Los Angeles Dodgers catcher Will Smith didn’t dress it up after the swing of his life. In his on-field chat with Ken Rosenthal, Smith summed up a championship-deciding bomb, and a two-year run, like a captain would: “It’s a special group of guys, man. We just never gave up, kept fighting.” That wasn’t just adrenaline talking.

The Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays 5–4 in 11 innings to clinch a second straight World Series, with Smith drilling the go-ahead solo shot in the top of the 11th. ESPN’s box score tells the story of survival with Los Angeles trailing 3–0 early, 4–2 late, and still finishing the night with 11 hits, three homers, and zero errors, just enough to outlast Toronto’s 14 hits. Max Muncy cut the deficit with an eighth-inning blast, Miguel Rojas stunned Rogers Centre with a game-tying ninth-inning homer, and Smith delivered the final punch. 

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This one had all the rope-a-dope you’d expect from a winner-take-all. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, fresh off a heavy lift in Game 6, escaped a bases-loaded jam in the ninth and closed out 2⅔ scoreless for his third win of the Series. Reuters and the Associated Press each framed Smith’s 11th-inning homer as the moment the Dodgers became MLB’s first repeat champs in 25 years. 

So what did Will Smith credit? Not luck, not magic, but resolve. The Dodgers kept answering every Blue Jays surge and trusted the next man up to land the next swing. In a Game 7 that swung on inches and nerve, the catcher’s message was one that the entire team echoed.