Mariners stay home to avoid fatigue after 15-inning win sets up ALCS battle with Blue Jays

TORONTO (AP) — The Mariners decided to go sleepless in Seattle instead of being tired in Toronto.

After celebrating their 3-2 win over Detroit in Game 5 of the AL Division Series, the team stayed in Seattle before heading to Toronto for a late Saturday arrival ahead of a AL Championship Series matchup against the Blue Jays.

“Our guys will be ready,” Mariners manager Dan Wilson said. “We’ll get there tonight, get some rest, and we’ll be ready to go.”

In the ALCS for the fourth time and first since 2001, Seattle opens the best-of-seven series on Sunday night.

After eliminating the New York Yankees with a Game 4 win in their Division Series on Wednesday night, the Blue Jays were free to relax on Friday. Outfielder Myles Straw and teammate Davis Schneider went out together to a Toronto bar to see who’d they face in the team’s eighth trip to the ALCS, its first since 2016.

“Would have liked to have got out a little bit sooner, but we had a good night,” Straw said of the late finish.

Seattle used three starting pitchers in Friday’s win over Detroit, with Luis Castillo and Logan Gilbert both entering in relief.

That leaves Bryce Miller, who started Wednesday, to take the mound Sunday on three days' rest.

“It’s super cool,” Miller said. “I’m fired up.

Miller threw 55 pitches in Game 4, allowing two runs and four hits in 4 1/3 innings.

“We’ll take him as far as he can go,” Wilson said.

Miller will be opposed by Kevin Gausman, who hasn’t pitched since giving up one run and four hits over 5 2/3 innings in Toronto’s ALDS opener on Oct. 4. Blue Jays manager John Schneider said Gausman’s consistency and calm made him the right choice.

“There’s something about his demeanor, just kind of his presence every day, where the day he’s pitching everybody feels a little bit more confident going into it,” Schneider said.

Seattle, the only current big league team to never host the World Series, has won two games or fewer in three previous ALCS trips, losing once to Cleveland and twice to the Yankees.

Toronto, which lost the ALCS to Kansas City in 2015 and to Cleveland in 2016, won four of six meetings with the Mariners during the regular season, losing two of three at home in April and sweeping a three-game series at Seattle from May 9-11. The teams haven’t faced each other since.

“It’s definitely a fun city,” Seattle star Cal Raleigh said of Toronto. “It’s a nice stadium, and they’re a good team. Always look forward to the challenge of playing them. Just always fun.”

Schneider said shortstop Bo Bichette ran the bases Saturday, the first time he’s done that since spraining his left knee last month. The two-time AL hits leader and two-time All-Star was injured in a Sept. 6 collision with Yankees catcher Austin Wells and hasn’t played since.

“I don’t want to say he’s our last decision, but he’s one of them,” Schneider said. “Obviously you want his bat in the lineup.”

Bichette has been taking swings against teammates Max Scherzer and Chris Bassitt in recent days.

“A lot of swings, looked pretty good,” Schneider said.

After doing a good job of keeping New York’s Aaron Judge in check during the Division Series, Toronto’s pitchers now face the job of containing Raleigh. The switch-hitting catcher had 60 home runs during the regular season and hit one more in the ALDS.

Raleigh has seven home runs in 11 regular season games north of the border and went 4 for 8 with a homer in Seattle’s sweep of Toronto in the 2022 Wild Card Series.

“What a season he’s had and what a great switch-hitter at such a hard position to hit,” Gausman said of Raleigh. “To catch as many games as he has, what a season he’s put together. I also feel confident with myself that I can go out and get him out. I’ve gotten him out before, so now it’s just about mixing up pitches and trying to keep him off balance.”

Schneider said rookie Trey Yesavage, who set a Blue Jays postseason record by striking out 11 Yankees in 5 1/3 innings in ALDS Game 2, is “a definite possibility” to start the second ALCS game.

Yesavage rose through four minor league levels this season before joining the Blue Jays and going 1-0 in three September starts.

Yesavage walked out to the bullpen during Game 4 Wednesday but Schneider acknowledged Saturday that he didn’t intend to use him in that game.

Yesavage struck out 160 batters in 98 innings in the minors. Including his ALDS start, he has 27 strikeouts in 19 1/3 big league innings.

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Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider speaks with the media ahead of Game 1 of baseball's American League Championship Series against the Seattle Mariners in Toronto, Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025. (Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press via AP)

Toronto Blue Jays' Kevin Gausman speaks with the media ahead of Game 1 of baseball's American League Championship Series against the Seattle Mariners in Toronto, Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025. (Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press via AP)

Toronto Blue Jays' Kevin Gausman speaks with the media ahead of Game 1 of baseball's American League Championship Series against the Seattle Mariners in Toronto, Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025. (Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press via AP)

Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider speaks with the media ahead of Game 1 of baseball's American League Championship Series against the Seattle Mariners in Toronto, Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025. (Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press via AP)

Toronto Blue Jays' Myles Straw speaks with the media ahead of Game 1 of baseball's American League Championship Series against the Seattle Mariners in Toronto, Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025. (Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press via AP)

LONDON (AP) — With one puff of a cigarette, a woman in Canada became a global symbol of defiance against Iran's bloody crackdown on dissent — and the world saw the flame.

A video that has gone viral in recent days shows the woman — who described herself as an Iranian refugee — snapping open a lighter and setting the flame to a photo she holds. It ignites, illuminating the visage of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's highest cleric. Then the woman dips a cigarette into the glow, takes a quick drag — and lets what remains of the image fall to the pavement.

Whether staged or a spontaneous act of defiance — and there’s plenty of debate — the video has become one of the defining images of the protests in Iran against the Islamic Republic’s ailing economy, as U.S. President Donald Trump considers military action in the country again.

The gesture has jumped from the virtual world to the real one, with opponents of the regime lighting cigarettes on photos of the ayatollah from Israel to Germany and Switzerland to the United States.

In the 34 seconds of footage, many across platforms like X, Instagram and Reddit saw one person defy a series of the theocracy’s laws and norms in a riveting act of autonomy. She wears no hijab, three years after the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests against the regime’s required headscarves.

She burns an image of Iran’s supreme leader, a crime in the Islamic republic punishable by death. Her curly hair cascades — yet another transgression in the Iranian government’s eyes. She lights a cigarette from the flame — a gesture considered immodest in Iran.

And in those few seconds, circulated and amplified a million times over, she steps into history.

In 2026, social media is a central battleground for narrative control over conflicts. Protesters in Iran say the unrest is a demonstration against the regime’s strictures and competence. Iran has long cast it as a plot by outsiders like United States and Israel to destabilize the Islamic Republic.

And both sides are racing to tell the story of it that will endure.

Iranian state media announces wave after wave of arrests by authorities, targeting those it calls “terrorists” and also apparently looking for Starlink satellite internet dishes, the only way to get videos and images out to the internet. There was evidence on Thursday that the regime’s bloody crackdown had somewhat smothered the dissent after activists said it had killed at least 2,615 people. That figure dwarfs the death toll from any other round of protest or unrest in Iran in decades and recalls the mayhem of the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Social media has bloomed with photos of people lighting cigarettes from photos of Iran’s leader. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em. #Iran,” posted Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana.

In the age of AI, misinformation and disinformation, there’s abundant reason to question emotionally and politically charged images. So when “the cigarette girl” appeared online this month, plenty of users did just that.

It wasn’t immediately clear, for example, whether she was lighting up inside Iran or somewhere with free-speech protections as a sign of solidarity. Some spotted a background that seemed to be in Canada. She confirmed that in interviews. But did her collar line up correctly? Was the flame realistic? Would a real woman let her hair get so close to the fire?

Many wondered: Is the “cigarette girl” an example of “psyops?” That, too, is unclear. That’s a feature of warfare and statecraft as old as human conflict, in which an image or sound is deliberately disseminated by someone with a stake in the outcome. From the allies’ fake radio broadcasts during World War II to the Cold War’s nuclear missile parades, history is rich with examples.

The U.S. Army doesn’t even hide it. The 4th Psychological Operations Group out of Ft. Bragg in North Carolina last year released a recruitment video called, “Ghost in the Machine 2 that’s peppered with references to “PSYWAR.”And the Gaza war featured a ferocious battle of optics: Hamas forced Israeli hostages to publicly smile and pose before being released, and Israel broadcast their jubilant reunions with family and friends.

Whatever the answer, the symbolism of the Iranian woman's act was powerful enough to rocket around the world on social media — and inspire people at real-life protests to copy it.

The woman did not respond to multiple efforts by The Associated Press to confirm her identity. But she has spoken to other outlets, and AP confirmed the authenticity of those interviews.

On X, she calls herself a “radical feminist” and uses the handle Morticia Addams —- after the exuberantly creepy matriarch of “The Addams Family” — sheerly out of her interest in “spooky things,” the woman said in an interview with the nonprofit outlet The Objective.

She doesn’t allow her real name to be published for safety reasons after what she describes as a harrowing journey from being a dissident in Iran — where she says she was arrested and abused — to safety in Turkey. There, she told The Objective, she obtained a student visa for Canada. Now, in her mid-20s, she said she has refugee status in and lives in Toronto.

It was there, on Jan. 7, that she filmed what’s become known as “the cigarette girl” video a day before the Iranian regime imposed a near-total internet blackout.

“I just wanted to tell my friends that my heart, my soul was with them,” she said in an interview on CNN-News18, a network affiliate in India.

In the interviews, the woman said she was arrested for the first time at 17 during the “bloody November” protests of 2019, demonstrations that erupted after Trump pulled the U.S. out of the nuclear deal that Iran had struck with world powers that imposed crushing sanctions.

“I was strongly opposed to the Islamic regime,” she told The Objective. Security forces “arrested me with tasers and batons. I spent a night in a detention center without my family knowing where I was or what had happened to me.” Her family eventually secured her release by offering a pay slip for bail. “I was under surveillance from that moment on.”

In 2022 during the protests after the death of Mahsa Amini in custody, she said she participated in a YouTube program opposing the mandatory hijab and began receiving calls from blocked numbers threatening her. In 2024, after Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash, she shared her story about it — and was arrested in her home in Isfahan.

The woman said she was questioned and “subjected to severe humiliation and physical abuse.” Then without explanation, she was released on a high bail. She fled to Turkey and began her journey to Canada and, eventually, global notoriety.

“All my family members are still in Iran, and I haven’t heard from them in a few days,” she said in the interview, published Tuesday. “I’m truly worried that the Islamic regime might attack them.”

A demonstrator lights a cigarette with a burning poster depicting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a rally in support of Iran's anti-government protests, in Holon, Israel Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)

CORRECTS MONTH - A protester lights a cigarette off a burning poster of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a demonstration in Berlin, Germany, in support of the nationwide mass protests in Iran against the government, Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

A protester burns an image of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with a cigarette during rally in support of the nationwide mass demonstrations in Iran against the government, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026 in Zuerich, Switzerland.(Michael Buholzer /Keystone via AP)