Exclusive Insights: Inside Sources Say Dodgers' 2025 World Series Dreams May Be in Jeopardy

Ever walked through the summer heat dreaming of next year’s baseball aspirations, only to learn your team might not live up to the hype? If so, you’re probably a Dodgers fan, which brings us to our pressing question: Is a repeat championship closer to reality or fantasy? The Los Angeles Dodgers, armed to the teeth with talent, money, and expectations, are in a precarious spot. Their star-studded lineup, rejuvenated by the likes of Ohtani and Freeman, is powerful, compelling…but history says they might not make it back-to-back. What’s the catch? Could the same old story unfold? Let’s take a closer look.
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“The definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting a different result,” Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke wrote of the Los Angeles Dodgers after their star-studded lineup careened out of the 2023 postseason. “This is insane.”

Do you remember that? The feeling that the Dodgers were clearly the best team in Major League Baseball but couldn’t translate it into championships?

Maybe when you moved across the country or got that big job offer, when you met your partner or became a parent. Got it? Now, take a deep breath and try to remember how you conceived of your future before that moment.

It’s nothing against the Dodgers to say stratospheric superteams should come with a warning label: Everything probably looks the best it will ever look right now, in March. Someone will get hurt. Someone will get worse. Some other team will mount a bigger challenge than anticipated in the regular season.

How did you envision your prospects? Was it anything like the reality to come? How did you feel before you knew how you’d feel?

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The lineup, three MVPs in tow, comes with a similar disclaimer. By May 9, when Tommy Edman turns the big three-oh, eight members of the Dodgers’ ideal lineup will be 30 or older. Against lefties, when Enrique Hernandez likely slots in for Kim, everyone will be past 30. In baseball terms, that means virtually everyone is at risk of declining.

Even after all that name and dollar value, the Dodgers will need more.

But the Dodgers Bulked Up

This season’s Dodgers, you might be thinking, are looking like a different sort of beast. With Snell, Sasaki and, soon enough, Ohtani added to the starting pitching mix alongside Tyler Glasnow, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Clayton Kershaw, it seems like the Dodgers have corrected the depth issue that imperiled their run even last season.

Yes, Friedman’s Dodgers are running an exemplary player development system that could mitigate the effect of several trap doors opening under aging stars. And yes, they are dominating the market for Japanese talent. But there’s not much they can do about the 11 MLB postseason competitors with a small-sample opportunity to rise up and be better for three to seven games.

Some, like Freddie Freeman and Max Muncy, are closer to twilight than others like Mookie Betts and Ohtani, but this is the often-overlooked downside of big-money, marquee rosters. It took some or all of their prime years to earn that billing.

I want you to think of an inflection point in your life.

“This,” Dylan Hernandez wrote for the paper as the Dodgers embarked on last season’s October gauntlet, “could be shaping into the same old story for the Dodgers.”

Better Look in the Rear-View Mirror

So projections reflect the spread of possibilities. The model gives 18 teams at least a 1% shot at winning the World Series. Its win total projections top out at the Dodgers’ 94.6, but 11 teams chart in the competitive zone between 84 and 90 wins.

Out of the top seven starters expected to pitch for the Dodgers this year – the previous six, plus Tony Gonsolin – none has averaged more than Yamamoto’s 149 innings over the past three seasons. Incorporating only MLB seasons, Snell is the staff workhorse in averaging 137.1 innings. From some quick back-of-the-napkin math, if they all pitched to their three-year average innings totals, they would rack up 756.2 innings – besting exactly one team’s starter total from the 2024 season (the “pitching chaos” Detroit Tigers).

The Dodgers, of course, won the 2024 World Series. Headlined by Shohei Ohtani and sparked by Freddie Freeman, the winningest organization of the past decade claimed its second World Series of that run and its first in a full season (they also triumphed in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season).

After this flurry of reinforcement and enhancement, the Dodgers had the top payroll in baseball to go with the most-respected front office, and people were asking commissioner Rob Manfred if they ruined the sport. The thrust of that notion being: Clearly, the Dodgers are so much better than everyone else that there’s no point in competing.

The post Surprise! Why the Dodgers Probably Aren’t Going to Win the 2025 World Series appeared first on Opta Analyst.

Lower Pitcher Innings, Higher Positional Age

You think these Dodgers have a glide path to the World Series? OK. Just ask them. I’m sure they remember how this goes.

They might still do it, and become the first back-to-back champ since the 1998-2000 New York Yankees won three World Series titles in a row, but you have a better shot at successfully calling your shot on the roll of a die.

In their current 12-year run of postseason appearances – many of them as the sport’s most advanced, most talented club – the Dodgers have won it all twice. One in six. One shot at rolling the die.

Even their No. 1 payroll is not nearly as separated from the pack as some teams of the early 2000s. The 2005 Yankees, whose payroll topped the second-highest spender by about 56%, won 95 games but crashed out in the AL Division Series when Mike Mussina and Randy Johnson didn’t pitch as well as Shawn Chacon and Chien-Ming Wang. As of now, the Chicago Cubs’ ninth-ranked payroll is about as close to the Dodgers in percentage terms as the second-place Red Sox were to the 2005 Yankees.

It’s not quite that simple, though. Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations, has long favored pitchers with elite per-inning numbers who might be more transactionally available because they are less frequently physically available.

Teams that navigate that delicate balance the best over 162 games often have to dig into talent pools nowhere near our spring training frame of reference. Depth, injury luck and steadiness are rewarded. Then everything shifts gears. October’s short-term sprint turns the game into a few battles of the titans to determine which of the top 12 clubs is crowned champion. The club that’s best at the former quest only occasionally conquers the latter challenge – with last year’s Dodgers on the board, it’s been true in 26.6% of wild-card era seasons (and that including ties for the top record).

If you’re thinking the Dodgers will defend their World Series title, you’re not alone. Of course, MLB hasn’t had a repeat champion since 2000, so a lot can, and often, goes wrong.

Baseball is particularly ripe for fluctuation thanks to the bedrock rules of the game. Every hitter in the lineup must bat in sequential order. The winning team must acquire all 27 of those outs to secure victory, no matter how it strains their pitching staff.

It’s difficult to summon that past headspace. If only we all had beat writers and columnists documenting our travails.

Our MLB projections give Los Angeles (2-0) a 16.4% chance of capturing that repeat championship, and a 28.2% chance of at least reaching the World Series after sweeping its opening series in Toyko. Those are the best odds of any team entering 2025, but not by a ton over the AL-favorite Yankees.

They then signed eight prominent major-league free agents – adding two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell and top closer Tanner Scott among others, retaining Teoscar Hernandez and Blake Treinen – plus international infielder Hyeseong Kim. As a cherry on top, they convinced pitcher Roki Sasaki, the most exciting Japanese player since Ohtani, to join their rotation making the league minimum.

It must be said the projections are inherently conservative in these estimates. The TRACR model (Team Rating Adjusted for Competition and Roster) calculates an expected run differential per 27 outs, then simulates the schedule. Anyone who has ever run sims on a video game can attest to what happens when you ask an unthinking machine to consider hypothetical realities: A great many buck your expectations.
Well, here comes the good (or bad) news for those who can’t quite summon the outlook of six or more months ago: The Dodgers are probably not going to win the 2025 World Series.