The $1bn World Series champion Dodgers have everything except complacency

HJoining us after the last of the 2024 Major League Baseball season, the Yankee Stadium field was littered with ribbons of gold confetti. Jack Flaherty, who started Game 1 of the World Series for the now champion Los Angeles Dodgers, spotted Shohei Ohtani, the National League’s presumptive Most Valuable Player, in the middle of an interview with the MLB Network crew on a small stage set up in left field.

“Sho!” he shouted over the legion of fans who continued to cheer and chant the players’ names. “Focus!” Flaherty reprimanded him after purposefully distracting Ohtani.

Ohtani jokingly gestured for Flaherty to join him and the pitcher waved him away, turning his attention to hugging a shirtless Walker Buehler, who had both started Game 3 and closed Game 5. The passing moment was notable amid the various vignettes of revelry surrounding the rival ballpark in part because Ohtani is such a charming enigma. Any hint of an identity that isn’t directly tied to excelling in the sport is a thrill to discover. And also because neither Ohtani nor Flaherty, two parts of this year’s postseason success, were with the Dodgers last year. Buehler spent the entire season rehabbing from a second Tommy John surgery. And yet the 2023 team won 100 games.

On December 9 last year, the Dodgers – after eleven straight postseason appearances and the most regular season wins in the MLB in the past decade – did what most pundits expected and still managed to shock the sports world when they announced a prize of $ 700 awarded. m signing with two-way sensation Ohtani – the second coming of Babe Ruth had Babe Ruth stuck with pitching or boasted speed to match his power or was a global superstar.

In short, the best baseball team has added perhaps the best player the game has ever seen.

And Ohtani was just one part of the Dodgers’ offseason spending that saw them spend an estimated $1.2 billion in an attempt to turn a team that had proven it could make it into October into one that could consistently succeed there.

Nearly eleven months later, the Dodgers defeated the legendary New York Yankees four games to one in the World Series. Cause, effect.

Of course it’s not that simple; but honestly, reducing the past year of baseball to that equation would not be incorrect, just incomplete. Ohtani had previously managed to make himself baseball’s main character, even as he languished on an Angels team that failed to convert his presence — or that of another MVP, Mike Trout — into a single postseason -performance. Ohtani’s decision to move to an office 30 miles north of Anaheim to LA put a spotlight on a Dodgers team already accustomed to taking center stage.

The star-studded Dodgers would be a dynasty, the defining team of the modern era — they’re already the oft-mentioned envy of other franchises aspiring to such “sustainable” success — if it weren’t for the pesky detail that they won before only one title during this dominance. Further mitigation: That one ring came in the Covid-shortened 2020 season, uncommemorated by a championship parade, marred by context most of us would rather have a memory hole.

Rather than regroup after each premature and abrupt exit in October, the Dodgers have repeatedly doubled their profits, somehow just as adept at getting their money’s worth on players who had already won MVPs elsewhere, while they are upcycling undervalued reclamation projects.

“I think we have the best organization in baseball with consistency, but you still have to go out there and play the schedule,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, a man who is apparently being talked about in connection with the Hall of Fame of the hot seat depending on how his most recent playoff series went.

“That’s how I think about it every year,” Dodgers chairman Stan Kasten said after Wednesday’s game about whether the superlative was deserved. “But that’s not how the postseason is built. The postseason has its ups and downs. In a series of three, five or seven games, not only the best team wins. You have to take breaks. This year we were the best team and had some breaks along the way.”

Wednesday evening’s decisive match in the Bronx seemed full of fortuitous breaks in the form of miscues and missed opportunities by the opponent. But if anyone tries to tell you that the Yankees gave the Dodgers a championship with the mistakes and mental errors that lead to unearned runs, don’t believe them.

Yes, during the series — like when Yankees slugger and American League MVP-in-waiting Aaron Judge struck out seven in the first four games — it seemed like the Yankees lost more than the Dodgers won. But it was the relative absence of such meltdowns among the Dodgers themselves and the ability to capitalize on them when they were the beneficiary of such sloppiness that propelled Los Angeles to the championship. In a titanic game, the Dodgers did the little things right and that turned out to be the difference.

Even the Dodgers could consider themselves brave by the time they took the field on Halloween night because of how stumbling the team was. This was true for a man: Ohtani was struggling after dislocating his shoulder on a tricky slide earlier in the series; World Series MVP Freddie Freeman tied the record for RBIs in the Fall Classic despite an ankle that left him limping for National League Championship Series inductions – on a team-wide scale. In the regular season, the Dodgers led MLB in player games missed in IL stints.

That’s why, even in season, they kept adding. Flaherty — who faltered in Game 5 and forced the bullpen to convert the bulk of its outs but had been a boon to a decimated rotation — was a trade deadline acquisition. Just like NLCS MVP Tommy Edman. And Michael Kopech, who surrendered runs in just two of his 12 relief appearances this postseason. This Dodgers team, unlike many of the recent iterations, was not quite a super team and failed to reach the century mark in wins during the regular season. And yet, every piece missing from this carefully constructed roster could have meant another offseason coming early.

If there is a moral to the Dodgers’ title in 2024, it is to never be complacent. Or maybe it’s to win the obvious ways and acquire undeniable talent at any cost.

Or perhaps the almost compulsive convergence of the two that seemed to define this team speaks to a larger lesson. We can know that October’s small sample size is unfair and to some extent uncontrollable, and that the Dodgers have established themselves as a model for a modern franchise through their regular season record. And yet, what everyone in baseball really wants is a ring and a parade. No amount of sustained excellence can match the sticky end to the season with champagne, cigars perfumed the air, like champions.