How the Dodgers persisted to a World Series parade: ‘No asterisk on this one’

Major League Baseball

Updated Oct. 31, 2024 12:58 p.m. ET

NEW YORK — The Los Angeles Dodgers had heard the minimizing and belittling of their short-season championship in the hours and days and months and years since they dogpiled between the mound and home plate at Globe Life Field four seasons ago. They believed what they did in 2020 amid adverse circumstances and a Texas bubble might have been harder and required even more than the typical season. Every other team, after all, had the same chance they did.

And yet …

“You want the full season one, just to get that whole narrative out of the window,” Gavin Lux said. “I think it kind of bugs everybody a little bit that you don’t get the recognition that you deserve.”

For the past four years, it served as fuel, a little extra motivation to acquire the franchise’s first full-season World Series championship since 1988. The Dodgers had gone to the postseason 11 straight years before this one, with only one pandemic-shortened title to show for it. Many of the same characters from 2020 remained, craving a championship no one could question and a celebration that evaded them the last time they won in the middle of a pandemic.

Thanks to seven relievers and the first five-run comeback in a World Series clincher Wednesday night in the Bronx, that parade they missed in 2020 will take place Friday in Los Angeles — on what would have been Fernando Valenzuela’s 64th birthday.

“I’m going to enjoy the heck out of this one,” manager Dave Roberts said. “I’m sure there’s no asterisk on this one.”

In a season defined by persistence, the Dodgers outlasted the Yankees in Game 5 of the World Series, battling back from an early five-run hole, falling behind again, then coming through with the go-ahead runs in the eighth inning of a 7-6 win that embodied their resilience en route to a second championship in five years.

“Now it’s two, baby, what are you gonna say about that?” Max Muncy said. “World Series champions. Get that Mickey Mouse s— out of your mouth. We got a full season. It’s here.”

At 1:18 a.m. in the Bronx, as Wednesday night bled into Thursday morning and the Dodgers’ eighth World Series championship celebration shifted from a champagne-soaked clubhouse onto a family-filled field at Yankee Stadium, a shirtless Walker Buehler, pants still drenched from the postgame libations, lifted up Will Smith’s 2-year-old daughter for a hug before embracing his catcher for the second time that night. The first, a couple of hours prior, came as more of a surprise.

Dodgers pitching coach Mark Prior had not discussed Buehler pitching at all in the deciding Game 5 of the World Series. That Buehler, an October star again after a turbulent return from his second Tommy John surgery, nonetheless secured the final out of the 2024 season represented a fitting finish to a year that took a path the Dodgers never could have imagined after their billion-dollar offseason splurge.

If the chance to celebrate with a parade wasn’t incentive enough, they would find plenty more sources of motivation as their juggernaut roster began to crumble piece by piece. Injuries tattered their rotation to the point that only one pitcher from their Opening Day rotation still remained upright by October. Of the three starters they entrusted to get them through the postseason, one, Jack Flaherty, didn’t arrive until the deadline and was chased after recording four outs in the final win of the World Series. Another, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, missed nearly three months with a shoulder injury. The third, Buehler, had an ERA over 5.00 in a season marred by inconsistent command and mechanics.

Even the star-studded offense had taken its hits. Shohei Ohtani, the prize of the offseason who finally got his long-awaited opportunity on the sport’s biggest stage, partially dislocated his shoulder during the World Series. Before that, Freddie Freeman suffered a late September ankle sprain that was supposed to keep him out for 4-6 weeks. Freeman’s father, Fred, had to drive him to Dodger Stadium every day for physical therapy because Freddie couldn’t use his injured right foot on the pedal.

“It was beyond what any human should do,” Freeman’s father said from the field at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday, where he celebrated with his son. “I don’t know any other person that could have done that. Maybe Shohei, what he’s been doing right now. Shohei’s a warrior, also.”

Both players pushed through, though Freeman did a lot more than just survive en route to being selected World Series MVP. He set a major-league record with home runs in six straight World Series games (dating back to his 2021 championship run with the Braves) after homering in each of the first four games of this year’s World Series. The streak ended in Game 5, but his production did not. Freeman delivered a two-run hit as part of the Dodgers’ five-run fifth to tie the game. A medley of Yankees errors and miscues opened the door. An opportunistic Dodgers club knocked it down.

“Get dealt a couple blows, come back from it,” Muncy said. “Get dealt some more blows, come back from it. This game was literally our season in a nutshell.”

Given their dearth of starting options, the Dodgers needed to rely on a cavalcade of relievers to persevere, as they had all October. Their postseason run included 22 more innings from their bullpen than from their starters.

“I’d be one to tell you there would never be a bullpenning team that won the World Series,” said Blake Treinen, who recorded seven outs on Wednesday, marking the first time in six years that he’d gone more than two innings in an outing. “I’m eating crow.”

So depleted of starting pitchers, and needing to keep their highest-leverage arms fresh, the Dodgers and manager Dave Roberts chose to punt on certain playoff games when his team got down in a bullpen game. Roberts would live to fight another day, saving his most trusted relievers for more positive game scripts, so the opponent wouldn’t get as many looks at them. The dangerous strategy ultimately triumphed. Maligned for his decision-making in postseasons past, Roberts navigated a treacherous road deftly.

“Doc,” Smith said, “pushed all the right buttons.”

The most important might have come two weeks before the playoffs, when the team’s mounting injuries seemed to be taking a toll on the club both physically and mentally. In mid-September, after the Dodgers learned All-Star Tyler Glasnow’s season was over, Roberts read the room and saw a team that looked demoralized. The Dodgers had just dropped two straight games in Atlanta, and the Padres were clawing into their division lead.

Roberts rarely calls for team meetings, but Teoscar Hernández said the timing of this one changed everything. The skipper told his players that he couldn’t believe in them more than they believed in themselves, and the change needed to begin that night.

Buehler responded by bouncing back from a five-run outing to hold the Braves to one earned run in six innings. It was one of 11 wins in the final 14 games of the regular season for a Dodgers team that would be playoff bound for a 12th straight year, and it set a tone for a team that would then rebound from a 2-1 deficit in the National League Division Series against the Padres. It was around that time when Roberts realized this group, which would run through the Mets and Yankees, was different from recent iterations.

“I believe in this team,” Roberts said before a do-or-die Game 5 of the NLDS, “more than any team I’ve had.”

After winning the 2020 World Series, the past three years didn’t go the way the Dodgers planned. In 2021, they couldn’t dig out of another 3-1 NLCS hole against Freeman’s Braves, who would go on to win the whole thing. In 2022, a historic team that won 111 games bowed out in the first round in a stunning upset against the upstart Padres. A year later came another shocking first-round shellacking at the hands of a division foe, this time with the Diamondbacks blitzing the Dodgers.

Getting swept yielded sweeping changes.

The Dodgers opened the bank to bring in the most talented player in the game. A third MVP atop the lineup could, ideally, help stabilize an offense that had recently sputtered in October. Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman was at his son’s soccer game on a Zoom call recruiting another player when he got the news that Ohtani was on board, ending an emotional roller-coaster for a Los Angeles franchise that had long coveted the two-way sensation.

That Ohtani, determined to be part of a winning organization for the first time in his unmatched six-year big-league career, decided to set up his contract in an extraordinary way, deferring most of the $700 million he was owed over the next 10 years, freed up the Dodgers to continue adding. They made fellow NPB standout Yamamoto the highest-paid pitcher in baseball history with a contract that was $1 million more in total value than Gerrit Cole, the ace who took the mound for the Yankees on Wednesday in Game 5 of the World Series.

The Dodgers kept going, trading for and extending Glasnow and bringing in even more offensive firepower by adding Hernández on a one-year deal. They had formed what seemed to be an inexorable machine, one capable of exorcising their recent postseason failures and delivering their city the parade they never got.

But more work would be required from the Dodgers’ front office to acquire the pieces necessary to get them over the top.

In one of the most vital trade deadlines in franchise history, they acquired the best pitcher available on the market in Flaherty, the local Los Angeles product who did just enough for his hometown team in a volatile postseason to help his club survive. Just as importantly, they also swung a three-team deal for versatile defender Tommy Edman, who hadn’t played a game this year to that point as he rehabbed wrist and ankle injuries, and reliever Michael Kopech, who was languishing on the worst team in modern baseball history. Kopech would slot in among the bevy of relief arms Roberts would come to rely upon.

Amid the injuries, the Dodgers knew they still possessed talent. And as they clawed through the postseason, they learned more about their ability to overcome adversity. There was perhaps no better example than the player who threw the final pitch of the season.

Earlier in the day, Buehler told the Dodgers’ coaching staff and front office he’d be available in the bullpen.

“Like, yeah, Walk, that’s awesome,” Friedman said, shaking off the thought.

“Well, what if it gets wonky?” Buehler asked.

With Flaherty departing in the second inning, things got wonky.

The Dodgers had already deployed all those high-leverage arms they were saving, forcing Treinen to record seven outs as the bullpen options dwindled. From there, the Dodgers had a couple of options. They could turn to Daniel Hudson, who threw 20 pitches the night prior, one of which resulted in a grand slam, and had grinded through another grueling year that would end with the 15-year big leaguer declaring his retirement late Wednesday night.

Or, they could go to Buehler, who had already made his way to the bullpen. With the Dodgers leading by one run in the ninth, after he threw four scoreless innings in Game 3 of the NLCS and five scoreless innings in his lone start of the World Series just two days prior, Buehler, in what could have been his final act as a Dodger, emerged and added another spotless frame.

“What Walker did right there, he’s etched in Dodger royalty for the rest of his life,” Clayton Kershaw said.

“I can’t say enough about him,” Friedman added. “It shouldn’t be surprising. Time and time again, what he’s done in October cements his legacy as an all-time Dodger great.”

It was also a fitting microcosm of the Dodgers’ year of fortitude. After recording the final out of the 2024 season, Buehler raised his hands in the air with his palms to the sky, in a motion that was less “I can’t believe it” and more “What else would you expect?”

In a season that didn’t go the way Buehler hoped, he was still the October hero.

In a year and a game that didn’t go the way the Dodgers scripted, they were still victorious.

This time, four seasons after the previous title, a parade will mark the accomplishment. And there’s nothing anyone can say to diminish it.

“First one’s just as much as this, in my opinion, Smith said. “People can say whatever they want, but this is No. 2 for us, No. 2 for me. Hopefully, we get a few more.”

Rowan Kavner is an MLB writer for FOX Sports. He previously covered the L.A. Dodgers, LA Clippers and Dallas Cowboys. An LSU grad, Rowan was born in California, grew up in Texas, then moved back to the West Coast in 2014. Follow him on Twitter at @RowanKavner.

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