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during los angeles With the Dodgers wreaking havoc on the NL pennant in October, the defending World Series champions have exactly the legendary reputation that many baseball people long feared they would become.
The Dodgers are 9-1 in the postseason — and they’ve looked like a juggernaut while doing so, with nearly flawless starting pitching and a deep, flexible lineup producing major hits and electrifying highlights. they swept milwaukee brewers out of the NL Championship Series with a 5–1 victory on Friday night, which included an iconic three-homer, 10-strikeout performance. shohei ohtaniTheir $700 million superstar.
dodgers beat Yankees To win it all last year, and they return to the World Series on Friday with a chance to become MLB’s first repeat champions in a quarter century. They are in the Fall Classic for the fifth time in nine seasons, making 13 consecutive postseason appearances.
But deniers have claimed for years that it is bad for baseball if a team ever becomes that successful. The Dodgers’ reckless spending of their extensive resources could upset the competitive balance of the majors, and they could also harm the Dodgers by fueling some owners’ desire for a salary cap in the next labor negotiations.
The players and coaches in Dodger blue – and the more than 4 million fans who packed Dodger Stadium throughout the season – had no interest in worrying about what their success meant to other people as they celebrated another unforgettable night.
Manager Dave Roberts said it best when he took the microphone on the field stage after his team beat the 97-win Brewers.
Roberts shouted, “I’ll tell you, before this season started, they said the Dodgers were ruining baseball.” “Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball!”
The crowd at Chávez Ravine applauded a team that has repeatedly made the most of its advantages – especially over the past two years.
The Dodgers will spend approximately $509.5 million on players this season, including their $341.5 million payroll and an estimated luxury tax of $168 million. This dwarfs the spending of their potential World Series opponents from Seattle ($167.2 million payroll) and Toronto ($252.7 million payroll and an estimated $13.4 million in taxes).
But why are the Dodgers enjoying this success instead of the Mets, Yankees, Phillies and other teams that can spend roughly at the Dodgers’ level?
At this point, it’s clearly because Los Angeles has a strong organization from top to bottom, from player development and scouting. Baseball boss Andrew Friedman makes the game’s most prudent choices between free-agent rewards and veteran trade targets — and when he gets it wrong, his mistakes don’t sting as much because of the overall depth of his roster.
“It’s a very talented group, but it’s (also) a very focused and very hungry group,” said Roberts, the first manager in several decades to win five pennants in his first 10 seasons with one club. “So I think when you get those ingredients, they’re hard to beat. And we pay attention to the little things. We’re hungry. We don’t really care what came before.”
Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddy Freeman, Teoscar Hernandez, Tommy Edman, Max Muncy, Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow all began their major league careers elsewhere, but the Dodgers recognized them and gave them what their previous clubs couldn’t or wouldn’t give.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki chose to coach the Dodgers out of Japan the previous two winters because of the culture and opportunity created by the club’s past successes.
Snell faced the Dodgers in the 2020 World Series with Tampa Bay, and he emerged from the loss with praise for the club. He seized the opportunity to join LA as a free agent last winter.
“That’s why I came here,” said Snell, who has thrown 21 innings of two-run ball with 28 strikeouts in three impressive playoff starts. “Now we’re at the World Series, so I can’t wait to prove what I can do out there.”
Filled with high-priced additions like Blake Treinen and Tanner Scott who have yet to perform — not even with a very leaky bullpen — that has kept the Dodgers from romancing during the postseason, outscoring their opponents 46-28 overall.
And remembering that Los Angeles came into dominant form quite late in a tumultuous regular season doesn’t fit the false narrative.
The Dodgers won 93 games and the NL West title, but they finished with only the ninth-best winning percentage during their 13 straight playoff seasons – which is tied for the second-longest streak of postseason appearances in MLB history.
Los Angeles did not run away with its division, trailing San Diego by August 23 and defeating the Padres by only three games. Due to a long midseason stretch of mediocre play, the Dodgers finished third in the NL and had to play in the wild-card series for the first time since 2021.
But that could be a good thing: The Dodgers battled rust in the recent October Division Series after sitting out a week, but they’ve been locked in since their postseason opener on Sept. 30, just 48 hours after the regular season ended.
Los Angeles swept Cincinnati by 18 runs in the two wild card games, then the Dodgers handled NL East champion Philadelphia with impressive ease in four games, winning twice on the road and surviving an 11-inning final out of a tough Game 3 loss.
The Dodgers then overwhelmed the Brewers, who had the NL’s best record in the regular season, and made it to the postseason for the seventh time in eight seasons, with fans eager for their franchise’s first World Series appearance. Even before Ohtani’s supernatural Game 4 appearance, the Dodgers’ playoff savvy and top-tier talent was plentiful.
However, the star-studded Dodgers are no tired group. When each of Ohtani’s three homers went over the outfield fence, they jumped and celebrated wildly with their fans in the dugout, feeling just as giddy in disbelief as the paying customers.
The Dodgers may be an industry-changing juggernaut, but that industry is still child’s play.
“It was special,” said Freeman, last year’s World Series MVP. “We’ve been playing really good baseball for a while now, and that’s essentially what happened today.”
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AP MLB: https://apnews.com/MLB