Will Smith supplied the decisive swing in the 11th inning of Game 7, and the Dodgers walked away with another championship and a place in one of baseball’s strangest shared-name streaks. The catcher’s homer against Shane Bieber pushed Los Angeles in front for good in a 5-4 win over the Blue Jays in the 2025 World Series.
The result
Smith’s extra-inning blast gave the Dodgers their third title with their catcher behind the plate. He was also part of the club’s championship runs in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and in 2024, when Los Angeles beat the Yankees.
The 2025 crown made the Dodgers the first club to repeat as World Series champions since the Yankees won three straight from 1998 through 2000.
It also kept alive an unusual six-season World Series ring run for a player called Will Smith. The Dodgers’ catcher accounted for the bookends: 2020, then 2024 and 2025.
Two Will Smiths, six straight rings
The middle of the run belonged to the other Will Smith in Major League Baseball — not the actor, but the veteran left-handed reliever.
That Smith won with Atlanta in 2021, Houston in 2022 and Texas in 2023. In doing so, he became the first player to make World Series rosters for three different teams in three consecutive seasons and finish each of those Octobers with a championship.
The reliever’s final big league season came with the Royals in 2024, closing a 12-year career. Together, the two Smiths produced a title-winning sequence from 2020 through 2025 that reads like a baseball trivia answer waiting for the question.
There have always been numbers that seem too neat to be real. Stan Musial finished with 1,815 hits at home and the same total on the road. Khris Davis posted a .247 average in each season from 2015 through 2018. The Will Smith championship chain belongs in that company.
The run finally stopped in 2026, when Milwaukee swept the Dodgers in four games in the National League Championship Series. Still, six consecutive seasons ending with a World Series ring for one Will Smith or the other is the sort of odd baseball symmetry that will linger long after the box scores fade.
