The $1bn World Series champion Dodgers have everything except complacency

Hours after the last out of the 2024 Major League Baseball season, the field at Yankee Stadium was strewn with ribbons of gold confetti. Jack Flaherty, who started Game 1 of the World Series for the now-champion Los Angeles Dodgers, spotted Shohei Ohtani, the presumptive National League Most Valuable Player, in the middle of an interview with the MLB Network crew on a small stage that had been erected in left field.

“Sho!” he yelled over the legion of fans who stayed to cheer and chant the players’ names. “Focus!” Flaherty reprimanded, having purposefully distracted Ohtani.

Ohtani jokingly gestured for Flaherty to join him and the pitcher waved him off, turning his attention to hugging a shirtless Walker Buehler, who had both started Game 3 and closed out Game 5. The passing moment was notable amid the various vignettes of revelry unfolding around the rival ballpark in part because Ohtani is such a charming enigma. Any hint of an identity not directly tied to excelling at sport is a thrill to uncover. And also because neither Ohtani nor Flaherty, two pieces to this year’s postseason success, was on the Dodgers last year. Buehler spent the whole season rehabbing from a second Tommy John surgery. And yet the 2023 team won 100 games.

On 9 December last year, the Dodgers – coming off 11-straight postseason appearances and the most regular-season wins in MLB over that decade-plus – did what most experts expected and yet still managed to shock the sports world when they awarded a $700m contract to the two-way sensation Ohtani – the second coming of Babe Ruth if Babe Ruth had stuck with the pitching or boasted speed to pair with his power or was a global superstar.

In short, the best team in baseball added perhaps the best player the game has ever seen.

And Ohtani was just one piece in the Dodgers’ offseason spending spree that saw them commit an estimated $1.2bn dollars in an effort to turn a team that had proven it could get to October into one that could succeed there consistently.

Nearly 11 months later, the Dodgers trounced the storied New York Yankees, four games to one, in the World Series. Cause, meet effect.

Of course it’s not quite that simple; but, frankly, to reduce the past year in baseball down to that equation wouldn’t be incorrect, merely incomplete. Ohtani had previously managed to make himself baseball’s main character even when languishing on an Angels team that failed to parlay his presence – or that of another MVP, Mike Trout – into a single postseason appearance. Ohtani’s decision to relocate to an office 30 miles north from Anaheim to LA proper brought a spotlight to the Dodgers team already used to playing center stage.

The star-studded Dodgers would be a dynasty, the defining team of the modern era – already they’re the oft-cited envy of other franchises that aspire to such “sustainable” success – if not for the pesky little detail that they’d previously only won one title during this run of dominance. Further mitigation: that lone ring came in the Covid-shortened 2020 season, uncommemorated by a championship parade, marred by context most of us would rather memory hole.

Rather than regroup after each untimely and abrupt exit in October, the Dodgers have repeatedly doubled down, somehow equally adroit at getting their money’s worth on players who had already won MVPs elsewhere as they are at upcycling undervalued reclamation projects.

“I think we have the best organization in baseball with consistency, but you’ve still got to go out there and play the schedule,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, a man who is seemingly spoken of in relation to either the Hall of Fame or the hot seat, depending on how his most recent playoff series went.

“I feel that way every year,” Dodgers president Stan Kasten said after Wednesday’s game of whether the superlative is merited. “But the postseason is not built that way. The postseason has ups and downs. In a three-, five-, or seven-game series it’s not just the best team that wins. You’ve got to get breaks. This year, we were the best team, and we had some breaks along the way.”

The clinching game on Wednesday night in the Bronx appeared full of fortuitous breaks in the form of miscues and missed opportunities by the opposition. But if someone tries to tell you that the Yankees gifted the Dodgers a championship with the errors and mental lapses that lend to unearned runs, don’t believe them.

Yes, at times during the series – as when Yankees slugger and American League MVP-in-waiting Aaron Judge struck out seven times in the first four games – it seemed the Yankees were losing more than the Dodgers were winning. But it was the relative absence of such meltdowns by the Dodgers themselves and the ability to capitalize on them when they were the beneficiary of such sloppiness that propelled Los Angeles to the championship. In a matchup of titans, the Dodgers did the little things right and that proved to be the difference.

Even the Dodgers could consider themselves plucky by the time they took the field on Halloween eve by virtue of how hobbled the team was. This was true to a man – Ohtani struggled after dislocating his shoulder on an awkward slide earlier in the series; World Series MVP Freddie Freeman equalled the record for RBIs in the Fall Classic despite an ankle that had him limping out for introductions in the National League Championship Series – and on a team-wide scale. In the regular season, the Dodgers led MLB in player games missed to IL stints.

Which is why, even in season, they kept adding. Flaherty – who faltered in Game 5 forcing the bullpen to convert the bulk of the outs, but had been a boon to a decimated rotation – was a trade-deadline acquisition. As was NLCS MVP Tommy Edman. And Michael Kopech, who surrendered runs in just two of his 12 relief appearances this postseason. This Dodgers team, unlike many of the recent iterations, was not truly a superteam, failing to reach the century mark in wins during the regular season. And yet, any piece missing from this painstakingly assembled roster could have spelled another offseason come early.

If there’s a moral to the Dodgers’ 2024 title it’s to never be complacent. Or maybe it’s to win the obvious ways, acquiring undeniable talent at any price.

Or maybe the almost compulsive confluence of the two that seemed to define this team speaks to a larger lesson. We can know that the small sample size of October is unfair and to a certain extent uncontrollable, that the Dodgers have established themselves as a model modern franchise through their regular season record. And yet still, what everyone in baseball really wants is a ring and a parade. No amount of sustained excellence is a match for ending the season sticky with champagne, cigars perfuming the air, as champions.