PHOENIX — Everything is different for Miguel Rojas, even in spring training. The Los Angeles Dodgers utility man carved out a career better than most could have imagined, even before he cemented himself as a World Series hero.
Now, he’s spending a Sunday morning looking at an iPad, reliving the greatest moment of his baseball life.
Three of the most consequential plays in baseball history, by Championship Win Probability Added, happened in Game 7 of last year’s World Series against the Toronto Blue Jays.
None is more embedded in the memory of a championship than the swing captured by two words from broadcaster Joe Davis:
“No way.”
Those words echoed through an empty workroom one morning this spring, this time with Rojas providing his own commentary on rewatch. With a cup of coffee to his left ahead of a morning meeting, Rojas explains what he saw, felt and thought.
Longtime utility man Miguel Rojas was hardly a household name before what he calls ‘the best at-bat of my career.’ (Brandon Sloter / Getty Images)
Down to the team’s last two outs, Rojas — who had started just twice in the previous month — launched the game-tying home run in the ninth inning to keep the hopes of back-to-back titles alive. On a team filled with superstars, Rojas was the club’s least likely hero.
It’s the type of event he fantasized about as a kid. So when Davis’ two-word call emanated from the iPad during this replay session, Rojas smiled in agreement.
“That’s the first reaction, not just from him,” Rojas said, “but like, for me too. It was like, ‘No way.’”
It’s one of the most memorable Dodgers homers in World Series history, up there in the echelon with Kirk Gibson’s and Freddie Freeman’s walk-off blasts, as well as Will Smith’s home run that eventually won it all for Los Angeles two innings after Rojas launched his.
This is why everything is different. The final offseason of his career — Rojas has stated 2026 will be his final season — brought with it more celebration than even he could have anticipated. Fans from Los Angeles to Rome have approached him to thank him. It is not lost on him what this all means.
“The best at-bat of my career,” Rojas said, coffee in hand as he prepared to go through the sequence of events in detail.
He watched the at-bat often this winter. He stumbles upon the clip every few days or so. Each time, the 36-year-old will notice something new. He plans to keep the footage on a loop for himself as a teaching tool. A reminder of what is possible. Over the course of 30 minutes one morning this spring, he sat down with The Athletic at the Dodgers’ facility and relived the at-bat that etched his name into franchise lore forever.
“That’s a swing that you’re always gonna like, trying to go after,” Rojas said. “It’s gonna be kind of your model. I’m not gonna say just the swing. It’s just like the whole at bat. I can actually teach myself a lot of things. It makes me understand that I’m able to kind of stay under control, regroup, making sure that I simplify things in the middle of the at-bat.”
It was a surprise that Miguel Rojas wound up in the lineup at all for Game 7. The veteran had hardly played during the postseason run, taking 12 plate appearances all month before manager Dave Roberts sent him a text before Game 6 that he’d be in the lineup with the team down 3-2 in the series. When Rojas told his wife, Mariana, she predicted that he’d have his moment.
Initially, Rojas thought that his moment had already come in Game 6. With the Dodgers clinging to a one-run lead in the ninth, he sprawled at second base to nab the game-sealing double play throw from Kiké Hernández and keep the season alive — and injured a muscle in his ribcage in the process. One painkilling injection after the game wasn’t enough; he needed another the following morning just to make it into the lineup for Game 7. That last shot was one inning away from wearing off by the time Rojas and the Dodgers were set to take their final hacks in the ninth inning, down 4-3. Max Muncy’s home run the inning before had secured at least one thing – that the eventual four-time MVP, Shohei Ohtani, would get at least one more at-bat. Ahead of Rojas was Hernández, with his own history of postseason heroics.
“We had the part of the lineup that you kind of want to have at that moment,” Rojas said.
As Rojas stood in the on-deck circle, he said, he processes different scenarios he might have to execute. If Hernández reaches first with a hit or walk, Rojas said, he’d likely try to bunt him over to second base. If Hernández got to second, maybe he’d be able to hit something to the right side to advance Hernández to third base. That list of scenarios keeps running through his head until Blue Jays closer Jeff Hoffman struck out Hernández on four pitches.
The calculus changes. Rojas enters with a simple approach. If he can catch up to Hoffman’s high-90s velocity, he figures he could be ready to adjust to everything else he needs to get on base.
“I’m going to try to take his fastball away,” Rojas said. “I’m going to try to hit a line drive up the middle with his fastball away. I thought he was going to attack me that way, and that’s the reason why I felt like I put myself in a good position, because I was already kind of thinking through what my responsibility was going to be, regardless of the situation.”
Pitch 1: 0-0, 86 mph slider off the plate
Rojas looks for the fastball on the outer half of the plate, so much so that he gears up and swings at a pitch that looked just like a heater before snapping off into the dirt. With that, he falls behind in the count to Hoffman, who struggled with command and home runs for much of the season but struck out 10 of the 17 Seattle Mariners he faced during the American League Championship Series.
“I feel like he was gonna attack me, because, I mean, I’m the ninth hitter, and Shohei was behind me,” Rojas said. “The whole situation kind of presented itself for him to kind of be aggressive and be in the strike zone early, and I want that at-bat to end as soon as possible.”
Still, his aggressiveness hurt him. Rojas mutters to himself to let the ball travel before making his swing decision. If all is right with his swing, he would still be able to get to the fastball. Rojas also gave himself more time to adjust to a breaking ball, especially a pitch away.
Pitch 2: 0-1, 87 mph slider that bounces
After seeing Rojas’ aggressiveness against his first-pitch slider, Hoffman tries another one. He spikes this one. There’s no temptation to swing. But Rojas picks up the tendency.
“He was gonna try to get me out with that pitch,” Rojas said, with a hint of foreshadowing. “Now, I’m not gonna look for that pitch, because (then) I’m gonna give up on the (fastball). He throws 96, 97 (mph). So I was just trying to see the ball deep.”
Still, it’s now an even count. Rojas still wants the fastball outside, and Hoffman hasn’t gone to the pitch yet.
Pitch 3: 1-1, 97 mph fastball down below the zone
Hoffman wants to throw a fastball right where Rojas was looking. Blue Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk sets up behind the plate as such, flashing his glove belt-high as a target. Hoffman misfires; the pitch tails back over the plate and dives below the zone, not close enough for Rojas to chase.
It’s a big leverage pitch. Being 2-1 instead of 1-2 makes a difference. In his regular-season career, Rojas has a .676 OPS in 2-1 counts, but it drops to a .421 OPS in 1-2 counts.
The only home run he’d slugged off a righty on the year had been off Logan Porter, a position player. The challenge was even greater with two strikes.
He’s hit just .194 once he reaches two strikes against a right-handed pitcher in his career. Only twice in 1,306 at-bats, he’s homered, even if that wasn’t the goal of the at-bat.
“All I’m thinking right here is to shoot something really low up the middle,” Rojas said. “That is my base hit that I can close my eyes and see myself doing over and over. Because it happened before.”
Pitch 4: 2-1, 95 mph fastball outside
Rojas misses the pitch he was looking to hit, but is satisfied with the progress of the at-bat as he watched his foul ball fly into the seats. He sees the pattern.
“(It) was a script,” Rojas said, nodding along just like he had in the moment. “Kind of like, ‘OK, we’re gonna, we’re gonna attack him with breaking balls early. Mid-count, we’re gonna go with the fastball.’ As soon as he’s down (in the count), he doesn’t want to be 3-1, you know? He gave me a really hittable fastball.”
He exhales before he stepped into the box. He reminds himself to let the ball travel. He’d just done that and managed to get his bat to the fastball. The worst thing he could do was chase a breaking ball away for Strike 3.
Pitch 5: 2-2, 96 mph fastball over the plate
Hoffman’s fastball might be even more hittable than the one before it. It has the same result.
“That tells me everything that I need to know,” Rojas said, gesturing toward the screen. “He’s not gonna strike me out with the fastball. I’m not gonna swing-and-miss with the fastball.”
He’d just seen three of them in a row.
Pitch 6: 2-2, 86 mph slider, up and in
Hoffman didn’t execute the slider he wanted. Instead, the ball pops out of his hand and backs up. Rojas doesn’t swing. Even if he wants to, he probably couldn’t. He lets the ball travel and sees the pitch darting away from the zone before breaking at the last minute.
“You never swing at that pitch because you’re not expecting it like a top-shelf slider,” Rojas said.
It’s out of the zone. But it’s close enough to cause a moment of hesitation. Kirk is one of the best in the sport at turning balls into strikes, ranking in the 98th percentile among Statcast’s framing metrics. Behind the plate, umpire Jordan Baker doesn’t bite. It’s a full count.
Pitch 7: 3-2, 86 mph slider, middle of the plate
Rojas is not sitting on a slider, as John Smoltz would later speculate on the Fox broadcast when revisiting the home run. But he knows the circumstances. Hoffman does not want to walk him to put the tying run on base for Ohtani. Rojas needs to be ready for something in the strike zone, while still letting it travel. He can foul off a fastball if he needs to stay alive this way.
“I have to keep telling myself, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’” Rojas said. “I’m swinging, swinging, swinging, swinging, until my eyes say shut it down.”
Hoffman unleashes another slider. Rather than breaking off the plate, it bends right into the middle of it. Rojas connects with the ball, seemingly leaning forward after letting the ball travel just far enough.
As he’s talking through the play this morning, Rojas lets the pitch play before reaching out and pausing the iPad right as he’s making contact. This, he says, is the swing he’s trying to have. He’s ready for the fastball, but willing to hang back if it’s a breaking ball. Time it right, and he can have the barrel hit the baseball out in front of the plate and pull a ball in the air. From his seat, Rojas raises his left arm, copying where it was positioned in that moment on the screen.
“If you have fastball timing as a hitter and hit a slider out front that is hanging, that’s the best-case scenario for a hitter,” Rojas said. “You’re going to be ready for a fastball, but you’re kind of realizing that the slider’s coming and you keep going and you ride it out and hit it with the barrel out front. That’s the perfect-case scenario.”
On contact, Rojas thinks he’s hit the ball over Myles Straw’s head in left field. He picks up speed as the ball carries, knowing that the walls at Rogers Centre don’t have much give to them and can make stretching a hit into a double more difficult. “I need to be at second base,” Rojas said,
Then Rojas noticed Straw slow up. The ball flew into the seats of Blue Jays fans in stunned silence. Rojas, like everyone, was in shock.
No. Way.
As he rounds second base, he thinks of his wife’s premonition. His time has come, a full-circle moment for an unlikely player in this kind of spotlight. Rojas signed out of Venezuela as a teenager to little fanfare. The Cincinnati Reds let him walk as a minor-league free agent. His first taste of the majors included a cameo in Clayton Kershaw’s no-hitter, saving the day with a defensive stop. When Andrew Friedman first took over baseball operations in Los Angeles, one of his first moves was trading Rojas to Miami. Still, Rojas crafted a decade-long career in the bigs.
Then he changed everything with one swing.
The ballpark was silent outside of two places: the visiting dugout and the Dodgers’ family section a few rows up behind it. His teammates spill out of the dugout. As Rojas got hammered with high fives, he catches a look at Blake Snell, who was still in the game to pitch.
The score was tied, 4-4. There’s a difference between Rojas and Rajai Davis, who hit his own unlikely game-tying home run in a World Series Game 7. Davis’ eighth-inning blast for Cleveland in 2016 merely delayed the Cubs’ championship by a few innings. Rojas’ homer helped redirect the parade route by a few thousand miles.
“We need to go get three outs,” Rojas said. “That’s kind of what I was kind of trying to tell the guys. We’re not losing this game now, guys. This homer can’t really go unnoticed now, so we have to make sure that we’re winning this game. We’re not losing this game.”
They didn’t. Smith launched the go-ahead blast in the 11th and Yoshinobu Yamamoto put the finishing touches on his October masterpiece to finish it out.
The play that kept it all alive
While Rojas watched the clip of his home run throughout the winter, he hesitated to watch what he did in the bottom half of that ninth inning to keep things alive. So many plays could’ve gone the other way, Rojas said. Reliving them would be tempting fate; maybe one time watching it would bring a different result.
Rojas swaps out the iPad for a laptop, which presents the footage from a camera high above home plate of the bottom of the ninth inning, with Yamamoto looking to get out of a bases-loaded jam with one out. Rojas hasn’t seen this perspective.
“Now, I feel like I can handle it,” Rojas said. Back then, it was do-or-die. If a run scored, the Blue Jays would win the World Series.
Rojas, playing second base, has little margin for error if a ball were hit to him. He runs through the situation in his head, including one last bit of sequencing in which the type and location of the pitch provides a clue as to where a batted ball might end up. Catcher Will Smith called for Yamamoto to throw a splitter to left-handed hitter Daulton Varsho.
So Rojas looks to his right.
“Maybe a curveball, that’s the only pitch that (Varsho) will pull in the four-hole (to my left),” Rojas said. “Splits and fastballs, they’re probably gonna go here (to my right). After I listened to the pitch. I need to make sure that I’m reading the ball off the bat, depending on where the location is. If the split is down, he’s probably going to catch it up front a little bit more, and he’s probably gonna go right here (to my right). But if the split stays up, or the fastball stays up, he’s probably gonna just block it and hit it to this side (at shortstop).”
Still, Rojas said, he’s expecting Varsho to try to hit the ball in the air. If he gets it deep enough, that’ll be enough to score Isiah Kiner-Falefa from third base.
Varsho spins one off the end of the bat toward Rojas, who has to decide quickly how aggressively to pursue the hop. There are two ways he can go, he says. He can be aggressive with the hop and catch it short. Or he can let the hop go a little longer to secure the baseball, even if doing so cuts into his time to the plate. He chooses the latter.
Years earlier, while playing shortstop with the Marlins in 2022, Rojas had experienced a similar situation, with a runner on third and one out in a do-or-die spot. The Angels’ Max Stassi chopped a ball to Rojas, who couldn’t secure the initial grounder and set off the chain of events to a walkoff loss.
This time, the ball lands in Rojas’ glove, but he stumbles.
“The first thing that went to my mind is, ‘Oh s—. We just lost the game,’” Rojas said. He figured, based on his internal clock, that he’d run out of time. While saying that Kiner-Falefa’s lead from third base had “zero” presence in his thinking, he notices something when watching on the high home feed. When Rojas stumbles, the runner is nearly 70 feet from home plate. More time than he thought he had.
“Look where the guy is,” Rojas said. “I still have plenty of time, but I didn’t know that.”
Still, it would require a strong throw despite imperfect footwork. Rojas uncorks a throw at 78.8 mph, one of his strongest throws of the year.
“There’s no room for error on this throw,” Rojas said.
The throw beats Kiner-Falefa home. While Smith’s cleat comes off home plate, replay review keeps the call on the field: an out. One batter later, Andy Pages bodied Hernández in left field to catch the third out and force extras. The Dodgers held on, securing Rojas’ place in history.
Rojas sits back. He enjoys the detail, just as seemingly every Dodger involved in that World Series seemingly has a different favorite moment. The Dodgers didn’t play their best baseball in October. But at seemingly every opportunity, they out-executed their opponent in the tightest of spots.
“I feel like that’s the reason we won this World Series,” Rojas said. “We won moments more than we won games. Moments are more important than the whole game in these spots. For sure, we did that.”