The Los Angeles Dodgers are the freshly minted world champions for the eighth time in franchise history. That’s another way of saying they were the only team in Major League Baseball this season to achieve their ultimate goal. The Dodgers on Wednesday mounted a furious comeback, one aided by a conga line of Yankee miscues, and took the Fall Classic in five games. As result, the Dodgers and their star-stuffed roster have the World Series for the first time in a full season since 1988.
Now the focus shifts to whether the Dodgers in 2025 can become the first team since the Yankees of 1999 and 2000 to repeat as World Series champions.
Dave Roberts’ club during the regular season won 98 games and prevailed in a tough National League West to claim their 12th straight postseason berth. That, though, was merely the first step. Anything short of hoisting the World Series trophy would be tantamount to failure.
That’s because of the Dodgers’ unprecedented offseason of 2023-24 that built upon a team that won 100 games in 2023. That offseason work involved committing $700 million (of heavily deferred money) to superduperstar Shohei Ohtani. That same month, they committed more than $300 million to Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the most coveted starting pitcher on the market, and dealt for another ace-caliber starter, Tyler Glasnow, then of the Rays. They also inked slugging outfielder Teoscar Hernández. Fast forward to the trade deadline, and the Dodgers in advance of it added Jack Flaherty (the most in-demand rotation arm who was traded), reliever Michael Kopech, and super-utility guy Tommy Edman. All those moves were of course in addition to incumbent stars like Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Will Smith, and others.
For a time it seemed that rotation injuries would waylay the Dodgers’ October hopes. Instead, Roberts navigated three series triumphs with three healthy starting pitchers and a heavily worked bullpen. Coming into the season, the Dodgers boasted starting-pitcher depth that on paper would be the envy of every other organization, but those Dodger starters couldn’t stay healthy.
Nothing makes the point more acutely than how many starters the Dodgers had on the injured list for these playoffs. That would be seven starting pitchers: Glasnow, Clayton Kershaw, Tony Gonsolin, Dustin May, Gavin Stone, Emmet Sheehan, and River Ryan. Straits were such that Roberts, in the face of all that on-paper rotation depth, was forced to conduct four bullpen games during the Dodgers’ run to the belt and title. Overcoming the loss of all those battered starting pitchers is the leading subplot of the Dodgers’ championship run, and it’s a reminder that October, in a sport like baseball, is built to defy expectations, even when the best team in baseball winds up winning it all.
And that brings us to 2025. You can squint and see the Dodgers’ window, at least the one held open by their current core, closing at some point in the near-ish future. Betts, Freeman, Ohtani, Glasnow, Max Muncy, and Will Smith will all be age 30 or older next season. That said, the Dodgers should again be among the best teams in MLB next season and should again have realistic designs on a World Series championship.
Most notably, Ohtani barring the unexpected will resume pitching after his recovery from elbow surgery and be a fixture in the rotation (in addition to, you know, being one of the most productive hitters in baseball). Other core contributors like Betts, Freeman, Yamamoto, Smith, Glasnow, Muncy, and Edman are under contract through at least next season. The Dodgers do have some notable pending free agents like Hernández, Flaherty, and Walker Buehler. Suffice it to say, the club has the resources and willingness to bring them back or find suitable proxies on the market.
The Dodgers are already “pot-committed” to contention in 2025 and well beyond – Ohtani’s pact tells you that much – and the expectation is that lead decision-maker Andrew Friedman will continue to buttress and even improve the roster with offseason additions. Are the Juan Soto rumors worth acknowledging? The expectation is that Soto, this winter’s most coveted free agent, remains in the Bronx or makes the crosstown leap to the Mets, but the Dodgers, as full-bore as ever, can make a run at him if they choose to. Maybe instead they pile on more rotation depth by pursuing Corbin Burnes, the top starting pitcher on the market, or going after Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki if he makes the jump to MLB. Free-agent shortstop Willy Adames also likely will be on L.A.’s radar. Given the likelihood of another round of splash moves and the Dodgers’ deeply impressive returning core, they’ll enter the 2025 season as an early World Series favorite.
Predicting a World Series outcome for 2025, this far out and with the coils of the hot stove barely starting to warm, is a fool’s errand. Safe, though, is the assumption that the Dodgers, baseball’s modern juggernaut, will once again have strong designs on winning it all and, this time around, of giving baseball its first repeat champion of the current century.
