard time imagining that life would ever again feel this normal.
Not after that Game 7: Dodgers 5, Blue Jays 4, in a World Series classic that would deliver so much ecstasy for one of those teams and so much agony for the other.
So John Schneider, the manager of the Blue Jays, spent his offseason waking up in the middle of the night, dreaming that he was still moving pieces around that Game 7 chessboard on Nov. 1.
Mark Shapiro, the team president and CEO, couldn’t look at the field inside Rogers Centre for weeks.
Myles Straw, who spent the last three innings in left field, trudged back to his hotel room, overlooking the stadium, and couldn’t stop staring at the remnants of the Dodgers’ on-field celebration — mulling what might have been.
Davis Schneider, still stewing over failing to drive in an insurance run in the eighth inning, left the stadium, packed up his car, then drove all night, from Toronto back home to New Jersey, to escape the memories.
Then there was Ernie Clement, whose three hits that night were his 28th, 29th and 30th of a career-changing postseason. Yes, he has now turned the page on the heartbreak of Game 7, he said, because page-turning “is baseball players’ superpower.” But for months, one thought sustained him through the long baseball winter.
“I couldn’t wait,” he said, “for 2026.”
So what do you know, here it is: The Blue Jays are back, for the first chapter of life after Game 7. The palm trees sway in the Dunedin gales. The first few box scores of a new spring are filled with names like Kasevich (Josh) and Pinango (Yohendrick).
Bo Bichette doesn’t work here anymore — but Kazuma Okamoto does. It’s been way too quiet in the corner of the clubhouse that was once energetically filled by Max Scherzer, the pitcher who started Game 7, because he didn’t agree to a deal to return until late this week. And Isiah Kiner-Falefa, the man who came within inches of scoring the run that would have won the World Series for the Jays, does his reminiscing about that moment in Red Sox camp now.
Life moves on. Time moves on. Baseball moves on. But the journey ahead is everything. The magic-carpet ride can’t possibly be the same. Still, the vision that fuels these Blue Jays is to power along, right back to the same place, and then …
Make history.
What the historians tell us
Can the Blue Jays channel the 2014-15 Royals? Here, Kansas City celebrates after winning it all in 2015. (Elsa / Getty Images)
In the past 65 seasons, just one team has done what these 2026 Blue Jays dream of doing: after losing Game 7 of the World Series one year, return and win the World Series the next year.
Eric Hosmer’s 2014-15 Kansas City Royals were that team. Two men in this camp remember that Royals title vividly. We’ll hear their stories — and get their perspective — shortly.
To find the other teams that have performed this special trick, however, you have to travel back in time to when the sport was so different, it doesn’t offer us much perspective about what is possible now. These are the only six teams in history to lose a World Series Game 7, then win the next World Series:
2014-15 — Royals
1960-61 — Yankees
1957-58 — Yankees
1955-56 — Yankees
1934-35 — Tigers
1926-27 — Yankees
So yes, this happens. But look at that list and tell us it’s likely to happen again in 2026. Mickey Mantle knew what it felt like. Babe Ruth knew what it felt like. Goose Goslin knew what it felt like. But that was long before postseason baseball turned into a four-round, month-long, October-meets-November marathon.
That means, then, that the only realistic source of inspiration for a team like these Blue Jays is those 2015 Royals. But when we laid out that history lesson for the president of the Jays, he didn’t seem too inspired by our exhaustive research.
“I think, in my experience, anything like that is just not replicable,” Shapiro said. “You’ve got to have your own journey and your own path back. Plus, the Royals weren’t in the AL East, you know? And there’s just something so uniquely tough about being in the AL East.
“So I think the most important thing for us is to not focus on ‘getting back.’ It’s just a focus on step one, which is how do we get back to the playoffs? And then (if that happens), I think we will be well prepared to handle any of that.”
OK, what if we look just at teams like his, in the three decades of the wild-card era? If we dig into the eight previous teams in that era whose season ended in a loss in World Series Game 7, there is bad news and good news for the Jays.
| YEAR | TEAM | FOLLOWING YEAR |
|---|---|---|
|
2019 |
Astros |
Lost ALCS |
|
2017 |
Dodgers |
Lost World Series |
|
2016 |
Indians |
Lost ALDS |
|
2014 |
Royals |
Won World Series |
|
2011 |
Rangers |
Lost Wild Card Game |
|
2002 |
Giants |
Lost NLDS |
|
2001 |
Yankees |
Lost ALDS |
|
1997 |
Indians |
Lost ALCS |
The bad news is that only two of them made it back to the World Series the next year: the 2015 Royals and the 2018 Dodgers (who lost in five games to Boston).
The good news, though, is that all of those eight teams did at least ride that wave well enough to return to the postseason the next year. But when we served up that good news to Shapiro, he shook his head as if to brush away any of those molecules of encouragement.
“I wonder,” he said, “how many of those teams were in the AL East.”
All right, since he asked … that would be only one of them: Mariano Rivera’s 2001-02 Yankees. They lost the Luis Gonzalez Game in the 2001 World Series, then absorbed a first-round exit against the Angels the next year in the ALDS. OK then.
“Small sample size to compare to!” Shapiro said, correctly.
The game never ends down on Memory Lane
“I’ll probably think about starting Game 6, with a chance to win a championship, for the rest of my life,” Kevin Gausman said. (Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)
The only way to move forward is to come to grips with the past. We’re not talking about baseball when we say that. We’re talking about life. So for a moment, let’s not look at World Series Game 7 as a sporting event. Let’s look at what it really was, for the men who played it:
A life event.
KEVIN GAUSMAN, GAME 6 STARTING PITCHER: “I’ve never been in a room full of grown men who were all crying. But it was just heartbreaking, to be honest, to be that close, to feel like we played better. You know, that might sound bad, to say that, but we just felt like we did. We played better than them.”
Gausman asked us to check the stats from last year’s World Series to prove he was right. So we did. We found that the Blue Jays outscored the Dodgers (34-26) and outhit them (75-53) in the World Series. The Jays’ pitchers had more strikeouts than the Dodgers’ pitchers (72-64) and a better ERA (3.21 to 3.95). He rested his case. Now back to that mournful Game 7 clubhouse.
After many minutes of silence and tears, Gausman stood up to talk to his friends in that locker room. George Springer had spoken. The manager had said a few words. Now, it was the ace’s turn. Here is what he remembers telling the best team he’d ever played on:
“I don’t really care what it says (in the record books). I know we lost, but to me, we won. We were the better team. Obviously, we didn’t get a parade, but we should be super proud of what we did. Remember, it took them eight games to beat us, because we played 18 innings in one of those games.”
For weeks afterward, Gausman wrestled with the memory of Game 6, which he started with the Jays one win away from a title. Every time he closed his eyes, the replay machine in his brain kept streaming the fateful two-out, two-strike, two-run, tie-breaking single he allowed to Mookie Betts in the third inning.
“I’ll probably think about starting Game 6, with a chance to win a championship, for the rest of my life. … I mean, it was one pitch. One pitch. That base hit to Mookie that scored two. I kept thinking: What if I’d thrown a split there?”
JOHN SCHNEIDER, MANAGER: “There were numerous nights, probably in November, where I would wake up, kind of having a dream of Game 7 — and, really, trying to stay asleep, hoping this time it would have a different outcome. And it never did.
“I was just thinking about moves I made. I remember one night, I woke up in the middle of the night, and I asked my wife, ‘Hey, who did I pinch run for first in Game 6?’ And she’s like, ‘Go to bed.’ Or another time, I said, ‘What inning did Max come out of Game 7? Was it the fifth? Was it the sixth? When did Louis (Varland) come in?’ You know, when you’re in it, you just do it. But later, things kind of get lost in the shuffle a little bit.
“I hate going back to Game 7, because there were so many twists, turns, bounces. … But just a roller coaster of emotions. And each day or week just brought a little bit of that back. So I haven’t even watched Game 7 back yet. I mean, I’ve watched the first four innings, just to kind of see the broadcast feed of it, because it’s so different than what you see in the dugout and what you feel in the dugout. But that was as far as we got.”
MARK SHAPIRO, BLUE JAYS PRESIDENT: “When the last out happened, I literally hugged my son, hugged my daughter, turned my back to the field, and I didn’t look at the field again for like, weeks. I went back to my office, and I didn’t go out on the field. I didn’t look at the field. I didn’t watch any postseason highlights. I remember (later) seeing some highlight of the Dodgers celebrating on the stage. And I was like, damn, I never saw that. I haven’t seen that, and it’s been, like, three weeks (since it happened).”
Now imagine how hard it was to go to work every day in the same building where that game took place — Rogers Centre — and never even once look at the field where it all happened. But he couldn’t do it, Shapiro said. It was all about the mindset.
“It was just the part of my brain that said, OK, it’s over. I need to move forward. It’s time. I’m not going to dwell on anything I can’t control. I’m going to get back to what I CAN control.”
VLADIMIR GUERRERO JR., THE MAN WHO STIRS THE DRINK: “If you see — you watch the video — I am the last one to leave the dugout,” Guerrero told The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal this spring, in an interview for Fox Sports. “So I leave the dugout like that — the last one — because I want to face reality. I don’t want to see it on video. I don’t want to be, oh, my family asks me about it. I just want to feel the moment and feel that I lose.
“I just want to feel that. Because, in my mind, I just (think), OK, we lose, but we did everything. … I am proud of this team. Because we do everything. We do everything to win the World Series. But it is baseball, man. Sometimes you don’t understand baseball. But you got to understand that God blessed us and God blessed everybody. And, when He say the time is going to come, when it comes, it is going to come.”
MYLES STRAW, LEFT FIELDER: From his place in left field, Straw had watched Will Smith’s game-winning 11th-inning homer soar right over him, into the stands, into the history books. In his inner DVR, it’s still soaring.
“It’s still in my head. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.”
But later, Straw returned to his hotel and couldn’t make himself do what Shapiro did that night.
“It’s crazy. I was actually kind of the opposite (of Shapiro). I was staying in the hotel in the Rogers Centre throughout the World Series. And I remember, after the game, just looking out there and seeing all the beer cans, just seeing the field destroyed after their celebration … and being like, ‘Man, that could have been us’ — and just having a little fire to get back.”
Get back to where you once belonged
Kazuma Okamoto, signed to a four-year, $60 million contract, is among the key offseason additions. (Mark Taylor / Getty Images)
The road back to a place never takes the same Waze route. And it almost never happens with the same group of people. So the Blue Jays approached this offseason knowing that change was good — and changing faces was necessary.
In through the door have marched four important free-agent additions: Swing-and-miss machine Dylan Cease joins the rotation. Rubber-armed submarine-baller Tyler Rogers adds a new look to the bullpen. Okamoto has journeyed from the Yomiuri Giants to hold down third base in Toronto. And Cody Ponce is an intriguing rotation lottery ticket after a dominating year in Korea.
But the three most prominent missing faces this spring — Bichette, Chris Bassitt and (until this weekend) Scherzer — were men with an oversized presence. Even factoring in Scherzer’s mid-spring return, it will be different. But, according to the people who lead this team, different isn’t all bad.
“I’ve thought about this a lot,” Schneider said. “And I would be lying if I said, when you’re in the aftermath of Game 7 — the hours after, the days after — the tendency is (not) to say, hey, let’s run it back. … But I think there’s something to be said about bringing in different skill sets, different personalities.
“Dylan Cease has been great. Cody Ponce being a little bit eccentric, if you will, a little bit different, I think has been good. Tyler Rogers, who is just steady Eddie, has been good. Okamoto is a whole different animal, with media and with expectations and the transition into this league. And I think that’s good.
“It’s our way of saying that, hey, we’re not done getting better. We’re not done trying. We’re not resting on last year. I think it’s been really good for everyone here.”
The free agents who signed with this team have talked about how drawn they were to both the talent around them and the clear closeness of these players. And the teammates who returned have quickly latched onto the upside of re-stirring a near-perfect sauce.
“You can fall into a thing of like, all right, we need to be like last year,” Clement said. “I don’t think that’s the case. I think we’re going to create our own identity, and we’re going to be really, really good.”
But when we asked Shapiro if that Game 7 defeat had shaped the building of this team, he replied: “I don’t know that it did.”
“There were things we wanted to make sure we doubled down on,” he said. “The attributes that were special, that are sustainable — like being good teammates, and committing to paying attention to detail, and doing things the right way, and caring deeply about each other, and being resilient and strong and being able to handle the journey.
“But you also just can’t expect exactly the same thing to happen with exactly the same group of guys, right? So particularly in the pitching area, we had to continue to try to find ways to get better, to not accept that everything was just going to be the same.”
The pain of Game 7, 2.0
“I went home, went to bed, got up and went back to work,” Mark Shapiro said of the Game 7 aftermath. “I did not spend a lot of time reflecting. It wasn’t avoidance. But I had prepared myself for the idea that this (outcome) is not going to define me. (Vaughn Ridley / Getty Images)
Who understands Life after Game 7 better than Shapiro?
He hasn’t merely lost one Game 7 when his team was two outs from glory. He now has lost two of them — this game plus World Series Game 7, 1997, when he was a rising star in the Cleveland front office. (Google “Jose Mesa” if you want more details on that one.)
So in the hours before this Game 7, Shapiro knew he had to prepare himself — for everything.
How would he handle winning — finally winning? He thought deeply about that question.
“Is my life more meaningful if we win this game?” he asked himself, “because I have to make sure I don’t act like that, because people will attach a different level of significance around me. So I need to make sure.”
But what if this game had spun the other way? Shapiro reflected even more intensely on that question.
“I said: If we lose this game, am I a worse father?” he ruminated. “Am I a worse leader? Is my career less meaningful? I really did spend a lot of time on that, thinking: Hey, this is going to all be over in nine innings, in a matter of hours. And the reality of this business is, there’s a randomness to outcomes. I didn’t realize it would be (decided by) inches, and multiple times. But there’s a randomness to outcomes, right? So how are you going to handle that?”
Eleven innings later, when the clock had ticked past midnight and Betts was turning the double play that would end this dream, Shapiro did what he thought a true leader needed to do in that moment.
He hugged the people he loved. He went to the clubhouse and embraced these men who had gotten his team to this place. And then …
“I went home, went to bed, got up and went back to work,” Shapiro said. “I did not spend a lot of time reflecting. It wasn’t avoidance. But I had prepared myself for the idea that this is not going to define me.
“I know that the only place for me to find solace, and the only place where I ultimately find fulfillment — and this is genuine — is the pursuit and in the process,” he went on. “And I know I have to model that as a leader for this organization. So I got back to the process, and got back to the pursuit of the only thing I know that provides meaning, purpose and the ability to move forward, rather than sit there and feel sorry for ourselves because of the randomness of a couple of outcomes.”
We can be Royal
In our baseball travels, we’re used to the comparisons. We hear teams talk about trying to do things like the Dodgers. We’ll hear teams joke that nobody is going to compare them to the 1927 Yankees. But you know what we don’t hear much?
Who the heck ever talks about re-enacting the unique formula that drove the 2015 Royals all the way to the parade floats?
Well, here’s one guy who does: the manager of the 2026 Blue Jays.
“You know who you should go talk to,” Schneider told us. “Justin Lehr, our director of pitching. He was part of those teams in Kansas City in 2014 and 2015.”
Schneider knew that because he’s been picking the brains of everyone he could think of who could advise him on ways to avoid the dreaded World Series hangover. So why not pick the brain of someone who has a direct link from his team to the last team to lose a World Series Game 7 one year, then win it all the next?
“Yeah, John talked to me the other day,” said Lehr, who was a scout for those Royals World Series teams and is now a key cog in the Jays’ pitching-development program. “And he said something that got me thinking. I’ve actually been thinking about it since the World Series ended.
“Just thinking about how in 2014, (Madison) Bumgarner coming into that (Game 7) in relief, on short rest, and throwing those five innings. And then last year, about (Yoshinobu) Yamamoto coming in and doing what he did in relief. Very similar story, right?”
Right. But can the rest of this Royals/Jays saga be that similar? Lehr has talked to Schneider about that, too.
“I (told Schneider): My vision is ultimately, this is like what the Royals did from ’14 to ’15, and the moves the organization made. And when the season ended, every department went to work and filled every gap. And then you add in the experience our players are going to have when they get back to that situation.
“I said what I saw Kansas City do was, everyone got better. They filled every gap, and the players capitalized on that experience. So when they got back, it was a completely different story the next year.”
Catching coach Drew Butera sees similarities between the 2015 Royals and this year’s Blue Jays. (Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
But Lehr isn’t the only guy in this Blue Jays camp who connects the dots to those Royals. Drew Butera was the backup catcher in Kansas City in 2015. He’s now the catching coach in Toronto. And what he sees around him is a group that seems unusually comfortable in the big moments, just like those Royals.
“Any time you go through something for the first time, there’s a little bit of the unknown,” Butera said. And then once you’ve been there, you know what to expect. You know how to control the emotions. And you know how good your preparation has to be to repeat it again.”
He has seen that meticulous preparation with his own eyes this spring. But what he learned from that experience in Kansas City is an important lesson he’s ready to impart when the time is right — that as hard as a team tries to re-enact its last journey, that next journey, the following year, is inevitably so different.
“It’s different, and yet it’s the same,” Butera said. “I think you have to honor what you did in the past. You respect the process that you had. And you try to grow and make it better. The end goal is still to get there. But even if it’s maybe the same destination, it’s a little different route.”
Put a ring on it
Sometimes, to truly understand the meaning of our most powerful moments, we need more than the perspective of history … or self-help gurus … or the most insightful leaders in our lives.
Sometimes, it takes the innocent wisdom of children.
So let’s return now to Rogers Centre, in the aftermath of Game 7, where the tears continued to flow — inside and outside the locker room — for the men who had just experienced the pain of losing the last game of the World Series.
Inside, the shockwaves were still reverberating around that room. Outside, families gathered, comforting each other as they waited for the men who had just absorbed this epic blow to emerge through the double doors.
Then out of those doors strode Gausman.
He locked eyes immediately with his wife, Taylor, and their two young daughters, Sadie, then 6, and Sutton, 4. He was holding it together, he remembered, until he saw the tears rolling down Sadie’s face.
“I feel like that was the first year where she really understood what we were trying to do,” Gausman said. “So just seeing her after Game 7, and seeing her bawling, crying, I was like, man, I didn’t even know she cared. And then, I mean, wow. She was distraught.”
Kevin Gausman and his family pose for a photo in 2023. (Nick Turchiaro / Imagn Images)
When the Jays’ postseason began, four weeks earlier, Sadie didn’t quite understand it all, her dad said. It was more than just that she didn’t grasp the career-defining meaning of these games. She couldn’t understand why the family wasn’t heading back home to Louisiana. Wasn’t it October? Wasn’t the season over?
The wheels began spinning in her father’s head. How could he help her see what was at stake here? Finally, it came to him.
“What I told her was: We’re trying to get a ring. I remember showing her a picture of the Rangers’ (World Series) ring from a couple years before. And you know, she’s a girl, so she got that. She was, like, ‘Whoa. A ring.’”
But now, a month later, his daughter’s tears seemed to be telling him something else. So the next day, after they’d all awakened, Gausman sought out Sadie to make sure she was OK — and to see if he could help her put this powerful experience into perspective.
“Honestly, it was a good teaching moment,” he said, “because I was, like, hey, this is what you sign up for when you play sports. You know, sometimes it’s going to break your heart. You’re going to be really close, and you’re going to feel like maybe you deserve it, and it doesn’t have to be the end of the world.”
Sadie listened closely to the words of her dad. He watched her face shine as her 6-year-old brain processed this invaluable lesson about sports — and life. Then her eyes lit up. She knew exactly what to tell him.
“Well,” that wise young soul told her father, “you can always get a ring next year.”