Why the Dodgers’ return to the World Series was only a matter of time

Outside, Dodgers I know a simple story about my season.

About how, after the start of the campaign with the highest expectations imaginablethey spent most of the year failing to live up to the hype.

How, during an already dismal second-half slump, they seemed to hit rock bottom when they squandered a no-hitter and a three-run lead in the game stunning loss in the ninth inning in Baltimore last month.

How they have looked like a renewed and refocused club over the past six weeks, following a disastrous 15-5 regular-season loss and a torrid 9-1 march to October en route to the National League pennant and return trip to the World Serieswhich begins with the first game on Friday night.

However, in hindsight, the Dodgers also argue that the story is not that simple.

According to them, the peaks and troughs of this season have never been as extreme as they seem.

“Obviously the season went the way it did,” the veteran third baseman. Max Muncy recounted a 93-win campaign that, despite another NL West title, qualified as a disappointment compared to their preseason projections. “It's a long season. There will be a lot of games. We've dealt with a lot.”

But Muncy added, as beer and sparkling wine were splashed around him in the Dodgers' clubhouse Friday night to mark the team's fifth trip to the fall classic in the last nine seasons: “We always knew what we had in the clubhouse. We always knew what we had on the field. Now you're starting to see it.”

This really was always the plan. Something that, even in their worst moments, they believed would always happen.

Last fall, the Dodgers broke through to World Series Championship it was truly amazing. Their starting rotation was destroyed. Freddie Freeman entered the playoffs with ankle and rib injuries. And it was necessary to overcome real October doubts after the upset first round elimination That two previous years.

This team also had notable turning points, such as the confidence-inspiring meeting at the club called by the manager. Dave Roberts in mid-September for a return to the NL Division Series vs. San Diego Padres this helped them reach the end of the playoffs.

When they finally reached the mountaintop, led by a limping Freeman and heroic performances from a superb bullpen, it was achieving determination and perseverance; a triumph whose coming, even within the country, not everyone always foresaw.

This year, on the other hand, the Dodgers looked at their path differently.

On paper, the defining moment of the season seemed to be a loss to the Orioles on September 6, a day that began with another meeting in the clubhouse for Roberts, who had rallied his team amid a stunning 22-31 slump that stretched into early July; then it ended disastrously when Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up a no-hit bid with two outs in the ninth before a fading bullpen imploded and lost the game in a collapse.

“Losing that game to a team that's not even in the playoffs, you start thinking, 'What's wrong with us?'” Infielder Miguel Rojas reminded.

But looking back on the past week, some other teammates said the Dodgers never fully felt the panic swirling around them.

Instead, they trusted the talent of their record-breaking $415 million roster to eventually surface. They expected to recover and then eventually turn the ship around.

“We've been there before,” Freeman said. “We knew we were okay.”

“At some point we were going to start clicking,” Muncy added. “[We just needed] the guys are coming back and recovering.”

After all, the Dodgers were healthy and great to start the season. Their 8-0 start was better than any defending champion in MLB history. Their 29-15 record through mid-May gave them 107 wins.

“You look at the beginning of the season when we had everyone, we played really well,” Muncy said. “If our team were our team a whole year, perhaps we would live up to these expectations.”

The Dodgers, of course, did not have a full team for much of the next three months, when they played exactly .500 baseball (49-49) from May 16 until the September 6 loss in Baltimore.

On the mound, rotation was hampered by injuries. Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Rocky Sasaki And Tony Gonolin. That added stress (and innings) to a bullpen still feeling the effects of last October.

The squad also solved its injury problems. Freeman started the year still nursing his anklewhich required off-season surgery. Mookie Betts was sidelined from the start in the eighth with a stomach virus during spring training. In summer Tommy Edman, Teoscar Hernandez And Kike Hernandez every time he missed and then came back playing less than 100%. Muncy also left the game in the second half after suffering a knee injury in July and a strained oblique muscle in August.

In retrospect, Muncy noted that this was a dynamic that the Dodgers (who have an average MLB senior age of 30.7 and went through a physically taxing postseason last year) have always struggled with.

“The reality is — and we all know it, everyone up there knows it — our team is not going to get through the entire season without breaking down at some point,” he said. “So it was just: how do you withstand these [low] moments?

The problem was that they didn't always handle it well either.

For much of July and August, the Dodgers had one of the highest-scoring offenses in baseball, due to an occasional lack of focus and intensity among some people in the organization. later attributed to World Series hangover.

Their faulty bullpen only made matters worse, contributing to a 5-20 record in games decided by two runs or fewer from early July to early September.

When Roberts called the club's pregame meeting in Baltimore that day, it was only the latest in a string of speeches he had given to various groups of team players over the previous weeks. By this point, attempts to overcome the second-half crisis had been going on for some time.

“We're doing everything we can, holding closed meetings, doing everything we can to try to turn things around,” Shohei Ohtani said through a translator on a night when the Dodgers fell to second place in the division after being overtaken by the Angels in August. “We just need to do better.”

“There's no sugarcoating it,” Freeman repeated a few weeks later, when another baffling victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates in early September was followed by another loss to the Orioles in the game. team's first match in Baltimore. “We need to figure this out, and we need to figure it out fast.”

However, this is where the 2025 Dodgers differed from last year's team.

Even at their lowest level, they did not feel hopeless.

They believed that once they were healthy again, the game would get better.

“Everyone was saying, 'We're going to hit.' We're going to throw well out of the bullpen. It's just going to happen,” Freeman said. “We'll figure it out. We'll get there.”

Since then, the main driving force of change has been pitching. Snell and Glasnow had returned from injury by September, but didn't find their rhythm until the final weeks of the year. Yamamoto also got hot, missing just one run in three starts after barely hitting. Emmett Sheehan and Clayton Kershawwho was out earlier in the year recovering from surgeries, thrived to give the rotation additional depth.

Ohtani (posting MVP's numbers insultingly) also made his way up to the starting player's full workload, after previously being limited to short outings from his Second Tommy John surgery in his career.

Meanwhile Sasaki did late season return to bullpengiving this group an anchor that was previously missing.

“We started winning because our starting pitching was so good,” Freeman said after the group produced a 2.07 ERA in September and a 1.40 mark in the first three rounds of the playoffs.

“When you see your starting pitcher throw zeros over and over again, it's like an insult: 'Come on, just take one, take two, take three.'

This kind of consistent production has really started to make a comeback.

Health improved and individual performance improved, especially for Ohtani, Betts and Freeman (who combined for 22 home runs and 54 RBIs during the Dodgers' resurgence in September). There was new emphasis from the coaching staff on the quality of his batting and team offense (helping the Dodgers average 5.6 runs per game in their last 20 contests).

Players also have an increased level of accountability for each other, challenging themselves to improve their performance as they move closer to postseason baseball.

“We always knew we were going to be a very, very good team come October,” Muncy said. “Once you get to October, you're like, 'OK, it's game time.' That's how we look at it.”

That mentality continued into the playoffs, where many of the Dodgers' biggest moments – starting with the wheel game they turned into in Philadelphiato an 11-inning marathon that sent them to the NLCSto line inconclusive victories they came out against the Milwaukee Brewers with veteran composure and battle-tested composure.

“Having such a group of veterans is an advantage,” Quique Hernandez said. “We played in a lot of big games together.”

And now they'll do it again in another World Series appearance, playing the kind of baseball they expected all along.

“When we showed up this spring, it was, ‘Hey, we need to do this again,’” Muncy recalls. “It didn't look like something we wanted to do again. It was like, “Hey, we need to”… Because that’s how good we are.”