LOS ANGELES — The day before the Dodgers’ 2-0 victory Friday in Game 5 of the National League Division Series, they had Kobe Bryant’s quote posted on a screen in their clubhouse: “JOB’S NOT FINISHED.”
You don’t say, guys.
A scowling Bryant delivered that line in 2009 after the Lakers went up 2-0 in the NBA Finals, his commentary reflecting an acute and unflinching desire to win the grand prize, his unwillingness to even consider bending to complacency: “What’s there to be happy about? Job’s not finished.”
The Dodgers were using it as a rallying cry after winning Game 4 to extend their NLDS and force a must-win Game 5. They had to win or they were finished for this season, two rounds shy of the World Series. It was win or let down their tormented fan base for the 11th time in 12 seasons. Obviously the job wasn’t done.
And neither were the Dodgers, it turned out, finished.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto and a parade of fire-breathing relievers – Evan Phillips, Alex Vesia, Michael Kopech and Blake Treinen – kept the formidable Padres off the board, finishing them off with barely a whimper, scoreless in the final 24 innings of their 2024 season.
And at the plate, the Hernandezes – first Kiké and then Teoscar – gave the Dodgers all the offense they needed to advance past the NLDS for the first time since 2021, when they lost to the eventual champion Atlanta Braves in the NLCS, 4-2 … which is to say, they failed to finish the job.
It’s been mission accomplished just once in this stretch of relative success, when they beat Tampa Bay in the strange confines of a 2020 COVID World Series and steal hear about the asterisk some want to attach to a title won in a pandemic-shortened season.
Otherwise, the typically big-spending Dodgers – who came into this season with their largest payroll yet after committing $1.4 billion in future salaries to Shohei Ohtani and Yamamoto this past offseason – have been falling short of the grand prize.
And while, yes, the Dodgers finished with MLB’s best regular-season record (98-64) for the fourth time in the past eight seasons – including the club-record 111 wins in 2022, when their season ended with a stunningly abrupt 3-1 NLDS loss to the Padres – it’s not what the people really want.
The people don’t want a pretty record or even a party so much as they want a parade.
“If there’s something that this crowd is, it’s hungry,” said Kiké Hernandez, who reliably turns into Playoff Kiké every October, before Friday’s victory, in which he hit his 14th postseason home run, and sixth in a clinching game.
“They want a championship. They want another one. The one we had a couple years back, the city didn’t get to celebrate it because of obvious circumstances. We know how bad they want it.”
And so the job is still not finished. Far from it.
Even though the Dodgers danced on a champagne-logged clubhouse carpet while rapping along with Kendrick Lamar’s mega-hit diss track “Not Like Us” after subduing their Southern California rivals, the work’s not done.
“We won a series, we beat the Padres, and now we get to play the Mets,” said Kiké Hernandez, in a statement that would have been most matter-of-fact if he hadn’t been shouting it into a microphone while Miguel Rojas sprayed him in the face with champagne.
Said backward ballcap-sporting pitcher Jack Flaherty through the din: “We gotta refocus after this tonight, and move forward to the next.”
But first, they celebrated getting over “a little bit of a DS funk,” as Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman called it. “For the guys who have been here, they could feel that after we got down 2-1, and the new guys wanted no part of that …”
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So the Dodgers let loose as only baseball players will after moving past the divisional series for the first time in three tries.
And when they’re finished celebrating having earned the right to host the New York Mets in Game 1 of the National League Championship Series on Sunday evening, they have a job to do.
These talented Ohtani-led Dodgers have two more series to win if they’re going to live up to their potential (even with what amounts to a full pitching rotation sidelined by injury and Rojas and Freddie Freeman ailing, too).
They have work to do to disprove their doubters: “Eighty percent of the experts said we were gonna (freakin’) lose, (forget) those guys, we know what we are!” infielder Max Muncy shouted amid the celebrating. “We were the (freaking) best team in baseball this year.”
The (freaking) best team in baseball has got a job to finish if it’s going to fulfill the fans’ far-too-often deferred dreams. If it’s going to celebrate not just as a playoff participant or divisional winner or National League pennant winner but, finally, as a World Series winner again.