Dodgers’ Roberts against extending automatic runner to postseason. Blue Jays’ Schneider not sure

Associated Press ^ | 28 October 2025 | Ronald Blum

[WhiteHatBobby0701]

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Admitting he came close to putting a position player on the mound for the first time in World Series history, Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said a month ago he never would have believed he’d face that decision.

“I would have thought I was under the influence of something, for sure,” he said.

A day after the Dodgers beat the Toronto Blue Jays 6-5 on Freddie Freeman’s 18th-inning home run off Brendon Little to take a 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven Series, both managers said Tuesday they were getting close to having to send a position player to the mound in a game of utmost importance because they were running out of available pitchers.

Yet, neither was immediately in favor of adopting in the postseason the automatic-runner rule used in the regular season since 2020, in which each team starts every extra inning with a runner at second base. Among 209 extra-inning games this season, all ended by the 13th. In the six seasons with the “ghost” runner, the longest was the Dodgers’ 16-inning win over San Diego on Aug. 25, 2021.

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TOPICS: Sports
KEYWORDS: baseball; tiebreaker; worldseries

[Alberta's Child]

Managers refuse to play bunts because they don’t have to worry about the pitcher bunting.

Sacrifice bunts have mostly disappeared from baseball for one simple reason: analytics.

Run millions of baseball game situations through a computer, and you'll find that with the exception of a late-inning scenario where the home team is playing for a single run, giving up an out to score a run is almost never a good trade-off.

You can theoretically put an infinite number of runners on base and score an infinite number of runs even with two outs in the ninth inning ... but once you give up one of your 27 outs, you can never get it back.

[Alberta's Child]

Which is one of the reasons I said that Pete Rose was wrong to bet on his own team, while managing it.

Exactly.

[discostu]

True. But that’s also part of the fun. Post season is a different game. Different thinking. AZ won a Series because they understood that better than the Yankees (we’ll pull the Big Unit now to bring him in relief in game 7). And the repercussions of these monster games are part of what makes playoff series a great concept. We can see it here, Dodgers are a great starting pitching team, Jays are a great hitting team. Because hitters recover faster than pitchers that game could lose the series for the Dodgers.