The Los Angeles Dodgers’ push to win a third straight World Series ended officially Thursday, swept by the Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Championship Series.
Their chances were never the same, however, as early as June.
The Dodgers started June 11 the way they began the season — as a heavy favorite to become the first franchise since the 1998-00 New York Yankees to claim three consecutive championships. Their active roster, the most expensive in the sport, included two former World Series MVPs, one Cy Young winner, and a second would be added a few weeks later at the trade deadline.
The linchpin was superstar Shohei Ohtani, the four-time MVP whose pitching and hitting feats were unparalleled in modern baseball history, and had helped the club win titles in each of his first two seasons in Los Angeles.
That version of Ohtani was on display June 11 in Pittsburgh. He started the day with a minuscule 1.06 ERA in 11 appearances on the mound. Against the Pirates, he proceeded to hit a solo homer and get on base in all four plate appearances. Then, in the seventh inning, Ohtani exited with what the team called knee inflammation.
The injury appeared innocuous. It was instead the first in a series of lingering knee and bicep injuries that diminished Ohtani and eventually derailed the Dodgers juggernaut (total payroll cost: $339 million) until they couldn’t keep up with Milwaukee ($146 million), which clinched its sweep with Thursday’s 6-4 win in Los Angeles.
After exiting the June 11 game in Pittsburgh, Ohtani pitched only three more times and had an ERA of 4.50 before being shut down as a pitcher July 3.
The Dodgers’ postseason disappointment could not be explained alone by Ohtani’s decline over the season’s back half. The Dodgers’ bullpen and vaunted starters also showed vulnerabilities throughout the summer.
Yet when the rest of the team’s offense sputtered for long stretches, Ohtani’s inability to rescue his team at the plate was even more pronounced. The Dodgers hit .257 during the regular season to just .188 in the postseason. Their OPS, a measure of both on-base percentage and slugging, ranked second-best during the season (.762). In the playoffs, that average fell to .572.
“They just out-pitched us, they out-hit us, they played defense better, they didn’t make any mistakes,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told Fox after Game 4.
Ohtani produced just one RBI in his final 83 plate appearances of the regular season, a stretch that included 11 hits and 11 walks. Entering Thursday’s NLCS finale, Ohtani had gotten on base eight times in 28 postseason plate appearances, with his slugging percentage a fraction of his postseason career average.
Desperate for a spark, the Dodgers moved Ohtani back into his traditional leadoff spot for Game 4 and he responded by hitting his first home run since Aug. 18, and driving in three runs. Ohtani tossed his bat and raised his arms to celebrate as the Dodgers took a 4-0 lead in the second inning. But just as it had been all season, as Ohtani went, so went the Dodgers. He never got on base again, and the Dodgers never scored again Thursday, allowing Milwaukee to recover and rally.
The Dodgers aren’t the only ones in baseball entering this offseason facing uncertainty. A work stoppage is considered likely when the collective bargaining agreement between MLB and its players union expires Dec. 1. The league intends to address the wide financial gulf between their top-spending clubs and their thriftiest, despite the success of small-market teams this postseason. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has said the league wants to address “concerns that go to the core of what we’re about — that is competitive balance.”
Backed by MLB’s richest TV deal, the Dodgers’ financial might allow them to build star-studded rosters that allowed them to withstand injuries and slumps by plugging in one promising player after another. That spending fueled their titles in 2020, 2024 and 2025 and should ensure they remain competitive for as long as owner Mark Walter intends to spend lavishly on the roster. Walter sold the Los Angeles Lakers and his stake in the Premier League club Chelsea to generate cash as federal investigators look into his businesses, but Dodgers leaders have maintained that Walter views the baseball club as a crown jewel of his portfolio of sports assets.
“I can’t tell you how important the Dodgers are to Mark,” Dodgers executive Stan Kasten told reporters in August.
Playing two ways is important to Ohtani. Yet if there is baseball in 2027, Ohtani will be 33, and the combination of this season’s lingering injuries — to his knee, then his right biceps — and the team’s handling of them will place a spotlight on how willing the team is committed to using Ohtani as both a pitcher and hitter in future seasons.
Rather than pull Ohtani from the lineup for a lengthy stretch until he was ready physically, the team deferred to the star’s feelings about his health, taking him out of the lineup for only a game or two throughout June, July and August. As recently as Game 3 of the NLCS this week, Roberts told reporters he’d had a “great conversation” with Ohtani and team executives in which Ohtani expressed a belief he was close to pulling out of a prodigious slump.
“There’s just complete conviction that he’s onto something,” Roberts told reporters this week. “He feels like he can help us, and he can help us. For me, that’s all I need to hear.”
Allowing a player’s input to influence their usage isn’t uncommon, but it has left the Dodgers relying on Ohtani’s candor. Though his health issues began cropping up in early June, it took until early September for the team to place Ohtani on the 15-day IL.
“He’s not always the best reporter of how he feels,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said in late September. “Freddie (Freeman) is the same way, Clayton Kershaw, I’ve been around a lot of these guys that feel like their job is to be out there to help the team however they can and, sometimes, will downplay some things that are bothering them.”
Before the Dodgers beat the Atlanta Braves in the postseason divisional series, Ohtani told reporters that it had been difficult to get “a good grasp of the root cause of all this.” Before facing Milwaukee, Ohtani began taking batting practice outdoors, a rarity for a player who prefers to prepare inside batting cages under the stadium.
“With the swing, it’s a daily process of trying different things,” Ohtani said last week. “The symptoms shouldn’t be the reason why I can’t hit.”
In last year’s World Series, Ohtani had endured hitting slumps, too, but his teammates compensated with timely contributions to earn a second consecutive title. That was no longer the case this year. Of the 12 teams to reach the postseason, the Dodgers ranked 10th in OPS, a measure of both on-base percentage and slugging, while their pitchers ranked eighth in walks plus hits allowed per nine innings.
After beating Atlanta to advance to the NLCS, the Dodgers wore celebratory T-shirts emblazoned with “Take October.” Unfortunately for them, their chance of a third consecutive World Series may as well have been taken out months earlier.
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