Why the Los Angeles Dodgers Won't Win Another World Series This Decade
I hope I’m wrong. I hope I’m really wrong. I sincerely hope this blog post ages terribly and shatters my credibility permanently.
I have been a Los Angeles Dodgers fan since the fateful night of October 15, 1988. That was the night when Kirk Gibson hit a walk-off home run off of Dennis Eckersley in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series. I cried that night. As long as I live, I will always remember how I felt watching the lights flicker in the right field pavilion, listening to Vin Scully make the call, and watching Kirk Gibson limp along the basepaths pumping his arms while Tommy Lasorda bounded onto the field like an inflated tube man unmoored. I am a Dodger fan for life. I bleed Dodger blue. I cannot begin to tell you how many Sunday afternoon naps began and ended with the voice of Vin Scully. So I do not write this with any relish. Again, I sincerely hope I’m wrong.
But, unfortunately, I think I’m right in saying that the Los Angeles Dodgers will never win another World Series title under the current management. Watching playoff disappointment after playoff disappointment over the last several years has made me certain that this blog post will stand the test of time.
And there are three reasons why.
The Front Office of the Los Angeles Dodgers Will Never Construct a Team Built to Win in the Playoffs
The front office of the Los Angeles Dodgers is obsessed with team culture. They sign, draft, and trade for baseball players that are talented yes, but who are also principally good and upstanding teammates. Translation: They’re quiet. What this means is that the vast majority of the baseball players brought into the organization are exceedingly adept at blending in. Nobody stands apart. Everyone blends into the background. This makes for an incredibly successful team during the regular season because team chemistry is critical then. Six months and 162 games become a slog with divas and jerks as traveling companions. But, divas and jerks are what you need in the sprint of the postseason. The Dodgers don’t have any. They will never have any because the front office refuses to sign them and when they do (Manny Machado) the divas are forced to conform to the culture. Arrogance is currency when the lights are the brightest. And yet arrogance is intentionally suppressed in an organization that prizes the exact opposite. We need swag. We have none.
Consequently, the Los Angeles Dodgers have spectacular regular seasons and equally spectacular playoff collapses year after year because they enter the postseason with a collection of men who do not want to ruffle any feathers – with ball players who hate to stand out and who want nothing more than to blend into one another in order to create one homogenous ball of understated vanilla. The problem of course is that when nobody wants to stand apart, nobody is available to lead. And when the lights go bright everyone scurries for cover.
Why do you suppose that the only World Series Championship won by this ownership group and front office was won in 2020 when games were played on neutral fields with virtually nobody in the stands? And why do you suppose it is that the vast majority of World Series champions in the last ten years had players whose arrogance bordered on the distasteful?
The Houston Astros won the World Series in 2022 and 2017. Carlos Correa (he may have signed with the Minnesota Twins before the 2022 season, but his arrogant stench stayed in Houston), Alex Bregman and Jose Altuve are divas. It takes a special kind of moxie, a special brand of arrogance to cheat, be unapologetic about it, and still win in the face of worldwide opprobrium.
The Chicago Cubs won the World Series in 2016 with ballplayers like Anthony Rizzo and Javier Baez. Those two embody the definition of smug.
The Washington Nationals won the World Series in 2019 with Juan Soto. Have you seen his shuffle when he takes a ball? It is hard to not categorize that as arrogant. The list goes on and on.
The playoffs are won by men who step up – by men who crave the spotlight and perform while under it. The Los Angeles Dodgers have a collection of men who cower when the lights are brightest because they have been trained to blend in and to never stand apart. And now they have bet the farm on two quiet, unassuming Japanese baseball players to reverse the trend. This in addition to Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, perhaps the two quietest superstars baseball has ever seen. When the team needs a talking to, who on earth is going to do the talking?
Perhaps a better course for the Los Angeles Dodgers moving forward is to make a trade at the trade deadline every single year and intentionally bring in the most obnoxious, arrogant divas in the league and let them go crazy in the playoffs. Jettison them at the start of the next regular season if need be, but the playoffs are a sprint and if there is one thing divas do well, it’s sprinting.
The Los Angeles Dodgers are All Business
Again, this works in the slog of the regular season. You need baseball players that go about their business over a 162-game season. But, the playoffs require a certain level of emotion and urgency – a different gear – that the Dodgers never seem to possess. I’m getting so tired of watching the Dodgers lose a playoff series to a team like the Arizona Diamondbacks all the while looking comatose. Being swept is embarrassing. The team should register some emotion, some disappointment at least. Moreover, I thought baseball was supposed to be fun. I thought the object was to win. The Dodgers always seem so bored when they win and drowsy and lethargic when they lose.
The Los Angeles Dodgers’ front office perennially fields a team of automatons who robotically accumulate wins in the regular season, but cannot seem to muster up any passion to win at a different level. I love Dave Roberts, but I think blame for this particular personality trait falls at his feet. I don’t know how many times I have heard this about Dave Roberts – “he’s so even keeled,” “he’s the same, always positive, whether the Dodgers are winning or losing.” I don’t want my manager to be the same regardless of whether the team is winning or losing. There’s a vast difference between winning and losing. Treating them as though they were the same thing is a pathology that is plaguing this team’s championship aspirations. Get angry sometimes. When your ballplayers are playing a playoff game like it’s game 152 of the regular season that’s a problem. You should say as much.
If the Dodgers do not win the World Series in 2024, they should go shopping for a new manager.
The Los Angeles Dodgers Play the Metrics Way Too Much
Playing the odds over the course of 162 games works well. Play enough hands of blackjack and the house always wins. But, the playoffs are the equivalent of one hand. Anything can happen and statistics mean very little. The playoffs represent an entirely different ballgame – one the Dodgers are ill-prepared for come October.
Position players are routinely platooned in the regular season based on lefty, rightly splits. Starting pitchers are always pulled shy of 100 pitches and they are never even given the opportunity to face the opposing lineup for the third time. Relief pitchers are brought in and substituted out based on lefty, righty splits no matter how well they happen to be pitching. Dave Roberts manages the club based on plans outlined by the front office. He does not manage by feel. He paints by numbers. None of this works very well in the crapshoot that is the postseason. Consequently, this team practices something for 162 games that has very little value when the games really count. And this overemphasis on metrics has two devastating consequences in my humble opinion.
First, this demoralizes the players. If you genuinely believe that a player will never become adept at hitting left-handed pitching and you unabashedly convey that belief to that player by removing him from the game every time a southpaw is on the mound, it should come as no surprise when they fail to hit left-handed pitching. If you have no confidence in the ability of your starting pitchers to navigate an opposing lineup a third time through, it should come as no surprise when they share the same conviction and consequently manifest the inability to get opposing hitters out when they have seen their pitches a third time. If you convey to your relievers that they stink at pitching to right-handed hitters, do not be surprised when they stink at pitching to right-handed hitters.
Players need their confidence bolstered, not retarded. I understand the philosophy that management wants to put players in the best position to succeed, but their approach is not uplifting, it’s crippling. Tell someone they’re no good at something and you will find out, more often than not, that they’re not. People have a greater capacity than they’re given credit for. The Dodgers organization seems constitutionally unwilling to acknowledge that. Players can and will rise to aspirational expectations if you give them the opportunity. Unfortunately, the players are never given that opportunity. Thus, instead of rising to an elevated standard, they fall to the metrics placed on them by management. It’s sad and it’s demoralizing. Player confidence in baseball is fragile – it is like playing with mercury – and a confident player come playoff time is a dangerous player. Playing the metrics destroys confidence and that is the very last thing you want come playoff time.
Second, this prevents player development. How are position players supposed to get good at hitting left-handed pitching in the major leagues if they are never given the opportunity to face left-handed pitching in the major leagues? How are pitchers supposed to learn how to get right-handed batters out in the major leagues if they’re never even given the opportunity to try? How are starting pitchers supposed to learn the best way to navigate a lineup for the third time if they always get pulled after the second go around? By playing the metrics to the hilt, management creates specialists, not well-rounded ball players, and invariably situations do arise in the playoffs where players will eventually have to face situations they are seemingly no good at handling. They will face situations they were not given the opportunity to face all year long and now they have to somehow succeed in those very same situations when they have not been adequately prepared for doing so and now they have to do it on the brightest stage imaginable.
Extra innings, injuries, the vagaries of playoff baseball, or flat-out mismanagement will invariably create situations where certain players will have to face a left-handed pitcher when they haven’t had to all year long. Or relief pitchers will have to get a right-handed batter out when they have been “protected” from those situations during the regular season. Or starting pitchers will have to pitch on three days’ rest to a lineup that will now have faced them four times in five days when throughout the regular season those same starting pitchers were never allowed to pitch beyond 100 pitches or face a lineup a third time through. This is not so much a failure on the part of the players as it is on the managers that “place them in the best position to succeed.”
Conclusion
I sincerely hope I am wrong about all of this. I hope the Los Angeles Dodgers win every World Series in what is left of this current management’s tenure. But, if past is prologue, the Dodgers will not win another World Series until the management changes or its philosophy does. Andrew Friedman became the General Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2014. It has been nearly a decade with one of the highest payrolls in baseball history and the Los Angeles Dodgers have only one World Series title and they only won that because they were allowed to play in a protective bubble – on neutral fields with virtually nobody in the stands.
Insanity is doing the same things over and over again expecting a different result. I’m betting the insanity will continue.