The Dodgers Embellish Their Playoff Dynasty With a Second Championship

NEW YORK — By closing out the Yankees with an unexpected World Series-clinching save two days after his brilliant Game 3 start put the Dodgers on the brink of a title, Walker Buehler had made a statement. Now, speaking to Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal and millions of viewers moments after striking out Alex Verdugo on a knuckle curve in the dirt, he had a message: “For our organization, we deserve this. We’ve been playing really good baseball for a lot of years. Everyone talks shit about 2020 and whatever, but there’s not much they can say about it now.”

Buehler was referring to the way that the Dodgers’ streak of 12 consecutive playoff appearances, which includes 11 NL West flags and three previous pennants, had been downplayed by some critics because the team not only had won only one championship during that epic run, but also because its lone title had followed the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. For many of the dozen core members who have remained with the team since (or in Enrique Hernández’s case, returned after a stint elsewhere), the application of that asterisk chafed.

“Get that Mickey Mouse shit out of your mouth,” said a champagne-and-beer-soaked Max Muncy during the ensuing clubhouse celebration, referring to the slight. “Now it’s two [championships], baby. Now it’s two… What are you going to say now?”

Others Dodgers, such as Gavin Lux and Will Smith, framed their victory in terms of playing in front of hometown fans in Los Angeles instead of in the COVID-created neutral site in Arlington, Texas, and in rewarding their support with a parade. “Not having the fans really get to enjoy it during the COVID year obviously, and not having that [parade] kind of sucks. Hopefully we can just get rid of the whole short season thing, people not counting it, get that taste out of our mouth,” said Lux, who as a rookie was on and off the postseason roster in 2020, before Game 3.

“We’ve been wanting a parade since 2020. We couldn’t do it because of the circumstances, but I can’t wait to celebrate with our fans, the best fans in baseball,” Smith said.

Lux and Smith were echoing manager Dave Roberts, who frequently had cited the desire to give the fans a parade as a motivator for his team. “I’m going to take the high road,” said Roberts when asked how much it irritated him to hear people undermine the organization’s feat of 12 straight postseason berths (the last nine on his watch) because it had only one title. “It’s hard to win a championship regardless of what your team is like. It’s hard, and there’s a reason why there hasn’t been a repeat champion since the Yankees did it [in 2000]. It clearly speaks to the difficulty, the playoff format, all that stuff.

“I’m going to be in the moment, and I’m going to enjoy the heck out of this one. I’m sure there’s no asterisk on this one.”

In winning for the second time during this lengthy run, the Dodgers separated themselves from what we might call the other playoff dynasties, clubs with sustained runs of excellence that culminated in only a single World Series win, as opposed to the more traditional notion of a dynasty that comes with capturing consecutive championships, à la the 1972–1974 A’s, 1975–1976 Reds, 1998–2000 Yankees, and their ilk. Earl Weaver, for example, managed the Orioles to six division titles and four pennants from 1969–1979, but only won the World Series in 1970. Bobby Cox led the Braves to 14 consecutive postseason appearances from 1991–2005 — division titles in every year except the strike-shortened 1994 season, when there were no playoffs — and five World Series appearances, yet 1995 was the only year in which Atlanta won it all during that stretch. Since winning four World Series in five years with Joe Torre managing from 1996–2000, the Yankees have added four pennants and 19 playoff appearances under Torre and successors Joe Girardi and current skipper Aaron Boone, but Girardi’s 2009 team is the only one to win a championship.

(I’m not sure where in this definition the Red Sox fit. They made six playoff appearances — but won only one division title — and two championships from 2003–2009. They also made 10 playoff appearances, won five division titles, and four championships from 2003-2018, but the middle period from 2010-2015 includes three fifth-place, sub-.500 finishes. If we rule out the longer stretch due to that fallow period, their two-championship stretch puts them on par with the Dodgers, albeit with less dominant regular seasons.)

The aforementioned Orioles, Braves, and Yankees playoff dynasties span the entirety of the division play era, which began in 1969, and the expansion of the postseason from four teams (1969–1993 except for 1981) to eight (1981, 1995–2011), then 10 (2012–2019, 2021), an unwieldy 16 in 2020 (a point in those Dodgers’ favor for surviving all four rounds) and since 2022, a dozen. As the playoff field has grown, some major upsets have brought scrutiny to the changing format, particularly given the infrequency with which the team with the best overall regular season record has won: seven times in 25 years from 1969–1993, and now just eight times in the 30 post-strike seasons.

Roberts’ Dodgers have become all too familiar with such upsets, getting bounced in the Division Series by the Nationals (who won 13 fewer games) in 2019, the Padres (who won 22 fewer games) in 2022, and the Diamondbacks (who won 16 fewer games) in 2023, and in the NLCS by the Braves (who won 18 fewer games) in 2021. As I pointed out after their shocking ouster in 2022, upsets in short postseason series are a cornerstone of baseball history, and practically as old as postseason series themselves. In 1906, in the third modern World Series, the 93-win White Sox, aka “The Hitless Wonders,” took down their crosstown rivals, the 116-win Cubs, four games to two. Anything can happen in a short series; David sometimes fells Goliath. We remember and revere the unlikely winners as much as the powerhouses.

Given the increasing disconnect between the regular season and the postseason, and the prevalence of such playoff dynasties — a group that also includes the 2015–2024 Astros, with their nine postseason appearances, four pennants and two championships, one of which some feel deserves a significant asterisk itself (yet another sore spot for the Dodgers) — it’s worth appreciating and contextualizing the regular season dominance of such teams over a longer timeframe. After the Dodgers’ 2020 win, based upon the length of Roberts’ tenure to that point, I settled on five-year rolling runs in terms of winning percentage, run differential, and a z-score-driven combination of the two. As you can see in the table below, the five-year winning percentage of the 2019-2023 team is the highest of this Dodgers run. It also happens to be the highest of any team during the expansion era, which began in 1961:

In repeating this exercise on a near-annual basis, I’ve used only the best stretch within overlapping ones, such that each team-season could be included only once. Here, however, I’ve expanded the table to include the other Roberts-era runs that surpass the 1995–1999 Braves, with the 2020–2024 edition ranked second — and it’s the only one of the Dodgers’ four that encompasses two championships instead of one. The result is similar if I switch to run differential:

Again it’s the 2019–2023 version with the highest rolling five-year run differential, but this time the 2020–2024 club ranks third, yet still ahead of every other non-Dodgers team in the span, and the only one with two championships. In the interest of timeliness, I’m filing this before crunching the numbers for the z-score version, but I anticipate it would mirror one of the two tables above, and with its championship bookends, I can understand preferring it to its surrounding brethren on a conceptual or aesthetic level beyond the decimals.

All of which is to say that this Dodgers run has been something special, particularly the 2024 squad. While this team did not win 100 games or outscore its opponents by more than one run per game as its recent full-season predecessors did, Roberts’ charges showed exceptional resiliency in overcoming so many situations that could have derailed them, starting with the explosive March revelations regarding newcomer Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara. In April, after a federal investigation, Mizuhara was discovered to have stolen some $16 million from Ohtani in order to cover gambling debts that he had concealed from the two-way superstar. Also, there were the struggles, injuries, and performance-related demotions of Buehler and Bobby Miller; the overlapping losses of Muncy, Mookie Betts, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto for at least eight weeks apiece due to injuries; the illness of Freddie Freeman’s 3-year-old son Maximus that took him away from the team for 10 days when they were already shorthanded; and the limited contributions from Clayton Kershaw as he returned from shoulder surgery — all of those helped the red-hot Padres and Diamondbacks chip away at Los Angeles’ NL West lead, which was as large as 8.5 games on July 23, and pull within two games on August 15. A series of late-season gut punches knocked Tyler Glasnow, Gavin Stone, and Kershaw out of consideration for the postseason roster, and threatened to do the same to Freeman, who sprained his right ankle in the fourth-to-last game of the regular season.

It would have been understandable, if not actually forgiven in some quarters (including, perhaps, the Dodgers’ front office), if this team had fallen by the wayside before winning a title. That the Dodgers instead rose to the occasion and next-man-upped it to a championship is a testament to Roberts and to clubhouse leaders such as Betts and Freeman, who demonstrated their selflessness and sacrifice for the good of the team along the way. Betts moved from second base to shortstop to right field without complaint in order to help optimize the lineup. Freeman endured several hours of pregame physical therapy just to suit up in the postseason, and it turns out not just for his high ankle sprain. As ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported on Thursday, Freeman was also playing this postseason with broken rib cartilage. Ohtani followed their example, and didn’t miss a game after suffering a left shoulder subluxation in Game 2 of the World Series, and if his performance suffered, his presence in the lineup still forced the Yankees to approach him with extreme caution. Nobody on the roster could fail to notice the examples set by this trio of MVP winners, which among other things led the Dodgers to band together, away from their families, during their downtime between rounds, focusing on fine-tuning their performances and building team chemistry — there, I said it – in hopes of overcoming the dreaded Curse of the Bye Week. These Dodgers, by the way, became the first bye team to advance to the NLCS since the new format was implemented. At various points during the team’s championship run, the trio of MVPs came up huge, none more so than Freeman, who hit the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history, tied a single-season record by homering in four consecutive World Series games, and set a multi-season record by doing so in six straight dating back to 2021. He also drove in the Dodgers’ second and third runs in their five-run fifth-inning rally in Game 5, and was named MVP for his inspiring performance.

In navigating a short-handed pitching staff through three postseason series, totaling 16 games, and coming out on top, Roberts ran circles around the skippers in the opposite dugouts. Thanks to the slack in the postseason schedule, he was able to use Buehler, Yamamoto, and deadline acquisition Jack Flaherty to cover 12 of those starts, but that still required him to call upon his bullpen to soak up four full games.

The first one, Game 4 of the Division Series against the Padres, came when the Dodgers were down two games to one and thus facing elimination; not only did they not have a traditional starter, but Freeman sat out that game due to lingering trouble with his ankle. Somehow, the result was picture perfect, as “starter” Ryan Brasier and seven other relievers scattered nine baserunners while keeping the Padres off the scoreboard in an 8-0 win. Brasier’s second turn, in Game 2 of the Championship Series against the Mets, didn’t go as well. He surrendered a first-inning run, and then rookie Landon Knack allowed five in the second inning; the silver lining, at least, was that Roberts could turn to lower-leverage relievers Brent Honeywell and Edgardo Henriquez to cover the final five innings in what ended up as a 7-3 loss to even the series.

The third bullpen game was in NLCS Game 6, and it was an absolute grind, a reminder that winning a championship doesn’t happen without winning ugly at least once in awhile. With a chance to clinch the pennant, Roberts started Michael Kopech. The Dodgers acquired Kopech in a deadline-day three-way trade with the White Sox and Cardinals and then straightened him out, helping him recapture the dominance he was capable of with his overpowering fastball. He scuffled from the outset of his appearance, walking two hitters, throwing a wild pitch, and giving up a run, but the Dodgers countered with two of their own against Sean Manaea in the bottom of the first. While four of the Dodgers’ next six pitchers each allowed a single run, and only one — closer Blake Treinen — turned in a clean inning (the first of his two frames), the offense erupted for 10 runs as the team punched its ticket to its fourth World Series in eight years.

The seven relievers in that game — Kopech, Ben Casparius, Anthony Banda, Brasier, Evan Phillips, Daniel Hudson, and Treinen, in that order — were fresh and available because Roberts made a point of avoiding them in Game 5. Flaherty, who started that one, was under the weather according to his manager — “He was kind of on day 3 of something, so he just didn’t have the strength,” he said ahead of Wednesday’s start — and lacking his typical fastball velocity. He was hit for eight runs over three innings in the single worst start of the postseason by Game Score. For as clear as it was that he didn’t have it that day, when he netted just two swings and misses in a 32-pitch first inning while serving up a three-run homer to Pete Alonso, Roberts let him wear it long enough to give up five more runs in the third. The manager then called upon Honeywell, who threw a career-high 4 2/3 innings while giving everybody else but Banda (who recored the final out in a 12-6 loss) the night off. “He said I won us Game 6,” a champagne-drenched Honeywell told SportsNetLA reporter David Vassegh, referring to Muncy, who was on hand to make sure that the 29-year-old righty — a five-time Baseball America Top-100 prospect who lost all of 2018–2019 to Tommy John surgery, 2020 to the pandemic, and most of 2022 to a stress reaction in his elbow, and who was picked up off waivers from the Pirates because the Dodgers needed a spot starter for their final game before the All-Star break — got his due for his selfless performance.

It was not his last. For Game 4 of the World Series, with a chance to sweep the Yankees, Roberts turned to Casparius, a 25-year-old rookie who had already made as many appearances in the postseason (three) as he had in the regular season. Though he walked three hitters, he lasted two innings and gave up just one run, but Hudson followed by serving up a grand slam to Anthony Volpe in the third, giving the Yankees their first lead since just before Freeman’s walk-off grand slam in Game 1. Roberts could have tried to put out the fire by calling upon lefties Banda or Alex Vesia to face Volpe with the bases loaded, but he stuck to his guns… by refusing to draw them.

“I’m not going to go get somebody in the third inning to get Volpe where [Hudson] just popped a guy up,” said Roberts. “I’m not going to use him in the third inning right there,” he added, not making clear which of his lefties he meant. Roberts then called upon the 27-year-old Knack, who hadn’t pitched in 15 days. He held the Yankees to one run over four frames as the Dodgers clawed their way back into the game, cutting the score to 5-4 before Knack allowed a solo homer to Austin Wells. Again Roberts resisted the temptation to turn to his A-list relievers to buy time while the Dodgers mounted a comeback; if nothing else, they might’ve kept the score close enough to have forced Boone to use closer Luke Weaver for one more inning, after he’d already recorded four outs. Instead, Honeywell followed Knack and yielded five runs in an inning that was absolutely excruciating to witness; the righty threw 50 pitches, more than any other pitcher has working an inning or less in a postseason game, at least during the pitch count era (1988 onward).

“We knew it was a bullpen game. As far as outcomes, to have six guys in your ‘pen that are feeling good, rested, I feel good about that. And being up 3-1,” said Roberts, again focusing on the bigger picture.

“The mindset… was just try to keep us in the game, try to eat as many outs as I could so we could save the dawgs for tomorrow,” said Knack of his own effort, using Honeywell’s term for the team’s higher-leverage relievers.

While only three of the previous 24 World Series teams down three games to none had even forced a Game 5 — the last of them before the Yankees was the 1970 Reds against the Orioles — it nonetheless felt like Roberts and the Dodgers were underestimating, or at least underselling, the tall task of beating Gerrit Cole and company for a second time in the series.

That task became even taller when Flaherty, who had rebounded from his rough NLCS Game 5 start by allowing just two runs across 5 2/3 innings in Game 1 opposite Cole, again imploded. He allowed three runs in the first inning on back-to-back homers by Aaron Judge and Jazz Chisholm Jr., then yielded another one in the second. For all of the Dodgers’ game-planning, Roberts admitted afterward that they had not addressed a scenario in which Flaherty got knocked out early. “Obviously if I have to use the potential Game 7 starter in the ninth inning, that just speaks to we didn’t have enough pitching,” he said. “I was trying to get as much as I could out of Jack.”

In other words, Roberts was winging it. Banda, Brasier, and Kopech limited the Yankees to just one more run (a third-inning Giancarlo Stanton solo homer, allowed by Brasier) before the offense mounted an unlikely comeback aided by the physical errors of Judge (dropping Tommy Edman’s routine fly ball) and Volpe (throwing wide of third on Smith’s grounder in an attempt to force out Enrique Hernández), and a mental error by Cole, who inexplicably failed to cover first base on Betts’ 49.8-mph bouncer up the line. After a scoreless frame from Vesia, Brusdar Graterol began his inning by walking Juan Soto and Judge, which led to a run before Roberts turned to Treinen, who retired seven of the nine hitters he faced while throwing a season-high 42 pitches.

Roberts’ game plan didn’t even include Buehler, who prior to his Game 5 appearance had appeared to cap a difficult return from his second Tommy John surgery — a 5.38 ERA, a hip injury, a demotion to Triple-A — with 12 scoreless innings from the middle of NLDS Game 2 through a brilliant five-inning start in World Series Game 3. “Seventh inning, he just said that he’s going to be available,” said Roberts. “I didn’t see him — see that even coming into play, but obviously as the game sort of played on, we had to keep the game close. Our guys were fighting, so I just felt that at that point in time, I was going to be all in.”

Buehler, whose history of big games goes back at least as far as his seven shutout innings in Game 3 of the 2018 World Series (the one won by Muncy’s walk-off homer in the 18th), said after his Game 3 start, “As kind of brutal as it is to say, it takes that adrenaline and stuff to really get me going mentally.” He couldn’t have asked for a more charged-up situation, and he couldn’t have delivered in much more emphatic fashion while offering yet another example of the 2024 Dodgers’ resilience and resolve. They are not only worthy world champions in their own right, but a centerpiece of perhaps the greatest 21st century playoff dynasty.