'Second to none': How the Dodgers' top-down philosophy won them the title
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Bradford Doolittle, ESPN Staff Writer
NEW YORK — The 2024 World Series is over: Shohei Ohtani and the Los Angeles Dodgers are champions in five games, the first title for him and, for the team, the eighth in franchise history.
There were heroes and goats, as there are in every Fall Classic, but no storybook showdown of Ohtani versus Aaron Judge. There were dramatic grand slams, stunning comebacks and horrible defensive miscues. The New York Yankees’ title drought reached 15 years, and their captain, Judge, faced struggles that sometimes reached nightmarish levels.
In the end, what we got was a pure baseball matchup decided by baseball factors, and mostly by the fact the Dodgers had more good players than their opponent. They earned it — as a group.
“They were the better team in this series,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said, while praising his own heartbroken club.
This championship, and the way Los Angeles achieved it, is less about the names on the marquee and more because of the ensemble. It belongs to them all, as much to the supporting cast of Teoscar Hernandez, Gavin Lux and Max Muncy as to Ohtani and fellow stars Freddie Freeman and Mookie Betts. To anonymous relievers as much as more heralded starters such as Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Jack Flaherty. None of this is by accident. The Dodgers won this way because they were built to win this way.
Every season, the Dodgers rank near the top of the majors in categories such as rookie WAR and in total appearances on the transaction wire. Think about that: With all of the resources poured into the L.A. payroll — the Dodgers spent more than $1 billion this past offseason — the Andrew Friedman-led front office never stops tweaking the roster mix, addressing needs both immediate and imagined. The Dodgers excel at turning other teams’ excesses into gold, with journeymen such as Ryan Brasier, Brent Honeywell and Anthony Banda becoming crucial contributors to the bullpen. Every bit as much attention is paid to the bottom 10 slots on the 40-man roster as it is to the top three.
“It’s about getting the right players, the right people,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “Talent is a lot, but it’s not everything. You still have to be cohesive. I just think we do a great job of getting the right players in our clubhouse.”
The Dodgers have as much star power as any team we’ve seen in recent years, but they could never be accused of taking a stars-and-scrubs approach, or constructing a top-heavy roster. Depth or stars? We’ll have both, thank you.
“We have a culture here at the big league level,” Roberts said. “But the scouting and player development is second to none.”
After a second title in five years, the Dodgers, from top to bottom, are what Roberts says — second to none.
THIS WAS SUPPOSED to be the Ohtani-Judge World Series.
Just look at the cover of the official program. On the left is Ohtani, his face exuding focus and exertion, his arms pointing behind him in the act of the backswing that completes the arc of one of his mighty hacks.
Judge is on the right, his mouth open in the midst of a shout, his head turned as he presumably looks at the bedlam in the dugout in the aftermath of one of his missile-like blasts into the farthest expanses of Yankee Stadium.
It would be Ohtani vs. Judge, in the ultimate version of a baseball hero’s journey, one with no antagonists but two protagonists on a parallel odyssey in pursuit to slay the same dragon: a career-first championship.
Thus was the hook for the resumption of baseball’s most prolific Fall Classic matchup, Yankees-Dodgers, the dream showdown between two of baseball’s most storied franchises.
The hype wasn’t without justification. This truly was an unprecedented clash between perhaps the best-right-now players in the sport, starring for marquee franchises in the glitziest of markets and biggest of stages. Together during the regular season, Judge and Ohtani hit .315/.423/.672 with 112 homers, 274 RBIs, 256 runs and 69 stolen bases. That’s from two players.
This pairing of the game’s two best players just hasn’t happened very often in World Series history. It’s easy to lose yourself in a debate about just who was considered the best in the game at any point, but the clear precedents are few: Ty Cobb vs. Honus Wagner in 1909. Ted Williams vs. Stan Musial in 1946. George Brett vs. Mike Schmidt in 1980.
Let’s imagine the Platonic ideal as the climactic scene of “The Natural,” when Roy Hobbs — “the best there ever was” — homers into the stratosphere, turning another Knights disappointment into an instant pennant. We’ve never had that payoff — a championship-winning, come-from-behind home run blasted by the game’s best player.
None of the superstar matchups we highlighted had the type of payoff we might dream of, and most of them disappointed altogether. In the just-completed 2024 showdown, while Ohtani played well as a stalwart at the top of the lineup, his series was most noteworthy because he popped his shoulder on a slide, bringing the term “subluxation” into the mainstream. And Judge, homerless until the clinching game, was astonishing to watch for much of the series, after a season in which he recorded one of the best offensive showings in history.
“He’s a great player,” a sympathetic Roberts said after Game 4. “I have so much respect for Aaron. There’s probably a little bit of maybe trying too hard right now.”
That’s baseball, though, isn’t it? When we zero in on a star matchup like Ohtani against Judge, that’s the possibility we’re teasing, even as we know the nature of the sport itself makes the realization of the dream scenario so unlikely.
In fact, the most cinematic moment of the series was not produced by Ohtani, Judge — or even each team’s next best player, Betts or Juan Soto. That belonged to yet another star, Freeman, in a postseason when his injuries threatened to keep him out of the lineup. His two-out, Game 1-ending grand slam evoked immediate images of 1988 Kirk Gibson and inspired Joe Davis’ epic, instantaneous Vin Scully homage.
There’s a lesson in there, both about baseball and about the Dodgers. No matter who we zero in on, it’s never about only one person. Anybody might be the one to realize a boyhood dream.
“Those are the kind of things, when you’re 5 years old with your two older brothers and you’re playing whiffle ball in the backyard,” Freeman said, “those are the scenarios you dream about. Two outs, bases loaded in a World Series game.”
As for Ohtani, he went 0-for-4 in the clincher and struck out with the bases loaded in the sixth. It didn’t make his night any less sweet.
“The success of the postseason is very similar to how we were able to pull it off during the regular season,” Ohtani said, via interpreter Will Ireton. “Again: The strength of the organization. Extremely honored to be a part of this.”
CONSIDER THAT 29 different Dodgers played this October. Nearly everyone had meaningful roles along the way, including a bright-eyed rookie named Ben Casparius, who began October with all of three big league appearances under his belt. He ended up making a start in Game 4 as an opener.
This is every bit as much a characteristic of this era of Dodgers baseball as the presence of household names Ohtani, Betts, Freeman and Clayton Kershaw.
“It takes a lot to get here,” Kershaw said. “Regardless of the talent level, everybody just assumes that we’re going to show up, win 100 games and win the World Series. It takes every last guy.”
Since the start of the 2021 season, the Dodgers have had 68 instances of a player recording at least one bWAR. Only the Brewers and Rays (69 each) have more. But the Dodgers have also had 17 instances of a player reaching an All-Star level of four BWAR, second only to the Astros (18). L.A.’s success is built on stars plus depth.
During the 12 full seasons since the Guggenheim Baseball Management group assumed control of the Dodgers, they’ve won 99.2 of every 162 regular-season games they’ve played. During the wild-card era, no team has done better over such a span, one that has included 11 first-place finishes, a 12-for-12 presence in the postseason bracket, four pennants and, now, two World Series titles. And there is no question the Dodgers’ economics might play a role in the team’s staying power. According to Cot’s Contracts, the Dodgers have sported a top-five payroll in all of those seasons. Yet other teams make huge payroll splurges — including the past two teams they beat, the Yankees in the World Series and the Mets in the National League Championship Series — and the Dodgers are sometimes outspent by one or two competitors.
A level of investment measuring in the billions sets a clear expectation for everyone who dons Dodger blue: to do what they did Wednesday — win it all. That expectation isn’t just carried by Ohtani, Betts and Freeman, but everyone who steps into the clubhouse. They would have it no other way.
“You’ve got a lot of good people that care about winning and that want to win,” second baseman Gavin Lux said. “None of them have egos.”
The Dodgers’ stars, including Ohtani, outperformed their New York counterparts, especially Judge, in the Series, but that was mainly because of Freeman’s massive output as World Series MVP. That certainly played a part in L.A.’s triumph.
But in terms of the headliner matchup, at no point did this feel like an Ohtani-versus-Judge World Series. If anything, it was the Freeman series, but of course he isn’t going to claim that title.
“Sitting here now, I’ve just been blessed to be able to play this game a long time and be in certain situations because of the group of guys, the organization,” Freeman said. “Just from top to bottom, to be put into a situation. … I mean, I got asked about the RBIs, and the RBIs are because there were guys on base. That’s my teammates.”
NO TEAM LOST more player games to injury in 2024 than the Dodgers. Even as they sprayed champagne and whooped it up in the clubhouse at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday, the Dodgers had more than an entire upper-tier starting rotation on the injured list.
That’s why Roberts — whose postseason decisions have been maligned by Dodgers fans and detractors alike over the years — deserves so much credit for this run. It’s not just that Roberts, along with pitching coach Mark Prior, was able to navigate around the losses in the pitching staff. It’s also that the skipper, as usual, folded in rookies such as outfielder Andy Pages, Landon Knack, Casparius and even Yamamoto, not a traditional rookie but a rookie nonetheless. It’s also that when the Dodgers splurged at the trade deadline, adding Flaherty, Tommy Edman and Michael Kopech, they all fit so seamlessly on and off the field that it’s easy to forget they didn’t join the team until the end of July.
No game showed it more acutely than the Dodgers’ Game 5 win against San Diego in the NL Division Series, when the big three went a combined 1-for-10 but four relievers backed Yamamoto on a two-hit shutout and Teoscar Hernandez and Enrique Hernandez hit solo homers for the game’s only runs.
“He lets you be the player that you’ll always be,” Teoscar said of Roberts. “He lets you have fun. His communication with his players is one of the best that I’ve had in my career. I think that’s why he’s so special for this team and the players.”
Roberts’ masterpiece was Game 5, when he had to work around Flaherty’s too-brief outing and a bullpen with perhaps too few adequately rested arms. So Roberts rode relief ace Blake Treinen for 42 pitches — seven more than he got from Flaherty. And then he turned to Walker Buehler, his Game 3 starter only two days before, to slam the door in the ninth.
“That’s one of the best games I’ve ever seen managed,” Freeman said. “That was special.”
Through it all, Roberts spreads the credit steadily away from himself, even as he joins the short list of managers who have won more than one World Series, a list made up almost entirely of current and future Hall of Famers, including Dodgers legends Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda.
“Humbling,” Roberts said. “Never thought I would be in that same conversation. I’m a part of a great organization, a lot of great people around me supporting me, and we’ve won a lot of ballgames. This is something I really wanted. I wanted this one.”
If Roberts required validation that perhaps the team’s shortened-season 2020 title did not supply — he has it. He might just be another high-profile cog in the Dodgers’ immense apparatus, but he’s a vital one. He’s also the manager of a dynasty.
This championship — after a grueling marathon of 162 games plus a month of playoffs, cannot be diminished. It took all of the Dodgers to make it happen, right to the end.
When the Dodgers spilled out of the third-base dugout after the final out, Ohtani, Betts and Freeman were in the middle of the pile. So too were Casparius and Knack. Baseball’s latest championship doesn’t belong to any one of them, but all of them, under a banner dyed a rich Dodger blue, just how it was drawn up all along.
