Baseball could be in the midst of a Dodgers dynasty

TORONTO (AP) – Baseball could be in the midst of a Dodgers dynasty, a much-debated word reserved for teams achieving sweeping success.

By beating Toronto in the World Series that starts Friday night, Los Angeles would capture its third title in six years.

“Just winning one is hard,” Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman said. “If you can get three in a matter of five, six years, I guess you could say it is one. But I think it’s the sustained winning that the Dodgers have done for so long and then obviously to cement it with some championships, I think, yeah, I guess you can call this if we do it a modern-day dynasty.”

Baseball has no widely accepted definition.

Most give pantheon status to the 1949-53 New York Yankees (five straight titles), the 1936-39 Yankees (four), the 1972-74 Oakland Athletics (three) and the 1998-2000 Yankees (three) – the last team to win consecutive championships. The Dodgers are the first defending champion to reach the World Series since the 2009 Philadelphia Phillies.

“The Dodgers have had an incredible, historic run, winning 12 out of the 13 division championships, and the one time they didn’t they won 106 games,” Emmy-winning commentator Bob Costas said. “That compares to what the Braves did in the ’90s and early 2000s. It’s historic and it’s an incredible run of excellence, but is it a dynasty? That’s a more difficult word to define.”

Would beating the Toronto change his opinion?

“I think a title this year moves them closer to that,” he said.

Mookie Betts, who has been with the Dodgers since 2020, said he’s more concerned about preparing for games than contemplating the team’s historical place.

“If you’re thinking about going to the postseason and obviously having a chance to win World Series year after year, I guess that would kind of qualify as some type of dynasty, but I don’t know what it takes to call it that,” he said.

Since the expansion era started, the only consecutive titles have been won by the 1961-62 Yankees, the mid-70s A’s, the 1975-76 Cincinnati Reds, the 1977-78 Yankees, the 1992-93 Toronto Blue Jays and the late-century Yankees.

Earlier back-to-back titles also were won by the 1907-08 Chicago Cubs, 1910-11 Philadelphia A’s, 1915-16 Red Sox, 1921-22 New York Giants, 1927-28 Yankees and 1929-30 A’s.

John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian, thinks sustained success is sufficient to earn the dynasty honorific, even if every year didn’t result in a title.

“I think a dynasty is today defined by consecutive pennants or division titles won, not by World Series championships,” he wrote in an email. “So I think the Atlanta Braves of recent years, the Detroit Tigers of 1907-09, or the Giants of 1911-1913, are in. Three straight WS appearances, rather than three straight titles, does it for me.”

Los Angeles won the title during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and that year’s expanded playoffs, then beat the Yankees in a five-game Series last year. Winning this year would for some make them comparable to the Yankees, who won four in seven years from 1956-62, and the Dodgers, who took three in seven seasons from 1959-65.

Teams with three titles in a four- or five-year span include the 1910-13 Philadelphia Athletics, the 1915-18 Boston Red Sox, the 1942-46 St. Louis Cardinals and the 2010-14 San Francisco Giants.

“It just kind of puts us on a Mount Rushmore of sports organizations,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “The legacy, dynasty talk, a lot of that I feel is is meant for other people that aren’t playing, and let them have those debates, where it’s our job to kind of put those topics on the table.”

Betts considers each championship a boost toward the sport’s highest individual accomplishment.

“Obviously, my end goal and the goal of probably everyone is to be in the Hall of Fame one day, and so I think that definitely helps the case,” he said.