The Dodgers Just Became MLB’s First NBA-Style Champion

With money and megastars — but also regular-season load management usually reserved for basketball — L.A. eventually tamed the postseason... but it still wasn't easy.

Will Smith and Yoshinobu Yamamoto of the Los Angeles Dodgers celebrate after the third out to end the ninth inning against the Toronto Blue Jays in Game 7 of the 2025 World Series. (Mark Blinch/Getty Images)

As long as I can remember, MLB’s postseason randomness has always resisted any and all attempts to tame it. Every so often, a champion would seem to solve the playoff puzzle, but neither they — nor their copycats — could sustain a formula good enough to reliably overcome the chaos of October.

For their part, the 2025 Los Angeles Dodgers were hardly the perfect juggernaut many had expected en route to winning their second consecutive championship on Saturday night. After barely surviving the upset-minded Toronto Blue Jays in Game 7 of the World Series, capping off arguably the greatest Fall Classic of all-time, it’s hard for anyone to say they fully cracked the code for postseason success. It was more a story of gritty perseverance in the end — from Yoshi Yamamoto throwing 130 pitches in two nights to Miguel Rojas’ game-tying HR when L.A. was down to its final 2 outs in the 9th, and Will Smith hitting the winning homer after setting a record for innings caught in a World Series.

Nothing about this felt preordained; everything was earned.

But this Dodgers squad did manage to make October variance feel manageable up until the chaotic end, coasting through the long regular season before arriving in the playoffs as the optimized version of themselves that the preseason forecasts had always feared. That’s why, for all of the parity that defined MLB’s 2025 regular season, the betting markets never quite considered it fully real — not while the mighty Dodgers were still looming.

In that sense, the champion Dodgers bought themselves a luxury that we’d really only previously seen from elite NBA superstar-led teams starting in the 2010s: They were able to treat the 162-game grind as a warm-up act — buying multiple entire rosters’ worth of pitchers and stocking the lineup with enough stars and role players to make the playoffs — while still ensuring that, come October, only the best version of themselves took the field.

FanGraphs’ Dan Szymborski wrote about this as well earlier in the series, but the rendition of the Dodgers that played in the playoffs was truly their “final form” — far better than the one that only won 93 games in the regular season. To look at this, I calculated the pre-2025 Established Level for every player on every World Series winner in the Divisional Era (since 1969), and took the weighted average by share of total team playing time¹ in the regular season and the playoffs. The gap between the two is a measure of how much of an “extra gear” a team had in the postseason — and no team since ‘69 had a larger gap between the Playoff Dodgers and Regular Season Dodgers of 2025:

A big part of that was the fact that the Playoff Dodgers finally had their fearsome starting rotation of Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani intact for the postseason. And Dave Roberts made sure to deploy them up and down the World Series, including using all of them in Game 7 — the purest possible distillation of this team’s core identity.

That group’s dominance seldom showed up in the regular season, leading to results that seemed positively mortal much of the year. But like an NBA team load-managing its way through the long schedule, L.A. made sure they peaked at the perfect time to sweep their way into the Fall Classic as huge favorites over Toronto.

At the same time, this World Series showcased the limits of even a perfect NBA-style approach when it comes to guiding an expensive roster of stars past baseball’s customary October chaos. The Blue Jays could have easily won the marathon 18-inning Game 3, which may have changed the entire fate of the series. And then L.A. had a 92 percent chance of losing Game 7 at multiple moments, their $400M roster finally being saved only when a backup infielder making $5M hit a clutch, season-extending HR:

This series will go down in the history books for a variety of reasons — not least being the record-tying Game 3 epic — but it was unquestionably one of the best and most entertaining back-and-forth Fall Classics we’ve ever seen. From two-way Ohtani performances to Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s own offense/defense mix, Freddie Freeman walk-offs, the brilliance of young Trey Yesavage, a benches-clearing staredown in Game 7, Smith’s crowd-silencing go-ahead HR in the 11th inning on Saturday… let’s just say a Ballpark Bingo card for the series would have checked off an incredible array of sheer events to remember.

Through all of that, it would be foolish to say L.A. hacked the sport through their team-building tactics. The Dodgers didn’t solve baseball as much as they just learned to buy a bit of extra leeway in surviving it.

But it is worth asking if this postseason may mark the point where analysts (like me) have to treat MLB’s regular season the way we now do the NBA. Sometime in the past decade, the true hoops contenders stopped chasing gaudy regular-season win totals as often as they used to, and started pacing themselves for May and June instead of November and December. As a result, models that had previously worked well in the playoffs using regular-season data suddenly became spotty in the face of predicting deep runs by teams like LeBron James’ Heat and (especially) Cavs squads.

To reflect that changing reality, my NBA Elo model has a “regular-season track” and a “playoff-track”, in an attempt to account for elite teams who load-manage their way into the postseason. These are teams whose title potential outweighs their track record from the regular season, games that are often seen more as warm-ups than proofs-of-concept. For teams with certain payroll levels, that might suddenly be necessary in baseball as well. (It’s something to think about, at least.)

Even so, MLB didn’t suddenly turn into the NBA — at least, not for everyone. The Dodgers just showed there’s a path where resources, planning and star-stockpiling can downplay the value of 162 and let a team reveal its true quality only when the games matter most. And even then, it took an underdog’s mindset, and a lot of luck, to storm back and beat a Blue Jays team that was originally one of the Fall Classic’s biggest betting underdogs before the series.

The template of this Dodgers champion might end up being redundancy through financial might, while recognizing that there are still no guarantees. When the moment of truth came, it hinged on the unpredictable whims of fate in Game 7. Baseball may finally have its first NBA-style champion, but it still can’t escape being, well, baseball.

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Filed under: Baseball

1. Using plate appearances for batters, and leverage-adjusted innings for pitchers.