Make California Post a Preferred Source This week two years ago, the Dodgers’ coaching staff and front office were looking for answers to a familiar problem.
It was a proposal from some of the club’s veteran players that sparked a solution.
In 2022 and 2023, the Dodgers had earned a bye for the first round of MLB’s expanded playoff format. Both times, they emerged from their weeklong break looking flat, getting eliminated in four games by the Padres the first year and embarrassingly swept by the Diamondbacks the next.
Those results — each described as an “organizational failure” in their aftermath by president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman — led the Dodgers back to the drawing board ahead of another bye week in 2024.
And this time, the team’s veteran roster helped concoct a new plan.
In the previous two Octobers, the Dodgers not only struggled offensively following their five-day layoffs, seemingly losing their timing at the plate while their National League Division Series opponents stayed in rhythm during opening-round wild-card series. But they also failed to conjure a necessary level of postseason intensity, suffering from what some players felt was complacency that set in during their extended pause in their schedule.
“I think the hardest thing to replicate [during a bye] is the emotion of [the playoffs],” said third baseman Max Muncy, the Dodgers’ longest-tenured player. “The emotion, the stress, the ups and downs throughout the course of a game — you just can’t get that any other way than playing.”
Thus, a group led by Muncy, Miguel Rojas and Will Smith approached team officials with a potential workaround.
In the face of another bye-week break, they wanted to manufacture more urgency themselves.
“It’s hard to go from an at-home setting to trying to find a way to flip the switch,” Muncy said. “The best way for us to do that was to find a way to keep everyone together, you keep them at the field, you don’t let that switch ever get turned off. That was something I thought we did a really good job of in ‘24, and we’re going to try to do it again this year.”
Indeed, the reimagined approach that catapulted the Dodgers to the first of their back-to-back World Series titles the last two years is being dusted off once again now — with the team navigating another first-round bye in its quest for a championship three-peat.
Just like in 2024, the Dodgers are turning this year’s bye week into something of a team-building boot camp.
They will stage higher-intensity simulated games during workouts at Dodger Stadium. They will stay at the ballpark afterward to partake in teamwide watch parties of other playoff series. And, most importantly, they will limit the time they spend at home relaxing with their families, not wanting their competitive edge to be dulled during their pre-NLDS wait.
“You’ve earned the bye and you should take that time to rest and recover, but you don’t want to give guys too much time to be at home and get that taste of what it might be like,” Muncy said. “You get guys here to the field. You’re not forcing anyone to do anything, but you’re making all the guys hang out together for extended periods of time when they could be at home enjoying family time –– which is great for everybody but not when you know what’s coming for us ahead.”
In 2024, the Dodgers felt such changes made a profound difference.
It’s what helped them overcome a two-games-to-one series deficit to the Padres in that year’s NLDS; when the Dodgers made another tweak to their schedule by all busing to San Diego together, instead of driving individually down Interstate-5 as they typically would.
It’s what allowed them to keep building momentum over the rest of their postseason trek; when the team also began using a separate, players-only plane to travel to away games, something that has since become a staple of their regular-season travel plans in the two years since, as well.
“Talking to Munce and the other guys, [it was] really important to keep the guys together and make sure the team is continuing to spend time together and make sure that camaraderie remains that you have in the season,” general manager Brandon Gomes recalled this week. “It was largely player-driven … A lot of those adjustments came from the group of players wanting to switch things up and create an atmosphere where they’re just spending more time together and really putting an emphasis on that, which is great.”
That’s not to downplay the main factor behind the Dodgers’ recent success: their supreme roster talent, depth and league-leading payroll.
With a record-setting $432.8 million on the books this year, according to Cot’s Baseball Contracts’ tabulations for luxury-tax payrolls, they enter this October as clear-cut favorites on paper to triumph once again.
To them, however, reengineering that sense of togetherness is equally important.
It will begin during this current bye week (something the club didn’t have to endure last year, when it started in the wild-card round as the NL’s No. 3 seed).
It will need to sustain them over the four weeks that follow, too.
“We had a couple years where we didn’t do it that way, and it really didn’t work out very well for us,” Muncy said. “Just having the experience of doing it one way and realizing that way didn’t work, we needed to change how we do things.”
