The Dodgers are 46 games over .500 on a 37-game winning streak in 45 games. They have an 18-game lead in the division. They are on their way to winning a team record 113 games. They have scored the most runs in the Majors. They have allowed the fewest runs in the Majors.
You’d think it would be a monumentally successful year, the kind he’s been talking about for decades. For most franchises, it would be. For the 2022 Dodgers, though, it’s almost par for the course. Less is played than a local television reporter who is injured falling down a slide.
The main theme of baseball, when you don’t accept the fact that Walker Buehler won’t be back, or wonder about Clayton Kershaw’s back, is the anguish over the struggles of Cody Bellinger and Craig Kimbrel. They are, again, on track to win 113 games.
Such is life, we suppose, for a franchise that has been dominant for a full decade. What we need to do is explain how the 2022 team has been so good despite an endless streak of pitching injuries and a handful of big-bat appearances that didn’t show up, and we will, but that almost seems like a small picture here. . There is a much bigger question at stake, which is: Have we ever seen a multi-season race like this?
A decade of dominance
When the Dodgers win the NL West this year, and they will, it will be their ninth division title in the last 10 seasons. The only time they didn’t, the only massive flop in the last decade … was last year, when they won a franchise-record 106 games and avenged their second-place finish in a playoff loss to the Giants.
Since the start of this streak in 2013, they have won 70 more games than the second-place Yankees and 266 more than the last-place Marlins. (Yes, you can read that as if Miami had a full extra season at that point, and was 162-0 in that season, it would still be 100 fewer wins.)
In fact, let’s split the race into two parts, with the teams from 2013-’16 (.565 winning percentage, four division titles, no World Series appearances, straddling the Ned Colletti/Andrew Friedman eras) being "pretty good times". and 2017-22 teams (.644 winning percentage, five division titles [incluido este año]three World Series appearances [hasta ahora]) as “the unbelievably good times”.
What we want to know, then, is how this streak, the 2017-22 devastation streak, stacks up. We’re not talking about titles, necessarily, although of course that’s the ultimate goal. (For the most part, it was just much easier to win rings in the days before the playoffs; legends like Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, and Joe DiMaggio played exactly zero non-World Series playoff games. Robinson’s 1955 Dodgers they finished against the bottom – he placed the Pirates on September 25 and started the World Series against the Yankees on September 28).
No, we’re talking about this, dominance day in and day out, over many seasons, over hundreds of games. We’re talking about the kind of success that basically becomes second nature, to the point where winning is less "exciting" and more "expected". We’re talking about consistency, we guess. Consistent greatness, not a single casual run to the Fall Classic.
What we’re talking about, then, is 533 wins in 827 games. Why that seemingly random number? Because that’s the number of regular-season games (which went into this weekend’s Marlins series) the Dodgers have played since 2017, which is when they really made it better. It’s almost better than "seasons", because the duration of the seasons has not been consistent. They have a .645 winning percentage in that time. Has any club ever done that? Okay, yes. But it’s been a long, long time.
Setting aside overlapping stretches from the same team era, the best streaks of 826 games have been…
.693 1905-’11 Cubs
.664 1927-’33 Athletics
.663 1940-’46 Cardinals
.656 1937-’42 Yankees
.653 1952-’58 Yankees
.651 1901-’06 Pirates
.647 1909-’14 Athletics
.647 1908-’13 Giants
.645 2017-’22 Dodgers
That’s it, and take a close look at the dates attached to those clubs. Of the eight, seven played a non-integrated, prehistoric version of baseball, barely comparable to the game today. The only post-war group there are the Mantle, Berra and Ford Yankees of the 1950s, considered one of the legendary groups of all time, but even they never went west to St. Louis or played for more than eight teams. of the league.
What the Dodgers have done, then, hasn’t been done in more than six decades, when the sport and the world were very different places.
Maybe it’s easier to think of it this way. Remember, above, when we said they’ve both scored the most runs in the majors and allowed the fewest? If they continue like this, it will be the fifth time in a row that they pull off that double trick, which…
… would be a new record as this type of domain is not ordinary. It is not normal. It doesn’t happen, especially in today’s game. Except, of course, when he does.
What is going well in 2022
But back to 2022, which could end up being the best full-season team in franchise history, even though it often hasn’t felt that way, perhaps in part because Kimbrel has struggled or because the injuries keep piling up. – Blake Treinen hasn’t been seen since April, or because the pitching stars have so often been the Rockies’ firing Tyler Anderson or the Orioles’ firing Evan Phillips or the Marlins’ firing Alex Vesia or the Rockies firing Yency Almonte or the Angels/Yankees firing Andrew Heaney or the Brewers firing Phil Bickford or… well, you get the idea. It’s what they’ve been doing for years; find pitchers, make them better.
If that underestimates veteran starter Julio Urías and youth academy player Tony Gonsolin, it also helps to point out that they have allowed the fewest runs without full seasons to Kershaw, Buehler, Treinen, Heaney or Dustin May, who should return from injury in the next family house
His pitching has the fifth-highest strikeout rate and second-lowest walk rate, which seems like a great place to start. When they allow contact, it’s the lowest hit rate of any team. Even that contact is often not great, because they have the second highest popup rate and the third lowest line drive rate.
They throw the third most valuable fastballs … but also the third most valuable breaking balls and the second most valuable off-speed pitches. Hardly anyone throws more strikes, but at the same time, hardly anyone gets more chase either. When are the balls put into play? No defense converts more of those balls into outs.
What emerges from the wash is that their 2.73 ERA is well above the 3.99 average for the season, which if you go back to the end of the war in 1945, they’re on track to have the largest gap between team ERAs. and the league’s ERA of any NL team, and second-most of any Major League team overall in that time, trailing only the Cleveland club in 2017. They don’t allow runs.
All of which would be quite difficult, were it not for the fact that they also outrank everyone, and here it’s tempting, easy, and not entirely wrong to single out the highly paid trio at the top of the list: Mookie Betts, Trea Turner, and Freddy. Freeman. Sometimes it’s as simple as “having big stars”, and they do; the top three produce all of the other top three in the game, except for the Yankees.
But then something weird happens, which is that the lineup can get a little soft in the middle. While receiver Will Smith has been fantastic, Bellinger, Justin Turner and Max Muncy have all had their issues, so the 4/5/6 order picks have a .707 OPS, which is only 19th-best this year.
However, it doesn’t matter. The bottom third of the order (mainly names like Gavin Lux, Chris Taylor, Trayce Thompson, sometimes Bellinger, now Joey Gallo and others) have been very good (.771 OPS, the best of any bottom trio).
Los Angeles’ bottom three are performing better than the top three of more than half of the rest of baseball.
So it becomes almost routine to recite the hitting version of the above pitching stats, and yet it has to be done. No team hits fewer ground balls, because ground balls don’t win games; in fact, no team has had a lower ground ball rate than the 2022 Dodgers since pitch tracking went online in 2008. They chase out of the zone less than anyone else, because those aren’t crushable pitches, which is what yours; four of the six seasons with the lowest chase rates on record are recent Dodger teams, but not even this Dodger team.
They hit the ball hard, obviously; fourth best in hard hit rate and third best in barrel rate. They are the fourth best team with runners in scoring position, but they are the best team without any running back.
It is, for lack of a better term, relentless. (It’s worth noting here, the pipeline is far from dry; they still have the best farm system in the NL, with Flames pitcher Bobby Miller potentially in play to help out later this season.)
Which might not be exhilarating, in the same way that you might get tired of eating your all-time favorite food night after night, year after year. Ultimately, all that’s going to matter about this run is how many rings they win, in the same way that the 1990s Braves are more remembered for winning a single title than winning 14 straight divisions.
These Dodgers will never win five straight titles like the Yankees of the early 1950s; it’s just not possible in today’s playoff structure. They may need to win at least one more to fully enter the conversation of "dynasty"however ill defined it may be. But make no mistake, they are already there. They are winning consistently, regularly and more often than any other team in most of our lives.