Last winter, coming off a World Series title, the Los Angeles Dodgers spent the offseason bulletproofing their roster at every position — using their financial might to sign a two-time Cy Young Award-winning pitcher, Blake Snell, and the franchise’s attractiveness to land Roki Sasaki, one of Japan’s most promising young pitchers.
But by late summer, injuries had whittled down a pitching staff once seen as perhaps baseball’s deepest. From Mookie Betts to Freddie Freeman and Shohei Ohtani, their biggest hitters had taken turns slumping. And when they did produce runs, their bullpen often couldn’t protect a lead. After taking a nine-game lead in their division on July 3, the Dodgers, with their league-high $416 million payroll, promptly lost seven straight games.
As late as Aug. 24, the Dodgers’ record was only fourth best in the National League. Along with the New York Yankees and Mets, Los Angeles formed a triumvirate of high-priced rosters that had underwhelmed as the season's final month began.
Fast-forward to Friday. The Dodgers not only made Game 1 of the World Series, but they have also done so amid one of the most dominant postseason runs in MLB history — entering their matchup against American League champion Toronto with a 9-1 postseason record, including five straight wins in which Los Angeles has allowed five total runs.
Only the 1999 Yankees and the 2005 Chicago White Sox have suffered just one loss en route to winning a World Series in the past 30 years, since MLB created the wild card. And only two other teams, the 1998 Yankees and the 2022 Houston Astros, have won a title with two playoff losses.
Manager Dave Roberts said Thursday that he believes this Dodgers team is better than last year’s.
“Shohei’s healthy,” Roberts said. “The starting staff is in much better shape. Position player-wise we’re healthy. So, yeah, I do.”
It is better for all the reasons many expected when the season began — a mixture of elite pitching and hitting, with what Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider called three likely future Hall of Fame players at the top of their lineup in Betts, Freeman and Ohtani.
Ohtani closed out the National League Championships Series with a game hailed as perhaps the greatest in baseball history, hitting three home runs and striking out 10 on the mound.
Toronto has seen, and beaten, elite talent this postseason, having reached its first World Series since 1993 by outlasting the Yankees’ Aaron Judge, who hit 53 home runs, and Seattle and Cal Raleigh, who homered 60 times. However, “you also have to understand,” Schneider said Thursday, “that, I think, you look at Game 4 of the NLCS, I think we’re talking about a totally different kind of animal here that can do things on the field that not many people can do — with all the respect in the world for Aaron Judge and Cal Raleigh."
Yet for all of the Dodgers’ talent and payroll investment, it might not have resulted in a World Series run without a key factor no one would have predicted in spring training.
Unable to identify a consistent closer all season, the team in late September took what could be read as either an inspired or a desperate move: It asked Sasaki, its 23-year-old rookie starter who missed virtually the entire summer with a right shoulder injury and had lost his place in the starting rotation, to become a late-game specialist.
“‘If you don’t want to do it, we understand. There’s risk in it,’” Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ top baseball executive, said of his conversation with Sasaki about the move, per MLB.com. “‘But if you want to, we think there’s a real pathway for you to help us win a championship.’
“We said we don’t want the answer right now, but think about it. Next day, called us and said, ‘I’m in.’”
When Sasaki allowed zero runs in his first two relief opportunities in late September, it was a harbinger of a dominant postseason to come. In eight innings across seven playoff games, Sasaki has allowed one earned run, two walks and just three hits.
Sasaki’s emergence was just one element of a pitching turnaround that began in mid-August and saved the Dodgers' season. Of the four starters the team envisioned leading its rotation — Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and Ohtani — all but Yamamoto spent substantial chunks of this season off the mound recovering from injury, forcing the team to rely on 37-year-old Clayton Kershaw, coming off his own injury-filled 2024, for 23 games. It was reminiscent of the 2024 postseason, when the Dodgers were forced to patch together pitching.
Roberts was glad the team was patient in bringing its pitchers back this summer.
“Redlining those guys, pushing those guys, shortening their rehabs to try to win X amount of games wasn’t the answer, in our opinion,” Roberts said. “So this wasn’t by chance. It was a calculated decision. But, yeah, the cost was in the regular season. We just weren’t optimal throughout the summer.”
All healthy by the postseason’s start, the four main starters not only pitched well, but also went unusually deep into games, covering more innings than any other starters in a four-game LCS since 1990, per MLB.com. That reduced the Dodgers’ reliance on a fragile bullpen that blew 27 saves — as did Sasaki’s surprise role change.
After having allowed 3.95 earned runs and 7.8 hits per nine innings in the regular season, the Dodgers have allowed a 2.45 ERA and 5.5 hits in the postseason. And Dodgers opponents have hit for a postseason-low .173 average. Toronto could provide a much more difficult test; the Blue Jays lead MLB in postseason OPS and slugging percentage and blasted 71 runs in 11 games — 25 more than the Dodgers have scored in 10 games.
Snell told the Los Angeles Times this month that his rocky first season with Los Angeles had been “the hardest year of my career.” Now it could end as the sweetest. Five years after he was on a Tampa Bay team that lost to the Dodgers in the World Series, Snell and the rest of a rejuvenated pitching staff could lead Los Angeles to a second straight title.
“I have a chance to win a World Series, the ultimate team goal," ” Snell said. "This is probably the biggest start of my career."
