The Dodgers have cleared one of baseball’s toughest hurdles by repeating as champions. Now, their focus turns to an even rarer challenge: a bid for a three-peat.
The Dodgers have the talent to pull it off, but you could have said the same thing about all of the other teams that went back-to-back. And yet, in MLB history, only two franchises have won three straight: the Yankees (1936-39, ’49-53, ’98-2000) and Athletics (1972-74).
Looking ahead to 2026, Los Angeles’ quest for a third straight title could hinge on these key factors working in their favor.
1. Will their position-player group continue to age gracefully?
As MLB.com’s Andrew Simon detailed recently, one of the first things that jumps out about the Dodgers’ star-studded lineup is how many of their players are well past the age of 30.
Of course, age hasn’t been an issue for the Dodgers so far. Betts and Hernández showed some regression at the plate in 2025, and Muncy has been limited to 173 games over the past two seasons due to injuries, but L.A. still scored the second-most runs in the Majors in 2025.
2. Will their fragile rotation hold up?
No team has more starting pitching talent than the Dodgers, but injuries remain a major concern.
Tyler Glasnow has never made more than 22 starts in a season. Blake Snell, meanwhile, has exceeded 27 starts only two times (he won the Cy Young in both years). Ohtani and Emmet Sheehan both returned from elbow surgery in June, combining for 26 starts during the regular season. And a right shoulder impingement limited Roki Sasaki to fewer than 50 innings as a rookie, including the playoffs.
With all of those pitchers spending time on the IL in 2025, the Dodgers leaned on Yoshinobu Yamamoto for stability. The right-hander had a huge workload increase, throwing 102 1/3 more innings between the regular season and playoffs than he did in 2024, when he missed nearly three months with a strained rotator cuff.
Somehow, the Dodgers had their entire rotation healthy for the 2025 postseason, which allowed them to use Sasaki and Sheehan to bolster a leaky bullpen. But can they really count on that happening again?
3. Will their expensive closer reset work out?
If that sounds familiar, it’s because Los Angeles inked Tanner Scott to a four-year, $72 million contract last January, only to watch the lefty struggle during his first season with the team. Díaz knows what that’s like — he had a 5.59 ERA for the Mets in his first year after being traded from Seattle to New York in December 2018.
It will be that much tougher for the Dodgers to three-peat if the closer role continues to be a problem after they’ve spent so much money trying to fix it.
