The Modern L.A. Dodgers Are Officially No Longer Playoff Underachievers
The Modern L.A. Dodgers Are Officially No Longer Playoff Underachievers
With a title this season, they’ve now won more World Series than they "should have" since 2013.
In recent years, October was usually synonymous with yet another early postseason exit for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
In the 11 seasons leading up to 2024, L.A. made the playoffs every year — a very impressive streak! — and posted an MLB-best winning percentage of .613 during the regular season, which works out to 99.3 wins per 162 games. And yet, the dominant narrative of the modern-era Dodgers wasn’t all of that success. Instead, Los Angeles was dogged by its reputation for postseason failure.
During those 11 seasons, the Dodgers lost in the Divisional Round nearly twice as often (five) as they made the World Series (three), much less won it (just once, in the abbreviated schedule of 2020).
They found ways to lose from ahead, such as in the 2016 NLCS versus the Cubs or the 2019 NLDS against the Nationals — both series they led 2-1 but eventually lost. Even more often, they dug themselves big early-series holes that proved insurmountable: For instance, the 3-1 deficits they faced in the 2013 and 2021 NLCS and the 2018 World Series — or maybe the most humiliating of all, the 3-0 sweep they suffered by the Arizona Diamondbacks last year.
Along the way, Dodger fans became used to seeing the players who had been so good during the regular season wilt under the bright lights of the postseason. From early struggles with Juan Uribe, Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez and Andre Ethier to more recent examples (like Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and Max Muncy going a combined 3-for-32 in that Arizona series), or the ongoing disparity between all-time ace Clayton Kershaw’s regular season credentials and his much more mortal postseason record, Los Angeles’ recent stars seemed unable to find whatever special alchemy was necessary to shine in the playoffs.
But this year’s title run should change how we view this entire Dodgers era. That’s because, statistically, a second World Series crown now has them running at a championship surplus since 2013.
We can measure this by looking at how often we’d expect a team to win the World Series, conditional on making the playoffs, based on its final end-of-regular-season Elo rating (along with variables for the particulars of each season’s playoff format).1 Plugging all of those factors into a logistic regression and ensuring that each season’s pre-playoff title odds added up to exactly 100 percent, we can track L.A.’s cumulative championships won above/below expected by year during this recent stretch of seasons:
For the entirety of the post-Frank McCourt Dodgers era of regular-season dominance and (mostly) postseason bumbling, the franchise was running well below the number of titles it “should” have won. Things reached their nadir after the aforementioned loss to Washington in 2019, which caused the modern Dodgers to run at a deficit of nearly 1 full championship versus expected. The 2020 win erased much — but not all — of that, but subsequent failures began to dig the hole deeper again.
Only with this week’s championship over the Yankees (a team that is themselves running a cumulative 0.69 championships below expected since the Aaron Judge era began in earnest in 2017) have the Dodgers finally climbed completely out of negative territory. With the wins in both 2020 and 2024, they’re now running 0.21 total championships above expected since 2013.
It’s a measure of redemption for the past decade-plus of mostly great baseball played at Dodger Stadium — if you think such a thing was even necessary in the first place.
Because in some ways, judging L.A. so harshly for its repeated postseason failures was always unfair. By far the most improbable aspect of L.A.’s playoff struggles was, ironically, the fact that the Dodgers even had the chance to choke so much in the first place.
Only two teams in MLB history — the 1991-2005 Braves and 1995-2007 Yankees — have ever made the playoffs more than 12 times in a row, and that trio is the only collection of teams to ever make more than eight straight appearances. Even granting that the playoff format has changed significantly over time, it’s incredibly rare for a team to get this many shots at a championship in the first place, whether they converted on them or not.
As we all know, however, great teams are ultimately judged on that conversion rate — there’s simply no avoiding it. And, fair or not, the Dodgers of recent vintage were always on the wrong side of that equation. It took overcoming a 2-1 deficit in the NLDS against Padres, then outlasting the Mets and steamrolling the Yankees to finally make up for years of postseason disappointment. Now they’ll get a chance to run it back and add to the surplus — they’re currently favorites to win again in 2025 — or fall back into the red again, if they go back to their old ways.
Filed under: Baseball
In this case, I created dummy variables for the following conditions using data since 1995: Original/standard LDS era (1995-2011); Wild Card Game era with/without a bye (2012-2021, except in 2020); the one-off COVID era of 2020; and the Expanded Wild Card era with/without a bye (2022-2024).