Pour one out for the Dodgers

No one is ever guaranteed a title. The Warriors didn’t win in 2015-16 when they went 73-9. The Mariners didn’t win in 2001 when they went 116-46. The Patriots didn’t win in 2007-08 when they went 16-0. A team can be comfortably the best all season long, enter the postseason hotter than anyone, and still lose in the finals, because … well, because sports.

And if a team can be the best entering the postseason and not win, then certainly a team can be the best entering the regular season and not win even more. So that’s the case. I want to say that up top. You could take the entire year’s All-Star team, put it on a roster for a full season, and the best you can say is “Yeah, they’ll probably win.” Probably. Not definitely. Probably.

But y’all, I feel so bad for the Dodgers.

If you recall my baseball season preview that I wrote something like 10,000 years ago, my conceit was that I predicted a record for each team, and also gave a best-case and worst-case scenario for each team. It was a silly exercise, but I envisioned creating some sort of fun graph where I charted each team’s won/loss record and range of outcomes on a little number line or whatever and it was cool to look at. You know, before the world ended and it became irrelevant.

(You know what? Doing it anyway.)

But the point of that little story is that I had the Astros with the second-most wins, at 94. The Dodgers? I had their best-case scenario at 125 wins, and their baseline at 110. I had the best-case scenario for the Astros at 108 — in other words, I couldn’t draw up a scenario where the Astros, if every last thing possible went right, could be as good as the Dodgers in a baseline situation.

Did I overstate the Dodgers’ case? Possibly! I’m open to the idea that they weren’t so much unequivocally the best team as they were probably the best team. That’s really as far as I’ll go, though. The team won 106 games last year, added one of the two or three best players in baseball in Mookie Betts, grabbed an expensive-but-still-good starter in David Price, called up one of the Rookie of the Year favorites in Gavin Lux, and lost … Alex Verdugo.

What I’m saying is, after 14 straight years of 80-plus wins, seven straight of 90-plus (and seven straight division titles), and two World Series appearances in the last three years, 2020 was supposed to be the coronation. The Dodgers were going to get a victory lap, run away with the division title, comfortably have the best record in the game, and coast to the championship. (Yes, nothing is guaranteed, I know. But you get what I’m saying.)

When the pandemic hit and delayed the baseball season, that largely ruined any historic possibilities for their season. Even if the season had been 80, 100 games long, and the Dodgers had coasted to an .800 winning percentage and a championship, well, it still would have been dismissed in the “all-timer” conversation because a shortened season isn’t a full season. So they were robbed of any chance at being in the conversation for best team ever.

But they still could have won a trophy, you know? Gotten a ring? Maybe a Dodgers championship on a shortened season wouldn’t have gotten the 30 for 30 treatment or be spoken about in hushed tones like the ’98 Yankees of ’75 Reds, but flags still fly forever, and championships are still championships.

Now? That’s just about out the window. There was and is a conversation to be held about whether sports in general, and baseball in specific, has any business even coming back as the pandemic continues (no, this isn’t a second wave, because we never finished the first). But we as a nation seem bound a determined to force things to happen, pandemic or no, and sports are on that list.

So you would think, well, it’s dumb that baseball would come back, but maybe the Dodgers could have still gotten a ring. Good for them. Only now, baseball (or more accurately, Baseball) has made it is solemn mission to be as abjectly stupid as possible, failing to even come to an agreement on “we’ll play games if the virus lets us,” because the owners are tools.

Will there be an abbreviated baseball season? Honestly, virus-permitting, it still wouldn’t surprise me. This is all posturing, and at some point someone blinks in that sort of situation. Maybe we get 50 games. Maybe not even that. I still think it’s on the table.

Even if we do, there are two problems. First, whatever we get is going to be a tiny season, and the shorter the season, the weirder the possibilities. The Nationals got off to a famously bad start last year, sitting at 19-31 after 50 games, while the Phillies were in first. It wouldn’t be hard at all to find a 50-game stretch where a team went 35-15 but hovered under .500 the rest of the year. In 50 games, maybe the Padres go crazy. Or the Brewers. Or … whatever, there are 30 teams, any of them could. More importantly to this conversation, maybe the Dodgers have their one bad stretch of the year in that 50 games instead of in the hypothetical 112 games we don’t get, they end up 29-21 and just miss the playoffs. It’s 50 games. It’s possible.

Second, and a bigger deal, is that now, after everything that has happened, it doesn’t matter at all who wins the World Series this year. Even if there is a season, however abbreviated, the only non-virus storyline that is going to come out of 2020 is labor unrest. Heading into the expiration of the current CBA at the end of 2021, it would be a bigger surprise (I say, potentially overreacting to current events) if there’s not some sort of work stoppage than if there is. In 2030, 2040, whatever, we’ll look back on 2019 as the year the Nationals won. But we’ll look back on 2020 as, “Man, that year was crazy and set up the strike/lockout a year later. Oh, and whatever, some team won the title.”

The Dodgers are likely to be good for several years. I’d argue no team is better set up for long-term success. But we know Clayton Kershaw is on the back end of his tenure as an elite pitcher. Mookie Betts might now never play a single game as a Dodger before heading into free agency. Justin Turner is 35, Kenley Jansen is 32, David Price is 34, A.J. Pollock is 32. The team is fantastic. It also isn’t young. We might head into 2021 with the Dodgers as a (or the) favorite. But if I do my same “win total” exercise next year, I can just about guarantee that the Dodgers aren’t going to have 110 as a baseline, 125 as the best case. It just won’t happen.

Every season has a storyline or two. The 2019 season was some combination of “the Nationals finally got there” and “ugh, Astros.” Take the satisfaction of the Nationals’ title and dial it way back, take the frustration of that title being overshadowed by scandal and dial it so far up the damn knob breaks off, and you’re getting somewhere in the range of what a 2020 title might be like, if we even get a season.

Obviously, “who wins the World Series” is approximately a billionth in order of importance right now. We need to figure out … you know what? I was going to list all the problems that we need to figure out before we get to sports titles, but I’m already at 1,300 words and that would double the length. You know what the problems are. Focus on those.

But if you have a spare moment to feel just a little bad for someone in a more trivial field, offer just a little bit of bad feelings for the Dodgers.