![]() ![]() “So, how far can a team fall in one season? How much did the Padres do to close that gap? I see both of them as 95- to 100-win teams – the Padres being within the margin of error – but giving the Dodgers the benefit of the doubt because I don’t believe they fell that far off such a high cliff. “The Dodgers won 111 games last season and (by Pythagorean W-L, and my own two eyes) could easily have had a better record, given how poorly some of their formerly dependable hitters (Max Muncy, Chris Taylor, Cody Bellinger) and closer (Craig Kimbrel) performed,” Hoornstra said when I asked him about it. Hoornstra was the lone voice picking the Dodgers to end up on top in the NL West. When seven Southern California News Group writers made predictions for the season, baseball columnist J.P. So maybe it’s no surprise that the Dodgers didn’t win it all in 2022, as preseason pennant favorites who collected a franchise-record 111 wins in a full-length regular season.Īnd no surprise that some people think they can win it all in 2023, when they might not even be the best team along a 130-mile stretch of Interstate 5, in a season when expectations are jumbled a bit by the uncertain effects of new rules. Over the last half-century, their three championships have come in the strike-shortened season of 1981 after the best team in the National League (the Reds) didn’t make the jerry-rigged playoffs, in the 1988 season when Bob Costas planted the popular notion that their injury-ravaged lineup was the “weakest” in World Series history, and in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic reduced the season to three months and left the Dodgers facing Tampa Bay in the World Series on a neutral field in Arlington, Texas. ![]() ![]() Going back to Brooklyn days, the Dodgers have managed not to win the World Series after any of their 10 highest-win regular seasons, last season being a particularly painful recurrence of this condition. The Dodgers, who open their 2023 schedule with four games against the Arizona Diamondbacks, starting with Julio Urias on the mound tonight at Dodger Stadium, have a history of winning the World Series at the oddest times. ![]()
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