Considering their sustained success, you might already consider these Dodgers a dynasty. They’ve made the playoffs 13 straight seasons, won their division 12 of the last 13 years, captured World Series titles in two of the last five seasons and are about to play in the Fall Classic for the fifth time in nine years.
But on the precipice of making history, Kiké Hernández isn’t ready to make that declaration just yet.
At least, not until the Dodgers finish what they set out to do this spring after walloping the Yankees in five games in last year’s World Series and returning a group with even more talent.
“You don’t really talk about dynasties when teams lose the World Series,” Hernández said in the aftermath of sweeping the Brewers last Friday. “To do that, we’ve got to win it. If we do win it, and we go back-to-back like I think we can, we can potentially talk about a dynasty.”
No Major League Baseball team has repeated as a champion since the 1998-2000 Yankees took home hardware in three straight seasons.
The Dodgers, on paper, looked capable of breaking that drought after another offseason of exorbitant spending that restocked their already stacked roster. They entered this year as the favorites to win it all again after adding the top starting pitcher on the market in Blake Snell, the top reliever on the market in Tanner Scott (in addition to Kirby Yates) and the most sought-after international free agent in Roki Sasaki, among a litany of moves. They also brought back Teoscar Hernandez, Kiké Hernández and Blake Treinen, key cogs from last year’s run.
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Back in February, manager Dave Roberts laid out the potential history ahead for the group and how special it would be to accomplish something that hadn’t been done in 25 years.
“I brought it up I think on the first day of spring training,” Roberts said, “and haven’t talked about it since. I think it’s one of those added pressures that I don’t think I want to take on, that I don’t think our players need to take on.”
Especially with the way the unexpected slog of a summer unfolded in Los Angeles.
The Dodgers, a team many expected to challenge for the all-time wins record, went 25-27 in July and August, at one point losing their grasp on the NL West lead in the process. They were 35-30 after the break. Injuries decimated their rotation. Their bullpen was in shambles. Scott, Yates and Treinen all had ERAs well north of 4.00. Mookie Betts was mired in his worst offensive season. Teoscar Hernández regressed from last season’s bounceback. After starting the season 8-0, the Dodgers were 70-64 over their next 134 games. It was a team that at times looked disinterested in the marathon, despite always recognizing the potential.
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Sometimes, they would address those possibilities in their group chat. In the low points, it served as motivation. “We got a really good opportunity to do something really big,” Miguel Rojas recalled one text reading. “Not just for us, but for the city, and for the organization, for baseball.”
Even if Roberts didn’t address the history again, the players knew the expectation.
“Our goal is to win the World Series,” said Max Muncy. “That’s what we expect. Anything less than that is a failure. For us, showing up to spring this year it was, ‘Hey, we need to repeat.’ It wasn’t like we wanted to repeat. It was like, ‘Hey, we need to repeat.’ Obviously, the season went the way it went. It’s a long season. It’s a lot of games. We dealt with a lot. But 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.”
It took a late-season surge — during which they won 15 of their final 20 games, shortly after Roberts held a team meeting in Baltimore in an attempt to strike some positivity into a scuffling group — for the Dodgers to get to 93 wins.
Through it all, they expressed confidence that they still had the pieces to get where they envisioned. They ultimately held off the Padres to win the NL West by three games, despite compiling their lowest win total over a full season since 2018.
“We talked about it in September when there were a lot of questions about whether us winning 93 games was a disappointment,” said president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman. “Our strong feeling was that we were going to be going into October with the most talented team we’ve ever had.”
It has played out that way.
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The Dodgers entered the postseason hot, sparked by a return to form from Betts and a return to health across the roster, particularly in a rotation that has been the best in baseball since getting whole again in August.
In October, they’ve trampled every foe in their way, looking every bit the juggernaut everyone expected to see back in February. The Dodgers have now won 24 of their last 30 games dating back to Sept. 7, including a 9-1 mark in the playoffs, as they get set to see the Blue Jays in the World Series.
“I think as a group, when you go through what we’ve gone through, especially coming down from behind against San Diego last year — that series, it was only five games, but it felt like a 162-game season — you get this feeling of like, ‘Nothing can go wrong. We’re not losing,’” said Kiké Hernández. “Yoshinobu [Yamamoto] had a great quote before his last start, ‘Losing is not an option.’ That’s sort of similar to the mentality we have as a group.”
That mentality has brought them back to the sport’s biggest stage. They’re the first World Series champion to return to the Fall Classic the following season since the 2008-09 Phillies.
With that, the “dynasty” conversation has resurfaced.
While some players define it by the number of titles won, others focus more on a team’s ability to contend year after year, which the Dodgers have done better than almost any franchise ever.
“I’m not going to base it on how many championships you’re going to win,” Rojas told me. “I base it on how consistent you are getting to this point. But I feel like it doesn’t matter. Right now, all we want to do is win the World Series. That’s the only good result we’re going to get after this year.”
“I think just because I’m in it, I know how hard it is, I don’t really think about dynasties,” Betts said. “I don’t really know what it consists of. But I guess if you’re thinking about going to the postseason, obviously having a chance to win the World Series year after year, I guess that would qualify as some type of dynasty. But I don’t know what it takes to call it that. So I’m just going to enjoy being in whatever mode we are now.”
The Dodgers’ 13 consecutive trips to the postseason are tied with the 1995-07 Yankees and trail only the 1991-05 Braves (14 straight) for the longest streak in MLB history. Those Braves teams only won one World Series title during that stretch. The Dodgers, meanwhile, have a chance to win their second straight and third in six seasons, a feat Roberts said would put them on the “Mt. Rushmore of sports organizations.”
“Just winning one is hard,” said Freddie Freeman. “So dynasty, I think if you can get three in five or six years, I guess you could say it is one. But I think it’s the sustained winning that the Dodgers have done for so long and then to cement it with some championships, yeah, I guess you could call this — if we do do it — a modern-day dynasty.”
There have been other dynastic runs from teams over the last quarter century. The Astros won two World Series and made two others from 2017-22. The Giants won the World Series three times over a five-year span in the early 2010s, though they missed the playoffs in the other two seasons during that stretch. The Red Sox won two World Series in a four-year span from 2004-07.
But none of those teams repeated as champions, and none of them experienced the perpetual success of these Dodgers, who now find themselves back where they expected to be — at the sport’s pinnacle, with a chance to cement their dynasty status.
“The legacy, dynasty talk, a lot of that is — I feel is — meant for other people that aren’t playing, and let them have those debates,” Roberts said. “It’s our job to put those topics on the table, and we have the opportunity to do that.”
Rowan Kavner is an MLB writer for FOX Sports. He previously covered the L.A. Dodgers, LA Clippers and Dallas Cowboys. An LSU grad, Rowan was born in California, grew up in Texas, then moved back to the West Coast in 2014. Follow him on X at @RowanKavner.
