Ousted Dodgers Drive Home Disconnect Between Regular Season and Playoffs

They ran roughshod over the league for six months thanks to an elite offense, great pitching, and exceptional defense, posting a win total that hadn’t been seen in decades. Yet a stretch of a few bad days in October sent them home, consigning them to the status of historical footnote and cautionary tale. Somebody else would go on to win the World Series.

Such was the fate of the 2001 Mariners, though everything above applies to this year’s Dodgers as well, who won 111 games — the most by any team since those Mariners, and the most by any NL team since the 1909 Pirates — but were bounced out of the playoffs on Saturday night. A Padres team from whom they had taken 14 out of 19 games during the regular season beat them three games to one in the Division Series because they got the clutch hits they needed while the Dodgers didn’t. The combination of an 0-for-20 streak with runners in scoring position that ran from the third inning of Game 1 to the third inning of Game 4 — after which they began another hitless-with-RISP streak — and some puzzling bullpen choices by manager Dave Roberts doomed them.

There’s been plenty of that going ’round. The Padres, who won 89 games this year, were facing the Dodgers only because they first beat the 101-win Mets in the best-of-three Wild Card Series. Earlier on Saturday, the defending champion Braves, who claimed the NL East title with 101 wins this year and like the Dodgers played at a better-than-.700 clip from June through September, were ousted by the Phillies. On Saturday evening, the 99-win Yankees let a two-run lead in the ninth slip away against the 92-win Guardians, pushing them to the brink of elimination, though they rebounded on Sunday night, pushing the series to a decisive Game 5 in New York.

Upsets in short postseason series are practically as old as postseason series themselves. In 1906, in the third modern World Series, the 93-win White Sox, a/k/a “The Hitless Wonders,” took down their crosstown rivals, the 116-win Cubs, four games to two. In 1954, the 97-win Giants beat the 111-win Indians in the World Series. In 1987, the 85-win Twins bumped off the 98-win Tigers and then the 95-win Cardinals. Last year, the 89-win Braves felled the 106-win Dodgers in the NLCS, then the 95-win Astros in the World Series.

Such unexpected wins are a cornerstone of baseball history. As MLB.com’s Anthony Castrovince noted, in terms of the gap in winning percentage between the underdogs and the favorites, the Padres trail only the aforementioned 1906 White Sox in the annals, with a 136-point gap (.549 to .685) compared to the Chicagoans’ 147-point gap (.616 to .763). In third place is the 122-point gap from the 2001 ALCS between the Yankees and Mariners (.594 to .716), and in fourth is the 107-point gap from last year’s NLCS between the Braves and Dodgers (.547 to .654). The 86-point gaps between the Nationals and Astros in the 2019 World Series and between the Braves and Phillies in this year’s Division Series are tied for seventh. By that measure, seven of the top 11 upsets have happened in this millennium.

That increasing frequency is a byproduct of the ever-expanding postseason; via the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, we’ve begun a stretch in which we’ll have 11 postseason series a year. That’s (obviously) 11 times as many series as there were from 1901 to ’68, when the winners of the two leagues went straight to the World Series; nearly three times as many as there were from ’69 to ’93 (excepting the 1981 strike season), when the top teams in each league’s two divisions met for the League Championship Series; 57% more than there were from ’95 to 2011, when two more rounds were added per league; and 22% more than there were from ’12 to ’21 (excepting the 2020 season), when the one-off Wild Card games were added to each league.

As Major League Baseball has added more and more rounds of playoff games to the schedule, the disconnect between the regular season and the postseason has grown. From 1969 to ’93 (and again excluding 1981), just seven teams with the majors’ best record won the World Series. From ’95 through 2021, another seven teams did so if you count the 2020 Dodgers, who played a shortened schedule but also had to survive the extra best-of-three Wild Card Series that is the forerunner of the current format.

That’s 29.2% of best-record teams winning it all for the ’69–93 group, and 25% for the 1995–2022 group (because we know we’re not getting one this year) if you’re counting the 2020 Dodgers (and I’ve argued that you should), or 21.4% if you’re not.

The new 12-team postseason format is drawing scrutiny for the five days of rest — or is it rust? — that the top two division winners in each league received; the NL’s bye teams went bye-bye, and the Yankees may yet do the same. So far five lower-seeded teams out of seven have won, and if the Guardians finish off the Yankees it will be six out of eight. Three of those underdogs won without the benefit of a single home game, and two more had only one home game.

Whether this is a feature or a bug depends on your point of view. The plights of the Yankees and Dodgers don’t elicit much sympathy from fans of teams who aren’t perennially running payrolls of $200 million-plus, and upsets make for great television, particularly when they come in front of frenzied crowds that have been starved for postseason baseball for years, like those in Philadelphia and San Diego. But for all of the great theater that they may provide in getting there, I’m not so sure that a Padres-Guardians World Series or even a Phillies-Astros one would buck the long-term trend of meager television ratings and the proliferation of “baseball-is-dying” narratives.

Our concern shouldn’t be with the profits of broadcasters but with the devaluation of the regular season as it becomes increasingly decoupled from the postseason. Baseball’s daily presence from April through September is a significant part of its charm. On a daily basis, the slate of games offers us companionship, connection, hope, ritual, the possibility of joy backed with an inevitable measure of despair — in the end, no one remains undefeated, either by their opponents or by time itself — and, occasionally, transcendence. We revel in a great defensive play, a perfect pitch, a long-distance blast. We gasp at the extremes we can now witness in granular detail, count the number of times everything happens, calculate statistics to explain what we’ve seen. We make sense of the season and pull meaning from it in those six months. Without some appreciation of the great and small triumphs and travails that the players and teams who survive the grind of 162 games carry into October, we’re just watching guys running around in colored pajamas.

Few if any teams have ever mastered the grind of the long season as these Dodgers have. I began tracking this in 2020, settling on increments of five years (at the time, the length of Roberts’ tenure) as a basis of comparison. In my first run at this, the 2016–20 Dodgers’ five-year winning percentage was the fifth-highest of any post-1960 expansion era team, once I excluded the overlapping stretches (any season could only be counted once). After last year’s 106 wins replaced the 2016 Dodgers’ 91 wins within the five-year window, they took over first place atop the list; with this year’s 111 wins replacing the 2017 squad’s 104, they’ve widened their margin:

The Dodgers’ five-year winning percentage is 20 points better than the second-ranked Braves, and they aren’t the only current team on this list; the Astros are here as well, and they too have climbed the charts, moving up from 11th (.599) for the ’16–20 span to sixth (.614) for ’17–21 to fourth. The asterisks aren’t because I’ve unilaterally stripped them of that electronic sign stealing-aided 2017 World Series win over the Dodgers, but because that season is no longer part of their best five-year span by winning percentage, though by the end of this postseason, Houston may have another World Series win or at least a pennant to include. As you can see from those columns, none of these teams won more than three World Series in a five-year span, and only the 1961–65 and 1998–2002 Yankees even won four pennants.

From last year to this one, the Dodgers have also increased the distance between themselves and the rest of the field when it comes to five-year run differential, not surprising following a season in which they outscored their opponents by 334 runs, the highest total of any team since the 1939 Yankees.

In my first iteration of this table, the 2016–20 Dodgers edged the ’15–19 Astros for the table’s top spot, 1.24 to 1.23. The ’17–21 editions of those two teams superseded their predecessors, with the Dodgers widening the gap, 1.50 to 1.34, and the ’18–22 version more than doubled the distance between them. The current edition of the Yankees is here as well, up from 10th on last year’s list. They’re one of two teams without a single World Series appearance during that run, the other being the 2000–04 A’s, though they remain in contention for at least one more day.

As I noted last year, the presence of so many teams of recent vintage — the aforementioned trio plus the 2015–19 Cubs and Red Sox and ’16–20 Cleveland — is likely a reflection of the competitive imbalance we’ve recently seen due to multiple teams tanking. For example, at the other end of the spectrum, the ’17–21 Orioles’ -1.32 runs per game in the second-lowest non-overlapping run differential of the era, ahead of only the 1962–66 Mets’ -1.53 per game, and the ’17–21 Tigers’ -1.11 per game is the seventh-lowest.

In an effort to deal with fluctuating levels of competitive balance, I’ve deployed an idea that harkened back to the 2000 Rob Neyer and Eddie Epstein book, Baseball Dynasties: The Greatest Teams of All Time, which measured teams’ multi-year runs while accounting for the environments in which they played using Standard Deviation Scores (Z-scores). Neyer and Epstein measured how many standard deviations each team was from the league average in terms of both run scoring and run prevention rates, then added the scores together across three-year periods, which was a pretty advanced metric at a time when things like Pythagorean records were only starting to gain traction with an audience outside of OG Bill James readers.

I’ve used a similar approach, sticking with five-year periods and using winning percentages and run differentials (instead of splitting run scoring and prevention), which among other things avoids overcrediting large run differentials in high-scoring periods and dominant teams in expansion (or tanking-heavy) seasons. Again, I removed teams’ overlapping stretches, and again, the 2018–22 Dodgers improved upon their immediate predecessors atop the field:

Because the standard deviation in winning percentage among NL teams was much higher this year than in 2017 (.098 versus .076), the Dodgers took a slight step back from last year’s Win% Score (8.99), but their Run Differential Score increased from 9.93.

In light of this, I think it’s fair to say that whether you choose the 2017–21 iteration or the ’18–22 one, this run by the Dodgers has a strong case for being the greatest of the expansion era when it comes to regular seasons, and pretty much in line with its playoff-era comps when it comes to converting that dominance into championships, which is to say that it’s a very imperfect translation. The Dodgers’ lack of multiple championships prevents them from occupying the same pantheon that squads like the mid-1970s A’s (with their ’72–74 three-peat), the Big Red Machine (with its ’75 and ’76 World Series wins) and the Joe Torre-era Yankees (with four wins from ’96 to 2000, and three from ’97 to ’01 and ’98 to ’02, the two spans that landed on the leaderboards above), but the added rounds of playoffs have changed the game. In case you haven’t noticed, no team has repeated as World Series winners since the 1999–2000 Yankees, and if you’re wondering about other clubs that won multiple World Series in close proximity, such as the Red Sox (2004 and ’07) and Giants (’10, ’14, ’16), remember that those championships were offset by more ordinary seasons, with the Giants even slipping below .500 in the odd-numbered years of those runs. That’s why those teams don’t crack these lists; it doesn’t lessen their accomplishments, but they belong to a different category.

Back to the Dodgers. Like the aforementioned Braves, the Orioles, and the Astros on the lists above, they did win it all once and reached the World Series a couple of other times. If you want to complain about that title coming in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, try prying the ring off Clayton Kershaw’s finger, then reckon with the likelihood that he and his teammates probably lost another ring in that run due to the Astros’ foul play.

That doesn’t lessen the sting of this year’s elimination, though for as great as their regular season was, it’s not as though anyone saw the Dodgers as bulletproof. The losses of Walker Buehler and then Tony Gonsolin inarguably compromised their rotation. Likewise for Blake Treinen and Daniel Hudson when it came to their bullpen, to say nothing of the fact that their efforts to fix Craig Kimbrel proved fleeting, and Dustin May could do only so much in his return from Tommy John surgery. They ran out of time, too, when it came to getting Cody Bellinger, Chris Taylor, and others back to their most productive selves. Mookie Betts went 2-for-14, and even Trea Turner… man, what the hell was Turner doing in Game 3, anyway, with the moment seeming always to find him when he was flat-footed even before he injured his hand?

I don’t think there are particularly valuable lessons to be learned from the Dodgers’ defeat beyond recalling Billy Beane’s old saying, “My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs,” and acknowledging that it’s difficult to keep an aging squad healthy. The depth that helps a team with the strongest 40-man roster get through 162 games doesn’t necessarily foreshadow short-series success. The organization’s ability to find diamonds in the rough, and Roberts’ leadership and patience with his players over the long haul give it competitive advantages as surely as its wealth does, but that hasn’t always translated into playoff victories. It is one thing to recognize that Yency Almonte can be a high-leverage reliever, another to ask him to run the gauntlet against the Padres’ top hitters in three straight games when there’s no margin for error. Sooner or later, Juan Soto gets just about everybody.

And as for hitting in the clutch, for as badly as the Dodgers performed with runners in scoring position, that’s hardly been the sole determinant of success this October:

There’s no secret sauce besides “play better than your opponents,” and even the most dominant teams don’t always do that over a three- or five-game span. That’s part of the fun of October, but one team’s upset is another’s agony.

I do think that with the expansion of the playoff field, there’s reason to be concerned about the players’ place within the game’s economics. If more teams decide that the marginal wins above 87 or so aren’t worth pursuing because even 100 wins won’t improve your odds all that much in this silly October tournament, the long-term result may be a continued slowing of salary growth, because adding that extra big-dollar starting pitcher or hitter may make less sense than it did before. Did you notice that the downturn took place under the 2017–21 CBA, when the novelty of the two-Wild-Card era wore off? It’s laudable that the Padres, who traded for Soto and so many others at the deadline, went all in, but they’re the exceptions. The new format is designed to maximize owners’ profits, not the likelihood of the best team over the long season prevailing, and if that lessens the urges of a few rogue owners to break the bank by building super-teams, so much the better as far as those less inclined to spend are concerned.

That possibility, and ways to improve the current format (e.g., reseeding after the first round), are debates for another day. For now, it’s enough to remember that what transpires in October doesn’t invalidate the highs of the past six months, and the greatness that we’ve witnessed, whether it comes from a dominant Dodgers squad or Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, who can’t seem to get an invitation do the dance. It’s just a different kind of greatness, and one that we, and the Dodgers, must learn to live with.