GLENDALE, Ariz. — Max Muncy doesn’t pull any punches.
“There’s no way around it. We sucked,” the Dodgers third baseman said of their three-game sweep at the hands of the Arizona Diamondbacks in last fall’s National League Division Series. “We really kind of blew it. And I’m not trying to take anything away from the Diamondbacks. They obviously played very well and hats off to them. But we blew it.”
There was no need to analyze the result, Muncy said.
“I feel like you can have a dartboard and throw a dart and it would land on something that went wrong,” he said. “We didn’t do a whole lot right. We didn’t hit. We didn’t score. We didn’t pitch. Really wasn’t a whole lot that we did well.”
It might have been a total team effort. But Mookie Betts took personal responsibility for his poor October.
“That’s when I didn’t show up. I didn’t do anything to help the team,” said Betts, who went 0 for 11 in the NLDS after a regular season that landed him as the runner-up to Atlanta’s Ronald Acuña Jr. for the NL MVP award.
“Just didn’t show up, bro. Whatever the reason is, didn’t matter. I didn’t show up. At the end of the day, that’s all that matters. Got to be there.”
The Dodgers were all together again Wednesday for the first time since that NLDS loss – the second consecutive year and third time in the past five years the Dodgers have been eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.
But a billion-dollar splurge in the offseason has cleared the air of those clouds, giving the Dodgers something else to focus on as they held their first full-squad workout Wednesday.
“I think so,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “I think reshuffling the deck with new players, I think that brought a lot of excitement to the fan base, to the organization itself. The newness part of it, yeah.”
But is that a good thing – should the Dodgers forget last October’s disappointment or use it as fuel in 2024?
“I…
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