Maybe the T-shirts the Dodgers were given on the field after winning a long-awaited championship last October should have said the following:
“I won the World Series, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”
The reasons were understandable and unavoidable, but the champs had reason to feel a little cheated. There was no parade down Broadway, no mass celebration on the steps of L.A. City Hall, no outpouring of love from their fans in which they could share.
Would Manager Dave Roberts have been tempted to dance at the podium, the way Tommy Lasorda had done 32 years previously? Would he have guaranteed a repeat, in the spirit of former Lakers coach Pat Riley in 1987? We’ll never know.
There’s no White House visit scheduled, although that still might change. (Worth noting: The Dodgers are in Washington on July 4 weekend.) And there was no making the rounds of the late-night talk shows to soak up the applause because it’s just not the same when Jimmy Kimmel has you as a guest via Zoom.
It was for the best, given the public health implications, but maybe there was another benefit. Maybe less partying means less of a World Series hangover.
Maybe, after being driven to erase all those years of October almosts and finally doing so, the 2021 Dodgers will be driven to build on their success, win it all again and actually get a chance to, you know, celebrate fully this coming October.
“In some ways, we feel like we kind of half-won the thing,” pitcher Walker Buehler said Saturday.
And Roberts noted Monday that it has indeed been a topic of conversation.
“Every player is motivated by different things,” he said via Zoom from spring training in Glendale, Ariz. “Every team’s motivated to win a championship. But I do think I’ve heard guys talk about the fact that we want to do it right and kind of enjoy all of the fruits, still being mindful of what we had to go through last year and what was allowed.
“I do think there’s a little bit of, ‘I want to do it again, we want to do it again so we can enjoy the champagne celebration in the clubhouse with our families, teammates, coaches. And also that parade.’ When you’re a young player, you think about winning the World Series and that parade is something that sticks out in a lot of players’ minds.”
Not only was there no parade, but pitcher Clayton Kershaw noted over the weekend that with position players not joining spring training until this week “we really haven’t had a chance to, like, celebrate it or anything together … so maybe get to live it up for a little bit the next few days and then get ready to go for this season.”
But while these Dodgers are coming from a different, more positive place than they did after all those seasons when the last box was left unchecked, Kershaw said there’s a feeling of not wanting to squander the opportunity to win it again.
There’s “not a different mindset,” he said. “With the team we have coming in, the expectation is to win a World Series. And so we have to remember that it doesn’t matter that we won last year, but at the same time remember that our team is going to be – has a chance to be – special again, and we can’t take that for granted.”
The Dodgers from management on down seem to have a “leave no doubt” approach to 2021, though some of that is in response to one of the few other teams in the sport willing to extend themselves to win, the division rival San Diego Padres.
For what it’s worth, two separate betting services posted projected over/under win totals for the coming season that put the Dodgers at 103-1/2 victories. Considering that in two of the last three full seasons they won 104 and 106 games, that’s not far-fetched.
They’ll face 19 battles with the Padres – which third baseman Justin Turner likened to “19 World Series games” – before even getting to October, but they also get to beat up on the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks and also get 20 games against an American League West that, at this point, looks cotton candy soft.
The Dodgers who have spoken publicly since camp began not only don’t seem bothered by the talent San Diego has amassed this offseason, they seem almost enthused about it. It’s a challenge, certainly, but to players who as a group keep a wary eye on teams’ level of willingness to compete, going all-in as the Padres have done doesn’t happen nearly often enough.
The bottom line for fans usually is whether they feel their favorite team’s ownership cares as much about winning as they do. With the Dodgers that question was answered years ago, even if the final payoff didn’t come until last October. Guggenheim Baseball has avoided the sort of boom-and-bust cycles of other teams, and while you might not always agree with their methods and have had reason to agonize over the results over the years, you can’t argue that they don’t try.
“Our primary focus is on doing everything we can to defend our title,” baseball operations boss Andrew Friedman pointed out Friday.
“We feel really good about the team we have in place. And we know that there’s some added costs associated with it, which is not ideal and it is a cost. But we feel like with where we are and the team we have, the reward kind of outweighs that.”
That doesn’t sound at all like an organization intimidated by the competitive balance tax. Rather, it sounds like one that feels it still owes L.A. a parade.
jalexander@scng.com
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