LOS ANGELES — Well, they got their bye.
Finishing without one of the top two records in the National League this year for the first time since 2018, the Dodgers rolled right into the postseason without the five-day break that comes with a No. 1 or 2 seed. They haven’t stopped rolling, winning nine out of 10 games (tagged on to a five-game winning streak to end the regular season) over the Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies and Milwaukee Brewers to reach the World Series for the fifth time in the past nine years and the 23rd time in franchise history.
Now they have to press ‘Pause.’ The World Series won’t start until Friday – in Toronto if the Blue Jays win the American League pennant, at Dodger Stadium if the Seattle Mariners win.
“We’re going to have to get creative,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said about how to fill the six-day break. “We’re going to celebrate hard tonight and then we’ll start (Saturday).”
There won’t be any workout Saturday (or Sunday), but Friedman said the front office and coaching staffs would start “at least planning. From my couch. Watching college football.”
The Dodgers have earned the break with a dominating performance over the Milwaukee Brewers, culminating in Shohei Ohtani’s historic exclamation point in Game 4.
The challenge now is to preserve that momentum through a week of live batting practice, intrasquad games and whatever “creative” environment the Dodgers create over their week in hibernation.
The last two teams that swept a league championship series to reach the World Series kept on winning – the 2022 Houston Astros and 2019 Washington Nationals. But the four sweepers before that – the 2015 New York Mets, 2014 Kansas City Royals, 2012 Detroit Tigers and 2007 Colorado Rockies – came up flat when they went back to work, winning a total of just four games in the World Series that followed.
But these Dodgers might have already taken their break. They slumbered through July and August, looking nothing like the super team they were projected to be. Then something changed after back-to-back walk-off losses in Baltimore in early September.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts identifies that series as a turning point for the season but not for any particular moment or meeting.
“We started playing better baseball,” Roberts said Friday. “But whether it’s me talking to players, them talking amongst themselves, understanding where the schedule is at, we needed to kind of tighten some things up.
“From that point in time, I think that overall the win-loss has been really good, and just the quality has been really good, playing baseball.”
Indeed, the Dodgers have won 24 of 30 games since then. And veteran infielder Miguel Rojas does give Roberts the credit for waking up the champions with a meeting in Baltimore.
“It was really powerful because he always has the touch to kind of talk to the group whenever we need it the most,” Rojas said. “He knows when to talk to us. I think it was the perfect time. It was devastating. It was heartbreaking, losing that game when (Yoshinobu) Yamamoto was one pitch away from throwing a no-hitter, and then losing that game to a team that’s not even in playoff contention. You started thinking, ‘What’s wrong with us?’ You don’t have an answer.
“Dave kind of challenged us to push through these last six weeks of the season. At that point, it was like a month and a half that we had to just play hard, those last 30 or 35 games that we had to play. It was an important message for everybody. We took it personally.”
After taking everyone’s best shot during the long regular season, “postseason baseball, it’s a breath of fresh air for us,” relief pitcher Alex Vesia said.
“You get in, and it’s just take it one game at a time,” he said. “One hundred sixty-two games – it’s a long season. This is a little bit more of a sprint.”
If a 93-win regular season could be viewed as a disappointment, the Dodgers always knew the final judgment would come in October.
“We’ve always known who we were as a team,” third baseman Max Muncy said. “The season’s long. You’re gonna go through ups and downs and we dealt with a lot of injuries. That’s just part of what happens when you make a deep postseason run the year before. It’s a lot of stress on the body and you’re gonna deal with some stuff.
“We always knew who we were in the clubhouse, who we were out on the field. Now you’re starting to see it.”