The champion Dodgers are dominating October again. There’s more behind their success than money

LOS ANGELES (AP) — During the Los Angeles Dodgers’ October rampage to the NL pennant, the defending World Series champions have actually been the dark eminence that many baseball people have long feared they would become.

The Dodgers are 9-1 in the postseason — and they’ve looked like a juggernaut while doing it, with near-flawless starting pitching and a deep, resilient lineup producing key hits and electrifying highlights. They swept the Milwaukee Brewers out of the NL Championship Series with a 5-1 victory Friday night featuring an iconic three-homer, 10-strikeout performance by Shohei Ohtani, their $700 million superstar.

The Dodgers beat the Yankees to win it all last year, and they’re headed back to the World Series on Friday with a chance to become MLB’s first repeat champions in a quarter-century. They’re in the Fall Classic for the fifth time in nine seasons during a streak of 13 consecutive postseason appearances.

But naysayers have claimed for years that it’s bad for baseball if one team ever becomes this successful. The Dodgers’ ravenous spending of their extensive resources could irretrievably fracture the majors’ competitive balance, and they could even hurt the Dodgers by providing fuel for some owners’ desire for a salary cap in the next labor negotiations.

The players and coaches in Dodger Blue — and the more than 4 million fans who have packed Dodger Stadium all season long — had absolutely no interest in worrying about what their success means to other people while they celebrated another unforgettable night.

Manager Dave Roberts said it best when he took the microphone on the field stage after his team steamrolled the 97-win Brewers.

“I’ll tell you, before this season started, they said the Dodgers are ruining baseball,” Roberts shouted. “Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball!”

The Chavez Ravine crowd roared in appreciation of a team that repeatedly has made the most of its advantages — for the past two years in particular.

The Dodgers will spend about $509.5 million on players this season, with their $341.5 million payroll plus $168 million in projected luxury tax. That dwarfs the expenditures of their prospective World Series opponents from Seattle (a $167.2 million payroll) and Toronto (a $252.7 million payroll and a projected $13.4 million in tax).

But why are the Dodgers enjoying this success instead of the Mets, the Yankees, the Phillies and other teams that can spend roughly on the Dodgers’ level?

At this point, it’s clearly because Los Angeles has a strong top-to-bottom organization, starting with player development and scouting. Baseball boss Andrew Friedman makes the sport’s most judicious choices among the free-agent prizes and veteran trade targets — and when he gets it wrong, his mistakes don’t sting as much because of his roster’s overall depth.

“It’s just a very talented group, but it’s (also) a very focused and very hungry group,” said Roberts, the first manager in several decades to win five pennants in his first 10 seasons with a club. “So I think that when you get those components, it’s tough to beat. And we mind the little things. We’re hungry. We don’t really care what happened before.”

Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Teoscar Hernández, Tommy Edman, Max Muncy, Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow all started their major league careers elsewhere, but the Dodgers identified them and gave them what their previous clubs wouldn’t or couldn’t.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki chose the Dodgers out of Japan over the past two winters precisely because of the culture and the opportunity created by the club’s previous successes.

Snell faced the Dodgers with Tampa Bay in the 2020 World Series, and he emerged from the loss with admiration for the club. He seized the chance to join LA as a free agent last winter.

“This is why I came here,” said Snell, who has thrown 21 innings of two-run ball with 28 strikeouts in three majestic playoff starts. “Now we’re in the World Series, so I can’t wait to prove myself what I can do there.”

Not even a profoundly leaky bullpen — stocked with high-priced additions like Blake Treinen and Tanner Scott who simply have not performed — has stopped the Dodgers from romping through the postseason, outscoring their opponents by a combined 46-28.

And it doesn’t fit the naysaying narrative to remember that Los Angeles only rounded into dominant form quite late in a tumultuous regular season.

The Dodgers won 93 games and the NL West title, but they finished with only the ninth-best winning percentage during their 13 straight playoff seasons — tied for the second-longest streak of postseason appearances in MLB history.

Los Angeles didn’t run away with its division, trailing San Diego as late as Aug. 23 and beating the Padres by only three games. Thanks to a prolonged midseason stretch of mediocre play, the Dodgers finished third overall in the NL and had to play a wild-card series for the first time since 2021.

But that might have been a good thing: The Dodgers struggled with rust in recent October division series after sitting out for a week, but they’ve been locked in since their postseason opener Sept. 30, a mere 48 hours after the regular season ended.

After Los Angeles thumped Cincinnati with 18 runs in two Wild Card games, the Dodgers handled NL East champ Philadelphia with impressive ease in four games, winning twice on the road and rebounding from a tough Game 3 loss to survive a crazy 11-inning finale.

The Dodgers then overwhelmed the Brewers, who had the NL’s best record in the regular season and made the postseason for the seventh time in eight seasons with fans clamoring for their franchise’s first World Series title. The Dodgers’ playoff savvy and top-end talent were too much, even before Ohtani turned in a superhuman Game 4.

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The star-studded Dodgers are not a jaded bunch, however. They jumped and cheered wildly in the dugout along with their fans when each of Ohtani’s three homers soared over the outfield fence, feeling just as much giddy disbelief as the paying customers.

The Dodgers might be an industry-altering juggernaut, but that industry is still a kids’ game.

“That was special,” said Freeman, last year’s World Series MVP. “We’ve just been playing really good baseball for a while now, and the inevitable kind of happened today.”

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AP MLB: https://apnews.com/MLB