TORONTO — The Dodgers never expected this to be easy.
The prior 24 World Series champions could have told them: No matter the talent you have, no matter how favorable the situation, repeating as champion is a tall task. Knowing that, the Dodgers set out to do everything in their power to position themselves for a run at another title.
Talented but flawed, deep but limited at times, the Dodgers did not dominate the regular season the way the baseball world imagined they would. But they were able to put it all together when the games meant the most, and now they are champions again.
“When you put on this uniform, you’re expected to win,” Freddie Freeman said. “To do it like we did in [back-to-back seasons], when everyone in Spring Training was expecting us to win — that’s really hard to do. When you have that pressure and you embrace it like we did and you accomplish it, I think that’s what makes it that much sweeter.”
From one dome to another, from Tokyo to Toronto, the Dodgers defended their World Series title in a Game 7 thriller, outlasting the Blue Jays, 5-4, in 11 innings on Saturday night at Rogers Centre to seal their third championship in six years — and the ninth in franchise history.
There had not been a repeat champion since the Yankees’ three-peat from 1998-2000. And this year, the Dodgers were reminded exactly why it is so difficult to defend a title.
“To do what we’ve done in this span of time is pretty remarkable,” manager Dave Roberts said. “I guess let the pundits and all the fans talk about if it’s a dynasty or not, but I’m pretty happy with where we’re at.”
Following the pandemic-shortened 2020 season — the first championship of this era of L.A. baseball — the Dodgers made another deep run but were eliminated in the 2021 NLCS. Then came back-to-back years in which they did not make it out of the NLDS, which sowed doubt regarding their postseason prowess.
The Dodgers carried that label into 2024, when they were again on the brink of being eliminated by the Padres in the NLDS before coming back to win another title. That team reached the promised land despite its injury-ravaged rotation thanks to a valiant effort from the bullpen, which played an outsized role in the championship run.
Heading into this year, the Dodgers knew they had the opportunity to do something special. They knew they made it through 2024 with just enough pitching, but they wanted more than just enough. They were hoping to assemble the greatest pitching staff they had ever had in the postseason, and they swung big in the offseason to reach that goal.
“You look around the room … and everyone wants to participate,” Roberts said. “You just got to figure out when is the right time to call their number, and know when to bet on ’em, when to push ’em, when to pull the plug. It just makes it a lot easier where I just know these guys are ready for whatever moment that I ask of ’em.”
Among the arms the Dodgers brought in were two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell, Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki and leverage relievers Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates. They did all they could to address the few weaknesses on an already stacked roster — but it didn’t take long for the flaws to reveal themselves once the season began.
Some were beyond their control. The injury bug returned, with Snell hitting the IL after two starts, Tyler Glasnow after five and Sasaki after eight. The rotation was not at full strength until August, when it became the best in baseball across the final two months of the regular season.
Others were self-inflicted. The two big relief acquisitions from the offseason — Scott and Yates — were unreliable, and neither was on the World Series roster. The bullpen in general was an eyesore for much of the season, costing the Dodgers several games along the way.
But the stars began to align as the Dodgers grew healthier. By the time September arrived, they had finally seemed to hit their stride, just in time to play in the Wild Card Series for the first time since the best-of-three format was adopted in 2022.
“Big picture-wise, we didn’t play very well,” president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said. “But those big pivotal moments is where our guys really showed up. Those big-swing moments and outcomes of games. Which I think gets at who they are, the compete, how much they care about each other, how much they care about bringing a championship back to L.A. in back-to-back years. I can’t say enough about them.”
The Dodgers were really cruising at that point, sweeping the Reds in two games before vanquishing the Phillies in four in the NLDS and sweeping the Brewers in the NLCS. So much of their success during their postseason run rested on the effectiveness of their rotation — at times, too much.
While Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani had put up historic numbers in the first three rounds, the Blue Jays made the four-headed monster of a rotation look mortal during the World Series. That laid bare a scuffling Dodgers offense, and the aforementioned bullpen, that had been inconsistent for so much of the year.
But everything came together in Game 7. All four starters pitched, all working on short rest. The sputtering offense chipped away, little by little, until Rojas went deep to tie the game with two outs in the ninth and Will Smith gave the Dodgers their first lead of the night with a go-ahead homer in the 11th.
Yamamoto, one day after tossing six innings on 96 pitches, pitched the final 2 2/3 innings — more than any other Dodger — and sealed the win after Mookie Betts turned a decisive double play. The performance locked up the World Series MVP Award for Yamamoto.
“Honestly, the thing I’m most proud of is when you put on the Dodger uniform, you expect to hoist up that trophy,” Max Muncy said. “It’s all about the team. It doesn’t matter about yourself. It’s whatever you can do to help this team win. That’s what we’ve created here and that’s what I’m most proud of.”
The final win was emblematic of the season, in many ways, for the Dodgers: It didn’t look pretty at times. It was an uphill grind. But from Opening Day at Tokyo Dome in mid-March to the triumphant end of the season at Rogers Centre on the first day of November, everything came together when it mattered.
“You can look back at the miles that we’ve logged this year,” Roberts said. “… It’s a long season. We started in Tokyo, and we kept going, and we persevered. And we’re the last team standing.”
And the hope is for that to be the case in future years as well.
“Our overarching goal,” Friedman said, “is for this to be the golden era of Dodger baseball.”
