Dodgers ‘hit every speed bump possible’ on way to title

NEW YORK — After winning the 2020 World Series, the Dodgers erased the frustration that came with their 32-year championship drought. What they didn’t do, however, was silence all the noise from the naysayers.

The Dodgers heard it all.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it wasn’t a full season. They played in a bubble. They never had to travel during the postseason and play in front of hostile crowds. It’s not real until you celebrate with a parade.

Well, L.A., get ready for that parade. The Dodgers are World Series champions for the eighth time in their storied history following a 7-6 comeback win over the Yankees in Game 5 on Wednesday at Yankee Stadium.

“Now it’s two, baby. Now it’s two,” said Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy. “What are you going to say now?”

The Dodgers made sure there was nothing else left to say. And they did it their way. In a season that featured some of the best comebacks in franchise history, the Dodgers saved their best for last. As the Yankees took a five-run lead in the early innings, the series looked destined to be heading back to Los Angeles for a Game 6.

Jack Flaherty didn’t have his best stuff and was pulled after recording just four outs. The first couple of relievers that followed also had their struggles. The sold-out Yankee Stadium crowd was ready to party.

But as long as the Dodgers had outs left, there was always a chance. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts turned to seven different relievers to finish out the game, including Walker Buehler, who volunteered to pitch on Wednesday and recorded the final three outs. That gave the Dodgers’ offense more than enough time to strike.

Aided by a multitude of mistakes from the Yanks’ defense, the Dodgers scored five runs in the fifth. They then took the lead in the eighth inning with a pair of sacrifice flies by Gavin Lux and Mookie Betts. That helped them complete the five-run comeback, the largest to clinch a World Series in baseball history.

“We’re grinders,” Betts said. “We never thought we were out of it. We just had to score one at a time. It was crazy how it unfolded. I mean, you gotta play a clean game to beat us, and our character came through.”

Celebrating the World Series was exactly where the Dodgers expected to be when they built a juggernaut over the winter. After adding superstar Shohei Ohtani, Japanese phenom Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and Teoscar Hernández, they knew the expectation was to win a championship. Anything short of that would have been a failure. That’s the pressure that comes when you commit more than $1 billion in contracts.

What the Dodgers didn’t know, though, was the adversity this group would have to face along the way. In the end, it’s a group that will best be known for their resiliency, one that overshadowed even their immense talent.

“This game was no different than our entire season,” Muncy said. “Get dealt a couple blows, come back from it. Get dealt some blows, come back from it. This game was literally our season in a nutshell. And it was special.”

Over the course of the summer, the Dodgers were forced to be without Muncy and Betts for an extended period of time. Freddie Freeman, the World Series Most Valuable Player, also battled injuries and spent time away attending to the health of his 3-year-old son, Max.

On the pitching side, there was a new injury seemingly every week. Yamamoto missed months and there were real concerns about him being done for the season due to a serious right shoulder injury. Gavin Stone went down for the year. So did Clayton Kershaw. Late in the season, they found out Glasnow would be forced to miss the rest of his season. The spate of injuries ran so long that Roberts decided to hold a meeting in Atlanta in September.

In that meeting, Roberts challenged his players. He didn’t want them to feel sorry for themselves, though they had every reason to. As a team, they all looked around the room and realized they had more than enough talent to get the job done.

“We did go through a lot, but I’ll say we still had the best record in all of baseball this year,” Roberts said. “It wasn’t easy, but our guys fought and played every day the right way, played to win. There was a lot of backfilling on talent because of injury, a lot of young players cut their teeth, which is good. But one thing is that we just kept going.”

After securing the best record in the sport, the Dodgers’ challenges continued in October. In the second-to-last regular-season series, Freeman sustained a badly sprained right ankle, one that usually takes four-to-six weeks to heal. He needed just one to get back out on the field.

As they faced the Padres in the NL Division Series, the Dodgers were underdogs after falling behind two games to one, facing elimination in the first round for the third consecutive year. That’s when Kiké Hernández and the rest of the leadership in the clubhouse decided to speak up. They weren’t going to go down without a fight.

Three weeks later, there was no team left standing to try and knock out the Dodgers.

“It seems like we hit every speed bump possible over the course of this year. And to overcome what we did as a group of guys, it’s special,” Freeman said. “This is what we start out to do every single Spring Training is to win a championship. I think it’s the hardest thing to do in sports because you just never know what’s going to happen. I mean, we were down 2-1 in the NLDS and it easily could have gotten away from us. And to come back and win those two games and keep it going like we did, it’s just a special group of guys.”

It’s a group that has withstood disappointment throughout the year, but one that has been building toward this moment for a number of seasons. Betts became the first piece of the puzzle after being acquired from the Red Sox in 2020. Freeman joined him as a free agent two years later. Now with Ohtani in the mix, the Dodgers are set up to contend for multiple championships.

That’s where they expect to be. But until then, they’ll celebrate this one. They’ll do it at a parade around Los Angeles that leads into Dodger Stadium. This time, there’s nothing else left to say.

“We can celebrate with our fans,” said Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman. “To be able to take it with them and do it through the streets of Los Angeles and Dodger Stadium, that’s where all of this will be the most special.”