There is this notion -- especially the further you get away from Dodger Stadium -- that the Dodgers continuing to try to turn themselves into a superpower-type team and continuing to show the baseball world that they’re willing to do whatever it takes to do that, are bad for baseball. But I happen to think they’re great for baseball. And not just if you’re a Dodgers fan.
Forget about how difficult it is to defend a World Series title in baseball, something that no team since Joe Torre’s 2000 Yankees has done in the past 25 years. Forget that in the last 70-plus years of Major League Baseball, only three teams have done what the Chiefs are trying to do next Sunday in New Orleans, which means become the first NFL team to win three Super Bowls in a row:
- The Yankees of the late 40s and early 50s, who won five World Series in a row.
- The A’s of the 70s, who won three straight from 1972-74.
- Torre’s Yankees, who won in 1998, 1999 and 2000, and were as close as they could possibly be to winning four in a row before the Diamondbacks got them in the bottom of the ninth of Game 7 in 2001.
But it’s not just that, now that the Dodgers are the "Evil Empire" -- same as the Yankees were once called back at the turn of this century, after they’d won those three Series in a row and came as close as they did to making it four. It’s that I just think any sport is better and more interesting when there is an undisputed heavyweight champ that everybody else is trying to knock down and knock out. If they can.
As great as Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird was for pro basketball and for all sports fans back in the 1980s, I loved it when Michael Jordan came along and made himself the undisputed champ -- not just winning three titles in a row, but retiring, unretiring and coming back to do that again. I loved it when Tiger Woods came along in his prime and immediately replaced Michael as the biggest star we had in sports, at one point winning four majors in a row across two years in golf, what was called the Tiger Slam. Next Sunday, the Chiefs will try to win their third in a row, to breathe that kind of rarefied air, and the whole country will watch with tremendous and maybe even historic TV interest to see if they can pull it off.
It would be like that if the Dodgers try to do it again this year, to win two World Series in a row and third since 2020. To do that with as much star power as baseball has ever seen, with Shohei Ohtani -- one of the great stars the sport has ever seen, expected to pitch again this season -- and with Mookie Betts, one of the most gifted and exciting all-around players of all time. With Freddie Freeman and last year’s Japanese ace, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and this year’s Japanese ace, Roki Sasaki. And, oh by the way, they now have Blake Snell, a two-time Cy Young Award winner, and perhaps even a legendary former Cy Young guy, Clayton Kershaw, coming back.
And even with all that talent, are the Dodgers a lock? Of course not. We’ve already established how difficult it is to repeat, and we all know how close they were to being out of business against the Padres in their division series, down 2-1 in a 5-game series with Dave Roberts forced to use a bullpen game with his team’s season on the line.
“But I believe our greatness was in our belief that day,” Dave Roberts told me afterward. After his team had lost just three more games on their way to finally getting their parade.
I think it will be a rocking show watching them try to do it again. And as much as people wring their hands over what the Dodgers are doing, there is no shame in trying to field the best and most entertaining team possible.
For now, we buckle up and get ready to watch the Dodgers try to do it again, watch everybody try to knock them out. And if the Dodgers are making you crazy, well, knock yourself out.