LOS ANGELES – As soon as Myles Straw saw Shane Bieber Tuesday afternoon, he had a good feeling.
Straw knew the Toronto Blue Jays had asked a lot of Bieber over the previous 24 hours and that even bigger tests were coming soon, but from the moment he saw Bieber in the visiting clubhouse at Dodger Stadium, the pitcher was focused and calm.
“He was chilling in the lunch room doing his crossword,” Straw recalled. “He was just nice and calm. When he put his headphones on at his locker, he was kind of in that mood. You could tell he was locked in.”
As it turns out, Straw was right. Facing a lineup featuring future Hall of Famers Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, Bieber pitched 5.1 innings of one-run baseball, allowing the Blue Jays to tie the World Series at two games apiece and put them just two wins away from a championship.
In something approaching a must-win game, with all manner of celebrities watching at a sold-out Dodger Stadium, Bieber responded to the pressure with his most important outing as a Blue Jay. Mind you, none of his teammates were surprised.
“He was locating pretty much everything,” said Bo Bichette. “That’s what it takes to shut down a lineup like that and a player like that. Shane was unreal.”
“He did a really good job of mixing it up,” added starter Kevin Gausman. “He’s an unbelievable pitcher and when he’s on we know how great he can be.”
Of course, Bieber was very nearly needed in a Game 3 relief appearance that would have sent the Blue Jays’ pitching plans into chaos. Sometime around the 11th or 12th inning of Game 3, starter Max Scherzer approached Bieber in the Blue Jays dugout, one step ahead as usual.
“He was like, Biebs, if this gets squirrely – you could tell the wheels were turning – can you pitch? And I was like, Yeah. Yeah, I can.”
Soon afterwards, Bieber told manager John Schneider and pitching coach Pete Walker that he’d pitch in relief if needed, and within a couple innings he was loosening up in the right field bullpen just in case. If a Freeman walk-off against Brendon Little hadn’t ended the game in the 18th inning, Bieber would have been next, followed by Trey Yesavage.
“That roller coaster for him was probably nuts, because it was not that long ago he was warming up,” said Ernie Clement. “Just a lights-out performance. He made a ton of great pitches – you can’t say enough about him.”
“He’s just different that way,” opined Addison Barger. “He competes. He’s a dawg.”
A late arrival at the team hotel meant Bieber didn’t get to sleep until about 2 a.m. Monday night, and the sleep that followed wasn’t especially restful. But he drew inspiration from his teammates, who approached the 2-1 deficit with an even-keeled approach Bieber liked.
“The identity of this team, the guys in that clubhouse, it’s hard to describe, other than it’s an absolute pleasure each and every day,” he said. “Coming off of what could be a back-breaking loss last night, it was an absolute pleasure to show up and see guys are, nobody changes, nobody ever wavers, nobody ever hesitates.”
From Schneider’s perspective, the late-inning detour to the bullpen and ensuing lack of sleep didn’t impact Bieber at all in Game 4.
“He came in focused,” the manager said. “He came in like a veteran pitcher should.”
Fellow pitchers like Gausman and Eric Lauer have both been asked to pitch out of the bullpen on short notice, so both could relate to the mental and physical challenge Bieber faced.
“It’s a crazy situation,” Gausman said. “But we’ve seen throughout post-season baseball that that’s kind of what it is. (Yoshinobu) Yamamoto was warming up for them. As you can see it’s just a different animal.”
“A gutsy performance,” added Lauer. “It’s the kind of guy he is and the kind of guy we expect him to be. He won a Cy Young for a reason. He’s one of the best pitchers in the game. That’s what we got him for. Big-time players do big-time things.”
After posting a 3.57 ERA during the regular season and making four playoff starts, there’s little doubt Bieber was the best starting pitching acquisition from the 2025 trade deadline.
Adding to the challenge Monday, Dodger Stadium was something of a scene. That’s always the case for playoff games, where Hall of Fame players roam the field during batting practice and there are plenty of non-baseball stars on hand, too.
But watching at Dodger Stadium Monday was an A-list collection of celebrities, including Brad Pitt, Sydney Sweeney, LeBron James, Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. If they were hoping to see a memorable pitching performance, they got one – it just wasn’t necessarily from Ohtani.
“It’s one of the reasons I like playing in LA,” Lauer said. “It’s almost like an intimidating crowd, an intimidating place to be: Hollywood, the big lights and everything. But I was like, ‘I love playing here.’ Because once you’re in the game, the crowd doesn’t matter. You block it out. But if you do well here, you have a chance to be a celebrity’s new favourite player. That’s how I always go into it.”
If the stakes of the game or stars on hand impacted Bieber in the slightest, he didn’t show it. Ever collected, the 30-year-old Orange, Calif., native wouldn’t be thrown off by a celebrity sighting or two, not when Justin Bieber showed up wearing a No. 57 jersey to Game 3.
“He’s a California guy,” Lauer said with a smile. “It’s his type of vibe. This is what he does.”
In all seriousness, Bieber’s teammates see him as someone whose work off the field allows him to succeed on it.
“When you prepare and go about every day with the consistency that he does, none of that matters,” Clement said. “A lot of us are on the same page about that. We’re not thinking about the crowd and seeing who’s at the game. Nobody really cares about that.”
As Bichette added: “Confidence comes down to the work you put in. And I’ve only known him for a couple months, but it’s pretty apparent the dedication he puts into his craft and that kind of stuff is the stuff you can lean on when things get tough.”
Thanks in part to Bieber, the Blue Jays are now two wins away from winning their first championship in 32 years. He says he’ll be available out of the bullpen once the series flips back to Toronto this weekend, and after Game 3, there’s no doubting his willingness to follow through on that promise.
“Very grateful for the opportunity to start for the Toronto Blue Jays in the World Series to even up the series,” he said. “Now we’ve just got to get two more.”
