LOS ANGELES — Winners of 931 regular-season games over the past 10 years but just one short-season championship, the Dodgers have learned one thing the hard way.
There are no guarantees.
“I’m not going to guarantee it this year. I’m not going to do that,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said recently. Last March, he guaranteed his team would win the World Series in 2022 during an interview on a national radio show.
“But I still expect to win the World Series. I do. And I don’t think there’s anybody that’s part of our organization or our fan base that doesn’t feel that same way.”
For most of 2022, Roberts had gone out on a very sturdy limb. The Dodgers won 111 games during the regular season, a total only three teams in baseball history had exceeded. They were only the second team since World War II to score the most runs in the majors and allow the fewest in the same season, outscoring their opponents by 334 runs (the fourth-highest run differential in baseball history).
Then the limb cracked. The Dodgers were eliminated from the postseason in four games by the San Diego Padres in a National League Division Series.
It was the second time in the past three full seasons that the Dodgers had followed a 100-win, franchise record-setting regular season with a first-round playoff flop.
“Every year it’s tough. There’s only one team that gets to win the last game of the season,” utility man Chris Taylor said this spring. “It’s hard. It’s a tough game. There’s not many years where the favorite actually wins the World Series. It was not the way we wanted to end it obviously. But that’s the nature of the business.”
Indeed, it is. Only five times (including ties) in the past 23 full seasons has the team with the best regular-season record also won the World Series. And MLB’s pursuit of increased TV revenue has only opened the postseason to more variables.
It’s enough to make one re-think the importance of regular-season success,…
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