The narrative of a championship season usually focuses on all the things that went right. That’s one of the factors that has kept MLB from having a repeat champion since the New York Yankees in 2000 – everything doesn’t often go right two years in a row.
As the Dodgers open defense of their first full-season championship since 1988 in earnest with their home opener Thursday, they don’t have to worry about that.
“I would say hardly anything went right for us last year,” said Max Muncy, one of 29 Dodgers who spent time on the injured list during the 2024 season – one of 18 who missed at least 40 games.
“There’s certain things in baseball you can’t control. For the most part, you can’t control injuries. … You’ve just got to find a way to fight through that. Last year, that’s what we did. Maybe this year it would be nice not to have to fight through all that.”
The Dodgers’ front office did what they could to avoid that, assembling the deepest roster in baseball with starting pitching options that go 10 deep, a bullpen that includes four relievers with 20-save seasons on their résumé and a lineup that will feature seven former All-Stars on most nights.
That collection of talent has made the Dodgers the favorites to win it all again, bucking a trend that has seen 12 of the past 24 defending champions miss the postseason entirely in their follow-up season and only one (the 2009 Philadelphia Phillies) make it back to the World Series.
“I don’t think anything changes, of the expectations and things like that,” Kiké Hernandez said this spring. “I think the expectations in this organization are the same year in and year out, regardless of what happened the year before. What happened last year was unbelievable, was really special. But it was last year. That already is paid for. That is not going to change any expectation coming into this year.”
Early in spring training, manager Dave Roberts addressed the topic in a team meeting and challenged the defending champions not to change their mindset. Don’t think about defending anything, he told them. Be the hunter, not the hunted.
“I love that,” Chris Taylor said. “I think it’s kind of just always playing with a chip on your shoulder like you have something to prove and not being content or satisfied. That’s something I definitely feel like I’ve had personally, that I’ve always played with that. But I think it’s a great attitude to have as a team as well. I think if we can carry that, with all the talent we have, we can multiply that with that chip on our shoulder. Being the hunter, I think that will make us better.”
Roberts explained his challenge as being aimed at getting his team to think in terms of “being proactive, being the aggressor.”
He calls it “a trick of the mind” because the Dodgers are actually “always” the hunted, their payroll and record of success meaning they play “with a bulls-eye on our backs” every year.
“I’ve always felt we have a target on our backs,” Muncy said. “I talk about it every year. We see it in the scouting reports – a guy throws 93, 94 (mph) and we face him at Dodger Stadium on a Friday night and he’s 96, 97. You see it all the time. Part of that is the aura of playing at Dodger Stadium. You have 50,000 people – more than anywhere else in baseball. The lights are brighter. The music is a little louder. All that stuff. That’s just part of the aura of playing at Dodger Stadium. So it’s always felt like that to me since I’ve been over here. There’s always a target on our backs.
“It was that way last year. It was that way the year before. And we didn’t have titles those years. That’s how it’s always been. It’s part of playing for the Dodgers. That’s why Doc says playing for the Dodgers is not easy. There’s playing Major League Baseball and there’s playing for the Dodgers and it’s not easy.”
If nothing changes about the targets on their backs, the Dodgers also hope nothing changes about the team chemistry they believe was critical to October’s championship run. Mookie Betts spoke at a players-only meeting in Tokyo (before heading back to the United States early due to illness) and emphasized the importance of maintaining the togetherness that galvanized during the postseason last year.
“Carrying over what we found last year in the postseason, being close as a group – that was the general theme,” Taylor said of the meeting.
“Just kind of something that we started figuring out towards the end of last year,” Muncy said. “This is our team. We need to be in it together. We need to be in it for the boys. Last year in the playoffs, we really took on that mindset. It was no longer waiting around for a coaching staff or a front-office guy making a decision on what we should do. It was us making our own decisions. Something that we felt really helped us get to the title last year.
“That was his message – we’ve got to continue doing that this year.”
No active player in baseball has been a defending champion as often as Betts, his three championship rings (2018 Boston Red Sox, 2020 and 2024 Dodgers) leading everyone.
“It’s hard to do it once. So I think we can’t keep thinking about being champions again,” Betts said at the start of spring training.
“It’s definitely tough but we didn’t win last year because we were talking about the World Series every day. I think we won last year because we talked about the task at hand. I think we have to continue to talk about the task at hand and not worry about the end goal. We have an end goal, of course, but you have to take stepping stones to get there and not worry about there. We’ll get there when we get there.”