Why was the Dodgers’ return to the World Series only a matter of time?
From the outside looking in, the Dodgers know the easy narrative for their season.
About how, after starting the campaign with the highest expectations imaginable, they spent most of the year failing to live up to the hype.
How, during what was already a dismal second-inning slump, they seemed to hit rock bottom when they squandered a no-hitter and three-run lead in a stunning ninth-inning loss in Baltimore last month.
How, in the six weeks that followed, they looked like a revitalized and refocused club, after that nightmarish 15-5 regular-season finale and a torrid run through October — going 9-1 on their way to a National League pennant and a return trip to the World Series, which will begin with Game 1 on Friday night.
However, in hindsight, the Dodgers also insist that the story is not that simple.
They felt that the peaks and valleys of this season were never as extreme as they seemed.
“Obviously the season went the way it went,” veteran third baseman Max Muncy said of a 93-win campaign that, despite including another NL West title, qualified as a disappointment compared to their preseason prognosis. “It’s a long season. It’s a lot of games. We’ve dealt with a lot.”
But, Muncy added as beer and sparkling wine were sprinkled around him in the Dodgers’ clubhouse on Friday night, celebrating the team’s fifth trip to the Fall Classic in the past nine seasons: “We always knew what we had in the clubhouse. We always knew what we had in the ballpark. Now, you’re starting to see it.”
In fact, that was always the plan. Which they thought would happen all the time, even in their worst moments.
Last fall, the Dodgers’ run to the World Series was truly surprising. Their starting rotation was destroyed. Freddie Freeman entered the playoffs with ankle and rib injuries. There were real doubts to overcome in October, after surprise first-round eliminations in the previous two years.
This team also had identifiable turning points, from a clubhouse meeting called by manager Dave Roberts in mid-September, to the NL Division Series comeback against the San Diego Padres that carried them through the remainder of the playoffs.
When they finally reached the top of the mountain, led by the crippled Freeman and heroic displays from the superior bullocks, it was a feat of determination and perseverance; A victory that everyone did not always expect, even internally.
By contrast, this year, the Dodgers looked at their path differently.
On paper, the defining point of the season appears to be the September 6 loss to the Orioles — a day that began with another clubhouse meeting from Roberts, who assembled his team amid a stunning 22-31 slump that extended into early July; Then it ended in disastrous fashion, when Yoshinobu Yamamoto gave up a no-hit showing with two outs in the ninth inning, before the bullpen collapsed to lose the game in a collapse.
“After losing that game to a team that wasn’t even in the playoffs, you started thinking: ‘What’s wrong with us?'” recalls midfielder Miguel Rojas.
But looking back on the past week, several other team members said, the Dodgers never felt the panic that was looming around them.
Instead, they trusted the talent of their record-breaking $415 million roster to eventually emerge. They relied on being healthy and eventually turned 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] “Guys are coming back and healthy.”
Early in the season, after all, the Dodgers were healthy and could click. Their 8-0 start was better than any defending champion in MLB history. Their 29-15 record through mid-May had them on pace for 107 wins.
“Look at the beginning of the season, when we had everyone, we were playing really well,” Muncy said. “If our team was like that Our team All year, we probably would have met those expectations.”
Naturally, the Dodgers did not have a full team for the next three months, when they played exactly .500 baseball (49-49) from May 16 through a September 6 loss at Baltimore.
On the mound, the rotation has been battered by injuries to Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Rocky Sasaki and Tony Gonsolin. This has put increased pressure (and innings) on a bullpen that is still feeling the effects of last October.
The lineup also dealt with its own injury issues. Freeman began the year still nursing his ankle, which required surgery during the offseason. Mookie Betts was behind the eight ball from the start after contracting a stomach virus during spring training. In the summer, Tommy Edman, Teoscar Hernandez and Kiki Hernandez all missed time, then returned to playing at less than 100%. Muncy was in and out of action during the second half as well, suffering a knee injury in July and an oblique strain in August.
In retrospect, Muncy noted that it was a dynamic the Dodgers (who have the oldest average age of an MLB lineup at 30.7 years old, and were coming off a physically grueling postseason the previous year) had always dealt with.
“The truth is – and we all know it, and everyone at the top knows it – our team was not going to make it through the whole season without breaking at some point,” he said. “So it was just a matter of how to deal with those things [low] Moments?”
The problem was that they didn’t always do it well either.
For most of July and August, the Dodgers had one of the lowest-scoring offenses in baseball, suffering from a lack of focus and intensity at times, which some people in the organization later attributed to a World Series hangover.
A faulty bullpen made matters worse, contributing to a 5-20 record in games decided by two innings or fewer from early July to early September.
When Roberts called his clubhouse meeting before the game that day in Baltimore, it was just the latest in a series of speeches he had given to various groups of players on the team in the previous weeks. By that point, the effort to emerge from the second-half malaise had been ongoing for some time.
“We are doing everything we can, holding closed-door meetings, doing everything we can to try to right the ship,” Shohei Ohtani said through an interpreter on the night the Dodgers fell to second in the division after being swept by the Angels in August. “We just have to do better.”
“There’s no sugarcoating this,” Freeman echoed this a few weeks later, when another confusing sweep by the Pittsburgh Pirates in early September was followed by another loss to the Orioles in the team’s home opener in Baltimore. “We need to know this, and know this fast.”
However, this is where the 2025 Dodgers differed from the previous year’s team.
Even at their lowest point, they did not feel hopeless.
Once they get healthy again, they believe playing better will follow.
“Everyone was like, ‘We’re going to hit. We’re going to get good out of the bullpen. It’s just going to happen,'” Freeman said. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll get there.”
The main driver of transformation since then has been promotion. Snell and Glasnow had already returned from their injuries by September, but did not find their rhythm until the final weeks of the year. Yamamoto also got hot, giving up just one run in his three starts after almost no-hitter. Emmett Sheehan and Clayton Kershaw, who were out at the start of the year recovering from surgeries, have thrived to give the rotation extra depth.
Ohtani (while posting MVP numbers offensively) also worked his way into a full rookie workload, after previously being limited to short outings following Tommy John surgery in his second career.
Meanwhile, Sasaki made his late-season return to the bullpen, giving that group an anchor that had previously been missing.
“We started winning because our initial offense was so good,” Freeman said, after the group posted a 2.07 ERA in September and a 1.40 mark in the first three rounds of the playoffs.
“As an offense, when you see a starting pitcher throwing zeros over and over again, it’s like, ‘Come on, just get one, get two, get three.’
This kind of consistent production is really starting to emerge again.
There was better health and improved individual performances, especially from Ohtani, Betts and Freeman (who combined for 22 home runs and 54 RBIs during the Dodgers’ comeback in September). There has been a renewed focus from the coaching staff on the quality of the bats and the team’s offense (helping the Dodgers average 5.6 points per game over the last 20 contests).
There has also been an increased responsibility that players place on each other, challenging themselves to raise the level of their game the closer they get to postseason baseball.
“We always knew we were going to be a really good team in October,” Muncy said. “Once you get to October, it’s ‘OK, it’s game time.’ That’s how we deal with it.”
That mentality continued to play out in the playoffs, where many of the Dodgers’ big moments — from the wheel play in Philadelphia, to the 11-inning marathon that sent them to the NLCS, to the low-scoring winning streak they had against the Milwaukee Brewers — were borne of the veteran’s poise and battle-tested composure.
“It’s an advantage to have such a veteran group,” Kiki Hernandez said. “We played in a lot of big games together.”
Now, they’ll do it again in another World Series appearance, playing exactly the kind of baseball they expected all along.
“It wasn’t until this spring that we showed up, ‘Hey, we need to replicate,'” Muncy recalls. “It wasn’t like we wanted to repeat. It was like, ‘Hey, it’s us.’ needs to “…because that’s how cool we are.”