PHOENIX — They won’t win 120 games. They won’t even threaten the all-time regular-season wins record (116).
That overheated spring training hyperbole didn’t make it through the day-to-day challenges of a 162-game season that grinds away at even the most talented roster.
But with a perfunctory 8-0 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks on Thursday afternoon – the Dodgers’ 90th win of the season – they clinched their 12th National League West division title in the past 13 years.
They will host a best-of-three Wild Card Series beginning Tuesday at Dodger Stadium with the Cincinnati Reds, New York Mets and the Diamondbacks (despite Thursday’s loss) all still vying to provide the opposition.
It is the first time since 2018 that the Dodgers will not finish with one of the two best records in the National League, but 13 wins in October would make them the first back-to-back World Series champions since the New York Yankees won three in a row from 1998-2000.
“Baseball is different from any other sport,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said of the challenge of repeating. “The psyche part of it, the battle of attrition, all that stuff kind of matters in baseball. There’s probably many reasons why it hasn’t been done since the Yankees did it, but I think that’s something we’re trying to do. We have an opportunity to make history. It hasn’t been easy, but that’s part of it. It shouldn’t be easy.”
They’ve come a long way since that first division title in this run. They celebrated that 2013 clinch at Chase Field by climbing the outfield wall and partying in the pool. When they clinched the 2022 title in the same location, there were mounted policemen protecting the pool from desecration.
This time, the splashing was limited to Shohei Ohtani’s fourth-inning home run, a 400-foot shot that drew water – and tied his total from a season ago (his personal-high and a franchise record). That was one of four Dodgers’ home runs in the first four innings, half of them hit by Freddie Freeman.
Freeman and Andy Pages hit back-to-back home runs in a four-run second inning that also featured a two-run single by Mookie Betts. Ohtani and Freeman each hit two-run home runs in another four-run inning in the fourth that made the rest of the afternoon a mere formality.
It was a surprising show of support for starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto who has had to make do with three runs or fewer in nearly half of his starts this season. He cruised through six scoreless innings Thursday, allowing four hits – the first time since August he has given up more than one hit in a start.
Yamamoto struck out seven, finishing the season with 201 strikeouts over a team-leading 173⅔ innings. He is the first Dodger pitcher with a 200-strikeout season since Walker Buehler (212) in 2021. His 2.49 ERA is fourth in the majors, second in the National League only behind Pittsburgh’s Paul Skenes.
After scraping together postseason starting rotations in recent years – and winning last year’s championship with bullpen games sprinkled in – the best thing the Dodgers have going for them in their quest to repeat is a group of starters led by Ohtani, Snell and Yamamoto (the likely order next week) with Tyler Glasnow, Emmet Sheehan and Clayton Kershaw behind them.
“I wasn’t on this (coaching) staff when they had Kershaw and (Zack) Greinke in ’15. That was a pretty good one, with Ryu,” Roberts said. “This is as good of a starting staff as I’ve had going into the postseason, by far.”
The division-clinching win was the Dodgers’ 12th in their past 17 games – a strong sprint to the finish after muddling through much of the summer. A nine-game division lead on July 3 disappeared entirely and they fell into second place on Aug. 13. That seemed to get their attention.
“You try to put forth every game is the same, April is just as important as September and October, and that in theory is great,” Roberts said. “It’s hard to do that in practice in baseball, but I do think we’ve gotten to this point and I feel we’re all aligned and we’re all in the right mindset for the rest of September and through October.”
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