Why the Dodgers’ return to the World Series was only a matter of time

From the outside looking in, the Dodgers know the easy story of their season.

How, after starting the campaign with the highest expectations imaginable, they spent much of the year failing to live up to the hype.

How, during what was already a grim second-half slump, they appeared to hit rock bottom when they squandered a no-hit, three-run lead in a stunning ninth-inning loss in Baltimore last month.

How, in the six weeks since, they’ve looked like a rejuvenated and refocused club, after that nightmarish defeat with a 15-5 regular-season finish and a torrid march through October — going 9-1 en route to a National League pennant and a return to the World Series, which begins with Game 1 Friday night.

Looking back, however, the Dodgers also insist that the story is not so simple.

The ups and downs of this season, they thought, had never been as extreme as they seemed.

“Obviously the season went the way it went,” veteran third baseman Max Muncy said of a 93-win campaign that, despite the inclusion of another NL West title, was characterized as disappointing compared to their preseason predictions. “It’s a long season. There are a lot of games. We’ve handled a lot of things.”

But Muncy added as beer and sparkling wine were splashed all around him in the Dodgers’ clubhouse Friday night, to celebrate the team’s fifth trip to the Fall Classic in the last nine seasons: “We always knew what we had in the clubhouse. We always knew what we had on the field. Now you’re starting to see it.”

Indeed, that was always the plan. A situation that, even in their worst moments, they believed would happen all along.

Last fall, the Dodgers’ run to a World Series championship was truly surprising. Their starting rotation has been devastated. Freddie Freeman entered the postseason with ankle and rib injuries. And there were real doubts to overcome in October, after shocking first-round eliminations the previous two years.

This team has also had identifiable turning points, from a clubhouse meeting called by manager Dave Roberts in mid-September, to a comeback NL Division Series against the San Diego Padres that catapulted them to the remainder of the postseason.

When they finally reached the mountaintop, led by a hobbled Freeman and heroic performances from an overachieving bullpen, it was an accomplishment of determination and perseverance; a triumph that, even internally, not everyone always saw coming.

This year, however, the Dodgers saw their path differently.

On paper, the defining point of the season appeared to be the Sept. 6 loss to the Orioles — a day that began with another club meeting from Roberts, who rallied his team amid a stunning 22-31 slump that stretched into early July; then ended disastrously, when Yoshinobu Yamamoto lost a no-hit bid with two outs in the ninth, before a withering bullpen imploded to lose the game in a no-win collapse.

“Losing that game to a team that’s not even in playoff contention, you started to wonder, ‘What’s wrong with us?’ “, recalls infielder Miguel Rojas.

But looking back on the past week, several other teammates said the Dodgers never fully felt the panic swirling around them.

Instead, they trusted in the talent of their record $415 million team to finally surface. They counted on health, to ultimately turn the ship.

“We’ve been there before,” Freeman said. “We knew everything was okay.”

“At some point we were going to start clicking,” Muncy added. “[We just needed] the guys are coming back and are healthy.

Early in the season, after all, the Dodgers were healthy and clicking. Their 8-0 start was better than any defending champion in MLB history. Their 29-15 record through mid-May has them on a 107-win pace.

“You look at the beginning of the season, when we had everyone, we were playing really well,” Muncy said. “If our team was our team all year, perhaps we would have lived up to these expectations.

The Dodgers, of course, did not have their full team for much of the next three months, when they played exactly .500 baseball (49-49) from May 16 until the September 6 loss at Baltimore.

On the mound, the rotation was battered by injuries to Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Roki Sasaki and Tony Gonsolin. This put added pressure (and innings) on a bullpen still feeling the aftereffects of the previous October.

The team also had to deal with its own injury issues. Freeman began the year nursing his ankle, which required offseason surgery. Mookie Betts was behind the ball early on following a stomach virus in spring training. This summer, Tommy Edman, Teoscar Hernández and Kiké Hernández each missed time, then returned playing less than 100%. Muncy was also in and out of action during the second half, dealing with a knee injury in July and an oblique strain in August.

In retrospect, Muncy noted, it was a dynamic that the Dodgers (who have the oldest average age in MLB at 30.7 and were coming off a physically grueling postseason the previous year) always thought they would struggle with.

“The reality is – and we all know this, everyone knows this – our team was not going to go through the entire season without breaking at some point,” he said. “So it was just, how do you deal with these [low] moments?

The problem was, they didn’t always do very well either.

For much of July and August, the Dodgers had one of the lowest-scoring offenses in baseball, suffering from an occasional lack of focus and intensity that some people in the organization later attributed to a World Series hangover.

Their flawed bullpen only made matters worse, contributing to a 5-20 record in games decided by two runs or fewer from early July to early September.

When Roberts called his pregame meeting that day in Baltimore, it was just the latest in a series of speeches he had given to different groups of the team’s players in the preceding weeks. At this point, efforts to break out of the second-half malaise had been underway for some time.

“We’re doing everything we can, holding closed-door meetings, doing everything we can to try to right the ship,” Shohei Ohtani said through an interpreter the night the Dodgers fell to second place in the division after being swept by the Angels in August. “We just have to do a better job.”

“There’s no sugarcoating,” Freeman repeated a few weeks later, when another confusing sweep against the Pittsburgh Pirates in early September was followed by another loss to the Orioles in the team’s series opener in Baltimore. “We need to understand this, and understand it quickly.”

This, however, is where the 2025 Dodgers differed from the previous year’s team.

Even at their lowest, they didn’t feel hopeless.

Once they were healthy again, they believed better play would follow.

“Everyone was like, ‘We’re going to hit. We’re going to come out of the bullpen well. It’s just going to happen,” Freeman said. “We’ll find a solution. We will get there.”

Since then, the main driver of the turnaround has been pitching. Snell and Glasnow had already returned from their injuries in September, but only found rhythm in the final weeks of the year. Yamamoto also got hot, allowing just one run in his three starts after a nearly hitless game. Emmet Sheehan and Clayton Kershaw, who were out early in the year recovering from surgery, have flourished to provide more depth to the rotation.

Ohtani (while posting MVP numbers offensively) has also reached a full starting workload, after previously being limited to short outings following his second career Tommy John surgery.

Sasaki, meanwhile, made a late-season return to the bullpen, giving that group an anchor it previously lacked.

“We started winning because our starting pitchers were so good,” Freeman said, after the group produced a 2.07 ERA in September and 1.40 through the first three rounds of the postseason.

“As an offense, when you see your starting pitcher throw zeros over and over again, it’s like, ‘Come on, get one, get two, get three.’”

This type of consistent production has indeed started to reappear as well.

There was better health and improved individual performances, particularly from Ohtani, Betts and Freeman (who combined for 22 homers and 54 RBIs during the Dodgers’ September resurgence). The coaching staff emphasized the quality of the team’s hitting and offense (helping the Dodgers average 5.6 runs per game over their last 20 games).

The players also increased their accountability to each other, challenging themselves to elevate their game as they got closer to postseason baseball.

“We always knew we were going to be a really, really good team in October,” Muncy said. “Once you get to October, you’re like, ‘All right, it’s game time.’ That’s how we take it.

That mindset continued to manifest itself in the postseason, where many of the Dodgers’ biggest moments — from the wheel play they spun in Philadelphia to the 11-inning marathon that sent them to the NLCS to the low-scoring series win they posted against the Milwaukee Brewers — were born from a veteran’s poise and composure proven in combat.

“It’s an advantage to have such a veteran group,” Kiké Hernández said. “We played a lot of great games together.”

And now they’ll do it again in another World Series appearance, playing the kind of baseball exactly the way they hoped all along.

“In the spring of this year, it was, ‘Hey, we need to rehearse,’” Muncy recalls. “It wasn’t like we wanted to rehearse. It was like, ‘Hey, we need to’… Because that’s how good we are.