The best organization in baseball just won another World Series title
The Dodgers have been the cream of the crop in baseball for a long while, now. There’s no sign of that changing anytime soon, either.
For the second time in five seasons, the Los Angeles Dodgers are World Series champions. For the first time since 1988, they’ll actually get to have the full treatment that comes with being World Series — meaning, the team and their fans will actually get to enjoy their first World Series parade since Kirk Gibson hit that famous homer in Game 1 that helped push them to the top of the baseball mountain.
Now, the Dodgers are back on top and it’s hard to say that they didn’t earn it. Ever since they won that 2020 World Series, Los Angeles has objectively been the best organization in baseball during that span. They won 106 games in 2021, 111 games in 2022 and 100 in 2023. However, they had nothing but two National League West divisional titles to show for those three incredible regular season performances — yeah, one that season where the Giants won 107 games was real and it was spectacular.
Those three bittersweet seasons where they dominated from March through September only to come up short in October were all just a prelude for what would happen in this past offseason, which is when Los Angeles proceeded to put their ambition on full display with the most astonishing offseason spending spree that the sport has ever seen. Around this time last year in this very space, I wrote an article about how the Texas Rangers bought themselves a World Series (and your team could, too). While I highly doubt that Andrew Friedman or any of the higher-ups in the Dodgers’ front office actually read this website, I’d still like to imagine that they saw what the Rangers did with their money and decided to show everybody in baseball what real money looked like.
Once the smoke cleared and they were ready for Opening Day, the Dodgers had ended up spending a grand total of $1.18 billion (yes, with a b) dollars doing things like trading for Tyler Glasnow and immediately giving him a contract extension, bringing in Yoshinobu Yamamoto from Japan on an incredibly lucrative deal and then landing the biggest free agency fish of them all: Shohei Ohtani, himself. The Rangers may have had a spending spree but the Dodgers did the equivalent of calling the store ahead of time, asking for the entire store to be empty just so they can shop and then proceeded to shop for the most luxurious thing they could find. This was a true flex of financial muscle.
Photo by Rob Leiter/MLB Photos via Getty Images
So with all of that money spent in the offseason, this should’ve resulted in the Dodgers simply running amok all season on their way to an eventual coronation in the World Series, right? Well, they did eventually get to the ultimate goal but they certainly took a bit of a roundabout path. Yes, the Dodgers did finish with the best record in baseball — but it was only by three games and they didn’t even clinch the division until the final week of the season.
In fact, this Dodgers team didn’t even win 100 games this regular season. Instead, they were simply at the front of the pack with all of the other contenders in baseball and this year’s Postseason figured to be the most wide-open competition in quite a while with no real clear favorite in sight. Again, this team finished with the best record in baseball but they did so with a starting rotation that got rocked by injuries all season — to the point where the Dodgers’ rotation finished with an ERA- of 105, a FIP- of 104 and an xFIP- of 98. 100 is considered to be league average for all of those stats.
The only three starters who finished the season with FanGraphs WAR at 2.0 or above were Gavin Stone, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow — that was it. Clayton Kershaw only threw 30 innings all season and he still finished fifth in fWAR among Dodgers starters in the regular season. It was a true team/organizational effort to keep this team performing at a high standard while this was going on and a lot of credit has to go to LA’s bullpen for pulling a lot of the weight in this scenario.
Oh yeah, we also have to give a ton of credit to the star-studded lineup for living up to expectations as well. The Dodgers finished the season with baseball’s top team wRC+ number (118) and a lot of that has to do with the fearsome foursome of Max Muncy, eventual World Series MVP Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts and Shohei Ohtani leading the way. Ohtani in particular definitely lived up to the lofty expectations that were placed upon him after signing that massive contract to go down the freeway in order to put on the Dodger blue.
Perhaps owing to the fact that he had to solely focus on hitting since he was unable to pitch after recovering from major elbow surgery on his pitching arm, Ohtani took the opportunity and ran with it — quite literally, since he completed the one-and-only 50/50 season in baseball history. Putting up 54 home runs, 59 stolen bases, 181 wRC+ and 9.1 fWAR in a single season is downright comical and something that should only exist in the wildest dreams of baseball fans. Instead, Ohtani made it happen while adding three homers over the course of this Postseason on his way to making his World Series dreams come true — even while struggling through a shoulder ailment in the Fall Classic.
With that being said, it had to have taken something herculean in order to take the spotlight off of Ohtani and his first crack at winning a World Series title. That’s where Freddie Freeman stepped in. Freeman was dealing with a tough ailment of his own, as an ankle injury kept the stubbornly-durable Freeman out of action for a few games during this Postseason run. Freeman powered through it by starting off this World Series at least one homer in each of the first four games. That included the legendary walk-off Grand Slam that he crushed in Game 1 to get this thing going int he right direction for Los Angeles. It’s hard to find a more deserving World Series MVP award winner than Freeman here in 2024.
It’s also very difficult to say that the Dodgers don’t deserve this World Series victory. They fought through adversity during the regular season in order to stay on top of the NL West, they survived a tough NLDS that went the distance against their hungry divisional rivals in San Diego, they stopped the Mets in their tracks in order to make sure that the NL’s 6-seed wouldn’t make it to the World Series for a third-straight season and then they simply outclassed the best that the American League had to offer in the most high-profile World Series matchup that we’ve seen in a while.
The clinching game itself could serve as a bit of a microcosm for how this season went for the Dodgers. The Yankees made quick work of Jack Flaherty early on in this one, so the Dodgers essentially had to rely on their bullpen once again after having to go with a bullpen game in Game 4. New York pushed their lead out to 5-0 after four innings but then the Dodgers were given a lifeline to revive themselves in the fifth inning. There’s going to be a ton of talk about the Yankees and their awful defense in that inning that eventually resulted in the Dodgers scoring five runs to tie it up. At the same time, Mookie Betts still had to leg out that infield single in order to get them on the board, Freddie Freeman still had to hit that looping single to bring the deficit down to two and then Teoscar Hernández still had to hit that deep fly for a double that tied the game.
They still had to make another comeback in the eighth inning after the Yankees regained their lead. They were once again able to take advantage of an ill-timed catcher’s interference (right after Gavin Lux’s game-tying sacrifice fly) that eventually led to Mookie Betts hitting the go-ahead sacrifice fly that put them ahead for good. Quality eventually separates itself from the rest and that was the case not only in Game 5 but for the entire 2024 World Series.
It was also the case for the 2024 season as a whole as far as the Los Angeles Dodgers were concerned. Despite going out and spending a billion dollars in the offseason, this wasn’t a straightforward path to a title for LA. With that being said, the quality of this Dodgers team has always been glaringly apparent and despite the fact that this wasn’t the best regular season they’ve had in the past few years, it ended with the best Postseason that they’ve had in recent years. The best organization in baseball has another trophy to show for their efforts and now it’s only a matter of whether or not they can go from being simply the best to becoming a dynasty.