Dominic Canzone singled home the go-ahead run in the 12th inning Tuesday night, completing a stunning five-RBI performance that gave Seattle an 8-7 victory over Los Angeles in Game 2 of the World Series and a commanding 2-0 series lead heading home to T-Mobile Park.

The Mariners needed every one of those runs. Los Angeles had clawed back from a five-run deficit with a thunderous sixth inning, tied the game in the seventh, and survived eleven innings of gut-wrenching baseball before Canzone — who had already deposited a grand slam into the left-field seats in the second — found a way to break hearts at Chavez Ravine one more time.

The decisive sequence in the 12th began with the automatic runner on second, and Canzone lined a single to center off Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who had been rushed in after the Dodgers’ AI manager removed Evan Phillips following a 29-pitch effort. “Phillips has been outstanding through 28 pitches — 6 batters faced, 0 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 2 K, still in his first time through the order,” the Dodgers’ AI manager explained. “At 28 pitches he’s approaching the threshold where reliever effectiveness begins to deteriorate. We’re in the 12th inning.” It was the second consecutive inning Los Angeles had pulled a dominant reliever before allowing a baserunner, and both times Seattle made them pay. Yamamoto, a starter pressed into a one-out fireman role, couldn’t escape the inherited mess.

The game turned on two of baseball’s most violent swings, separated by four innings. Canzone’s second-inning grand slam — a towering shot to right-center that capped a four-run burst — seemed to puncture whatever energy Dodger Stadium had stored for October. But the crowd rediscovered its voice in the bottom of the sixth. Andy Pages launched a two-run homer to cut the deficit to three, and then Mookie Betts — his first signature moment of this young series — crushed a three-run shot to dead center that tied the game at five and turned the ballpark into a roar that carried well past midnight. When Tommy Edman singled home a run in the seventh and Shohei Ohtani drew a bases-loaded walk to knot it at seven, it felt for all the world like Los Angeles had seized the momentum it needed.

Then the bullpen management unraveled in slow motion.

The Dodgers’ AI manager pulled Alex Vesia after he retired no one, brought in Brock Stewart, who was brilliant — four strikeouts in five batters — and then removed him at 30 pitches entering the eighth. “Stewart has been outstanding, but he’s at 30 pitches, which is the threshold where reliever effectiveness begins to decline,” the manager explained. “This is a tie game.” Edwin Díaz was equally dominant over two innings, racking up four strikeouts without allowing a hit, before the same logic applied at 34 pitches. Phillips extended the lockdown through the 10th and 11th before his own early exit set the table for Canzone’s walk-off. Seattle’s Andrés Muñoz handled the final 5.1 innings without allowing a run, rendering all of it moot.

Canzone finished 3-for-5 with a walk, five RBI, and two runs scored — a performance for the ages in a road World Series game. Pages matched him in tenacity if not volume, going 3-for-6 with his two-run homer and two runs scored, giving Los Angeles’s lineup a legitimate weapon to build around the rest of the series.

Logan Gilbert gave Seattle a needed foundation, working 5.1 innings and striking out eight before the Dodgers’ sixth-inning eruption chased him. “Logan’s had a solid outing — 8 punchouts, and that FIP tells you he’s been our guy all year,” Seattle’s AI manager explained when removing him. “But he just gave up 2 runs this inning, we’re only down 3 with the heart of the order coming up.” Muñoz then took the ball and didn’t give it back, converting the save and earning the series’ defining performance to this point. Blake Snell labored through four innings for Los Angeles, surrendering five runs on eight hits before the Dodgers’ AI manager held him in through an early-inning deficit on leverage grounds — a decision that looked defensible in the second but catastrophic in the full light of the final score.

Los Angeles now faces an enormous hill. No team in World Series history has come back from a 2-0 deficit to win when both losses came at home, and the series shifts to Seattle for Games 3, 4, and, if necessary, 5. The Mariners have outscored the Dodgers 15-14 through two games, but more telling is what they’ve done to Los Angeles’s psyche: twice now they’ve watched Dodger Stadium erupt, and twice they’ve answered.

SEATTLE MARINERS Manager — Postgame Press Conference

Q: Skipper, you pulled Logan Gilbert in the sixth inning with a three-run lead and eight strikeouts on the night. A lot of people in the building were surprised by that. Walk us through what you were seeing.

A: Logan was dealing — nobody’s gonna argue that. But I watched him give up those two runs to Pages and Betts, and I could see the hitters starting to square him up in a way they weren’t in the third and fourth. You track eight strikeouts and you think the guy’s untouchable, but the game was changing on him. We had a lead worth protecting and a bullpen I trust, so I went and got him. That’s not a knock on Logan — that’s me doing my job.

Q: Andrés Muñoz comes in during the seventh with the tying run on base and pitches five-plus innings of shutout baseball to earn the save. At what point did you know he was your guy for the rest of the night?

A: The moment Bazardo walked that third batter and I could see his release point drifting, I knew we were done with him. I looked at Muñoz warming and his stuff was electric — that slider was late and sharp. You put a guy like that in a pressure moment and you find out who he is, and what we found out tonight is he’s somebody special. Five innings, two hits, nothing on the board — in the World Series, on the road — that’s a performance I’ll be talking about for a long time.

LOS ANGELES DODGERS Manager — Postgame Press Conference

Q: You made four pitching changes in extra innings — pulling Stewart, Díaz, Phillips twice — each time citing a 30-pitch threshold. Critics would say you over-managed the bullpen and burned through arms chasing a number. What do you say to that?

A: The data is consistent and it’s real — reliever effectiveness degrades measurably past 30 pitches, and in a tie extra-inning game the cost of that degradation is enormous. What I won’t do is discount the fact that the outcomes were poor tonight, because they were. But I’d also note that Stewart, Díaz, and Phillips combined for zero runs allowed — the threshold decisions were sound; the final outcome in the 12th came down to Canzone putting a good swing on a pitch that Yamamoto had to throw. We’ll look at the data again tomorrow and I’ll stand behind the framework.

Q: Blake Snell gave up five runs in four innings, including the big Canzone grand slam in the second. The decision logs show you actually considered pulling him after the second but left him in at 72% confidence. In hindsight, does that decision haunt you?

A: The leverage index at that moment was 0.21 — we were down four with two outs and the bases clear, and the probability calculus said that’s not the moment to burn your bullpen. What haunts me is the aggregate — eight runs allowed, eight pitchers used, seven of those runs coming before we could answer. But the second-inning decision in isolation was defensible. Where we lost this game was in the seventh, when Vesia and Brash couldn’t hold the tie, and that’s on me for not seeing the matchup problems sooner. We’re down a game, and we’ll be better.

There’s a number that’s been haunting me since the final out at Dodger Stadium Tuesday night, and it’s not Dominic Canzone’s five RBIs or Seattle’s 15 hits. It’s 30. As in, the pitch threshold The Optimizer apparently treats as a hard expiration date on every reliever it touches — a philosophy that, carried to its logical extreme, turned a 12-inning World Series game into a parade of eight Los Angeles arms and, ultimately, a 8-7 gut-punch defeat.

Let’s start with what got the Dodgers to extra innings in the first place, because credit is due: leaving Blake Snell in through the second inning was the right call. Twice — with some indecision visible in the decision log — The Optimizer talked itself into keeping Snell out there despite a rough line, correctly reading the low leverage of the moment and the early inning context. Down four with two outs and bases empty in the second isn’t a crisis. It’s a deficit. There’s a difference. A human manager, probably reaching for the phone on pure emotional reflex, might have yanked Snell right there. The Optimizer resisted that impulse, Snell stabilized through the fourth, and the Dodgers remained in the game. Fine. Smart, even.

But somewhere around the seventh inning, the game logic that saved the Dodgers early became the thing that destroyed them late. Brock Stewart gets pulled after getting four strikeouts in five batters because Alex Vesia imploded for two runs on zero outs, and suddenly the Dodgers are burning Edwin Díaz in a tie game in the eighth. Díaz is brilliant — four strikeouts, no hits through two full innings — and he gets yanked heading into the tenth at 34 pitches. Here is what a human manager knows that The Optimizer apparently doesn’t: Edwin Díaz at 34 pitches is still Edwin Díaz. The stuff doesn’t evaporate at pitch 31. You don’t pull your best reliever in extra innings of a World Series game because a spreadsheet crossed an arbitrary threshold. You pull him when you see something — labored delivery, diminished velocity, a hitter laying off the slider. The Optimizer saw a number.

Then it happened again in the twelfth. Evan Phillips was dealing — 29 pitches, no runs, no walks, six batters retired. The decision log shows The Optimizer flagging him for removal because he was “approaching the threshold.” So in comes Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a starter working in relief, to face the top of Seattle’s order in extra innings. Canzone singled. Game over. Series down 2-0.

Now, give The Skipper some credit on the Seattle side: pulling Logan Gilbert after five innings while leading was aggressive but defensible — Gilbert had given up the big sixth-inning runs and Andrés Muñoz was available for a long save. The Skipper then rode Muñoz for 5.1 innings through the chaos of the seventh and all the way to the final out, which is the kind of commitment to a hot hand that separates confident managing from committee managing.

That contrast is the series story right now. Seattle has an AI that trusts its best reliever in the biggest moment. Los Angeles has an AI that seems to believe every pitcher turns into a pumpkin at pitch 30, regardless of what the actual baseball in front of it is saying. The Dodgers have the talent to get back in this thing — Shohei Ohtani is clearly about to go nuclear — but if The Optimizer keeps retiring its own relievers before Seattle can, Games 3 and 4 are going to feel very short.