Isiah Kiner-Falefa shirks responsibility for play that handed World Series to Dodgers

The bottom of the ninth in Game 7 of the 2025 World Series is best remembered by Dodgers fans for the moment that solidified Miguel Rojas' legendary status.

He'd already hit a completely baffling, implausible game-tying homer in the top of the inning, but he also made a frenzied, mostly instinctive play to throw Isiah Kiner-Falefa out at home for the second out of the inning and to keep the Blue Jays from walking it off to take the championship.

But it's best remembered by Blue Jays fans as the moment that turned Kiner-Falefa into ... whatever the opposite of the toast of the town is. Ernie Clement flew out to end the inning — on that crazy play that saw Andy Pages sending Kiké Hernández into the dirt on the warning track — and the rest was history.

Kiner-Falefa lingered on the free agent market for a long time before he finally signed a one-year, $6 million deal with the Red Sox. In his first media scrum as a Red Sox, he was asked about that play ... and refused to take accountability.

"I did what I was told, and it was an organizational policy," he said. "And we win as a team, we lose as a team, and there was a lot of opportunities to win before that, and we didn't do it. So that wasn't the sole reason we lost."

Isiah Kiner-Falefa brushes off criticism from botched baserunning that let the Dodgers win the World Series

To be fair, Toronto manager John Schneider echoed the sentiment that Kiner-Falefa was just listening to team orders. The player himself went into the specifics: he wanted to avoid a double play and make sure that Clement, a miraculous postseason monster, got an at-bat.

The Dodgers won Game 7 by the slimmest of margins, thanks to heroes both incredibly likely (Yoshinobu Yamamoto) and incredibly unlikely (Rojas). IKF clearly wanted to be to the Blue Jays what Rojas was to the Dodgers, but in a game — in a series — that was on a razor's edge the entire time, the margin for error was nonexistent.

It would've been far more admirable if Kiner-Falefa had just held his hands up and said, "yes, that was a mistake." He also complained about not getting any face time with the media after the game, which he argued would've helped him explain himself.

Okay, man. Whatever helps you sleep at night.