TORONTO — They did not come charging out of the dugout. They did not mob one another with a dogpile by the mound.
When the Dodgers won the National League pennant last week, their on-field celebration hardly looked any different than normal. What would be a frenzied moment of accomplishment for others, they seemed to treat as almost routine.
“The celebration wasn’t even there,” veteran infielder Miguel Rojas said, “because everybody is consumed with winning a World Series.”
“That,” he added, “is the only celebration that we want to really have.”
This has been the Dodgers’ ethos all year long. They knew they were on the precipice of history, trying to become MLB’s first repeat champion in a quarter-century. They knew they were playing for a larger legacy, trying to cement a modern-day dynasty with the franchise’s third title in the last six seasons. But they rarely actually vocalized it to one another. They tried to keep such historical stakes in perspective.
“The legacy, dynasty talk, a lot of that is meant for other people who aren’t playing,” manager Dave Roberts said. “Let them have those debates.”
“Very few people have a chance to do something as great as this organization has a chance to do,” reliever Blake Treinen added. “But it’s not like we have a huge team huddle and are like, ‘This is what we’re doing. This is all we’re worried about.’ It’s just in our DNA.”
Treinen is one of six players who, if the Dodgers win this year’s World Series against the Toronto Blue Jays, will have contributed to all three recent titles (Will Smith, Max Muncy, Kiké Hernández, Mookie Betts and Clayton Kershaw are the others).
This week, during the team’s six-day break between the end of the NLCS last Friday and the World Series opener this Friday, Treinen sat down at his locker at Dodger Stadium, took a moment to reflect on the season, then had a somewhat surprising epiphany.
“This doesn’t even feel like the season is almost over,” he thought to himself. “It feels like it’s just starting.”
It helps explain why the Dodgers were never crushed by the pressure of chasing a dynasty this year. How they followed up an underwhelming regular season with a dominant 9-1 postseason march back to the Fall Classic.
Being here, Treinen said, “kinda feels natural.”
“When you’re a Dodger,” he noted, “it’s just part of what you expect.”
It has been in recent years, at least, as the club began collecting star talent in a way the rest of the sport simply couldn’t match.
Betts became the first marquee external addition when the Dodgers acquired him in a trade from the Boston Red Sox in 2020 — back when the team was still trying to break a three-decade title drought. At that point, they’d already built a juggernaut with largely homegrown talent. They’d reached the World Series twice in the previous three years. And they hoped an MVP-winning superstar of his caliber could help take them over the top.
Betts did, playing a key role in that 2020 title team.
And in the years that followed, he felt the organization’s urgency for more only continued to build, as Freddie Freeman, Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki, Tyler Glasnow and Blake Snell also walked through the door.
“You go get guys [like that], I mean, that kind of lets you know where the team is,” Betts said. “You can kind of look up and know that the window you’re in is really important, and you really need to win now.”
To do so, however, Betts noted a certain mindset that has enveloped the clubhouse, an understanding that “you have to take it one day at a time, you gotta just win one at a time.”
“Eventually, you look up at the end of that window and you’ve taken care of business,” Betts said. “But if you don’t take care of one day at a time, then there’s no way to get to where you want to get to.”
That was key to the Dodgers’ second recent championship last year, when they navigated an arduous postseason path that included two early elimination games against the San Diego Padres and a patchwork pitching plan that threatened to implode at any time.
It was needed again this summer, as the club grinded through a 93-win campaign (its fewest in a full season since 2018) that was marred by repeated injuries and roster-wide underperformances (including from Betts himself during a first-half hitting slump).
“For us, it’s being in the moment, taking care of business,” Roberts said. “Then at the end of the season, you can look back.”
That doesn’t mean the Dodgers — who are trying to join the Yankees, Athletics, Red Sox, Cardinals and Giants as the sixth MLB franchise to win three titles in a six-year span — didn’t recognize the opportunity in front of them this year.
On the first day of spring training, Roberts centered his message to the club on the historical significance this season would hold. In passing conversations over the course of the year, players would sometimes remind each other “let’s win another one, let’s win another,” Treinen recalled. Muncy said the team’s internal belief was that “we need to repeat this year,” because “that’s how good we felt like we were.”
And at low points during the club’s second-half slide, Rojas said this week, the team’s group text chat would occasionally include messages along the lines of: “We got a really good opportunity to do something really big. Not just for us, but for the city, and for the organization, for baseball.”
“I think that’s one of the things that kept us going and motivated,” Rojas added. “It’s something we really want to accomplish.”
Of course, mileage varies on such a mentality.
Kershaw, the most defining face of this era of Dodgers baseball, batted away a dynasty-related question Thursday by professing, “I don’t care about all that,” instead choosing to focus on just how far the organization has come in his 18-year career.
“It’s a really impressive thing to be on one end of it,” he said, reflecting back on a time playoff appearances were sporadic and money was scarce under former owner Frank McCourt, “and get to see where it is now,” when postseason trips have become an annual occurrence and the club’s current Guggenheim ownership group has set payroll records.
“It’s come a very long way,” he added. “It’s built to last.”
Muncy offered a similar perspective, arguing that the team’s success over the last 13 years (including 12 division titles, five pennants and five 100-win campaigns to go along with 13 consecutive playoff appearances) “has to count for something” in any discourse about the legacy of the team.
“The culture we’ve created, to me that’s been everything,” Muncy said. “I feel like that on its own is its own dynasty.”
Still, Muncy acknowledged that a true dynasty label will likely require a third title.
“They always say in other sports you have to win three titles to be a dynasty,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s true. But we have the chance to do it.”
Freeman echoed that for all the “sustained winning the Dodgers have done for so long,” winning a title this week would push them across the threshold.
“Yeah, I guess you can call this, if we do do it, a modern-day dynasty,” he said.
That doesn’t mean the Dodgers will be changing their mindset this week. As they’ve done all year, they’re embracing this opportunity for history without fixating on the reward that awaits.
“The goal is to win as many as possible while this group is together,” Treinen said. “So you just pinch yourself and consider yourself blessed that an organization put you on the roster to do it.”
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