The low point came 36 days ago.
During a late-season series in Atlanta, the Dodgers’ division lead was dwindling after a string of frustrating losses. Even worse, they learned Tyler Glasnow would become the latest, and most important, pitcher done for the season because of an injury.
For a brief moment, the team felt that people were “panicking,” as outfielder Teoscar Hernández described it, about their season. For one of the few times in a year full of adversity and unforeseen setbacks, confidence in the clubhouse felt like it was waning.
“The guy who’s supposed to be your ace is dealt a blow and he’s done for the year? That was a kick in the gut,” third baseman Max Muncy said. “Everyone was like, ‘Man, not again. Another injury?’”
So, in an uncharacteristic move for a manager who describes himself as “not a big meeting guy,” Dave Roberts decided to call one, gathering his players before a Sept. 15 game against the Braves to deliver a simple reminder.
“We’re still the Dodgers,” Roberts told the group, as Hernández recalled. “We can do special things.”
Five weeks later, the Dodgers made good on that prediction.
On Sunday night, they returned to the World Series.
With a 10-5 defeat of the New York Mets in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, the Dodgers won the 25th pennant in their storied franchise history. For the fourth time in the last eight years, they will play for a championship that, this season, few outside the team saw coming.
“There’s just a lot of unforeseen things that can happen in a long baseball season,” Roberts said this week, as the club closed in on the fourth World Series trip of his nine-year tenure.
But, as Roberts reminded the group back in September, “We have a lot of good players.”
And reaching the Fall Classic, he implored them, was still well within reach.
“I just felt we had enough talent in the room to do that,” Roberts said, reflecting on the meeting. “But the most important thing was that those guys responded amongst themselves.”
And respond, the Dodgers did.
To the litany of starting pitching absences that left their October rotation thin and unsettled. To an ever-changing cast of characters amid their injury-plagued season.
Even the playoffs have brought setbacks, from Freddie Freeman’s sprained ankle to inconsistent starting pitching to two elimination games in the NL Division Series, plus a squandered chance to clinch the pennant in Game 5 of the NLCS on Friday.
“We’ve gone through a lot this year,” Muncy said.
Yet, the team managed to forge ahead anyway — riding a wave of internal belief that hasn’t always been present in October disappointments of years past.
“It was just about how we were gonna get here,” outfielder Mookie Betts said. “The question was not if.”
Indeed, the Dodgers always planned to be in this position, trying to win their second championship since 2020 and first in a full season since 1988. But the group mounting this run looks far different than they ever expected.
In Game 6 on Sunday, they had to go with a bullpen game, lacking the rotation depth typically required of a deep postseason run. They didn’t have Freeman in the starting lineup, either, electing to rest him amid a one-for-15 slump in which his ankle had hampered his swing and limited his defensive range.
The team had a rookie in center field, Andy Pages. They had two veterans with sub-.230 batting averages in the regular season, Kiké Hernández and Chris Taylor, in the infield. They had a slumping catcher, Will Smith, behind the plate. And, at a critical juncture early on, they even turned to a rookie pitcher, Ben Casparius, with only three career regular-season appearances.
“It clearly shows there’s no one way to do things,” Roberts said. “And we sort of pieced it together somehow.”
Of course, the Dodgers also had Betts, Shohei Ohtani … and NLCS most valuable player Tommy Edman, the trade-deadline acquisition who tied a Dodgers franchise record with 11 RBIs in the series.
They had a lockdown bullpen that escaped jam after jam in Game 6, leaving 13 runners stranded by holding the Mets two for nine with runners in scoring position.
And, most importantly, they had the right mixture of confidence, intensity and ever-abundant resiliency — displaying all the traits Roberts emphasized in his clubhouse meeting last month.
“There’s a lot of times in the season where we could have punted and had every excuse to look forward to ’25,” Roberts said. “But we didn’t. Organizationally, this was an organizational win. If you’re talking about some young players that cut their teeth in the postseason, to the three big trade acquisitions at the deadline, to veteran guys, we’ve needed every single one of those guys on the roster.”
Standing on the field and getting choked up by emotion, Roberts added simply: “This has been the most trying year, but it’s been the most satisfying.”
The final task now will be a World Series meeting with the New York Yankees, which will begin with Game 1 on Friday at Dodger Stadium. The matchup marks the 12th time the Dodgers and Yankees have met for a championship. Few before have ever been so hyped.
“The world,” Betts said, “wanted to see this.”
Despite the triumphant ending, Game 6 was yet another nervy contest for the Dodgers — who jumped to a quick 6-1 lead, flirted with disaster on several occasions, then finally pulled away down the stretch.
Edman supplied the early offense, answering an RBI infield single from Pete Alonso in the top of the first with a two-run double in the bottom of the inning. The cleanup hitter Sunday with Freeman out of the lineup, Edman delivered again in the third, getting four-straight changeups from Mets starter Sean Manaea before pounding an elevated fastball to left for a two-run blast.
“I didn’t really know what my role was when I got traded here,” said Edman, who also moved from center field to shortstop in the NLCS to fill in for an injured Miguel Rojas. “I feel like I’ve just done a good job of adjusting to whatever is required of me in any given situation.”
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The Dodgers added more before the inning was over. Muncy drew a walk in Manaea’s final at-bat, knocking the left-hander out of the game early after he quieted the lineup in the Mets’ Game 2 win.
“You’ve got to give them credit,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza told the Fox broadcast. “Because they were all over him.”
Then, reliever Phil Maton threw a hanging slider that Smith launched over the center field wall, giving him a home run in each of the team’s series-clinchers this month.
Up 6-1 at that point, Roberts carefully managed his limited options out of the bullpen the rest of the way.
After another key deadline acquisition, Michael Kopech, worked the first inning, Casparius faced a critical early sequence in the second.
Stuck in a two-on, two-out jam after a walk to Francisco Alvarez and single by Francisco Lindor (his only hit in a quiet night atop the Mets order), Casparius got away with a down-the-middle fastball that Brandon Nimmo popped up. He then returned to the mound in the third to complete a scoreless 1⅓ inning appearance.
From there, Roberts was able to string together the final seven innings with nothing but trusted high-leverage relief arms.
Anthony Banda stranded the bases loaded in the third, striking out Jeff McNeil to extinguish that threat. Ryan Brasier gave up a two-run homer to Mark Vientos in the fourth, but bounced back with a scoreless fifth.
More trouble arose in the sixth, when the Mets drew back-to-back two-out walks off Evan Phillips to load the bases again. But he executed a crucial three-pitch sequence against Jesse Winker, dotting a couple outer edge fastballs before snapping off a sweeper that Winker hit to left. The shallow fly ball that hung up just long enough for Teoscar Hernández to get there. Once again, the danger had been quelled.
After the teams traded runs in the next two half-innings — an RBI single from Ohtani in the sixth, before a sacrifice fly from Alvarez from the seventh — the Dodgers’ best reliever, Blake Treinen, entered for a six-out save.
The seventh Dodgers pitcher of the night, Treinen secured it with relative ease, hardly even needing the three insurance runs the Dodgers added in the eighth, even with the Mets scoring one more run in the ninth.
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As Taylor fielded the final out and fired to first, fireworks went off in center field as a crowd of 52,674 erupted in celebration, witnessing the Dodgers’ first pennant-clincher at home since 1988.
“It’s just been next guy up,” Treinen said of the Dodgers’ rollercoaster season. “Find a way to get it done.”
When asked earlier this week about the mid-September team meeting in Atlanta, Treinen described it as a “challenge” from Roberts to the rest of the team.
“It wasn’t this big rah-rah thing, and he didn’t chew us [out],” Treinen said. “But it was like, ‘Hey guys, this is who we are … We’re as good as we want to be.’”
“I think we’ll look back,” Treinen added, “and say it was a turning point.”
One that has resulted in the Dodgers going to the World Series — an accomplishment that, despite everything that went wrong this year, they always believed they would achieve.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
