The Los Angeles Dodgers enter the 2021 Major League Baseball season as the clear-cut front-runners to win the World Series.
That’s a simple, declarative statement, right? Do you disagree with it? Well, there are a lot of you out there, so some of you might. Chances are, however, that you don’t. You might think another team will knock off the Dodgers. You might think the team you root for will knock off the Dodgers. But few of you would actually argue that another team ought to wear the favorite’s target on its proverbial back as the season dawns.
The reason that opening sentence is so uncontroversial is that solid evidence to the contrary simply does not exist. L.A. is working on a streak of eight straight NL West titles, during which it has won 75 more regular-season games than any other team and 10 more postseason games. The Dodgers’ most recent season was their best yet: They won at a clip of 116 wins per 162 games in 2020. Their run differential suggested a team that should have won 115 and was on pace to be one of the five best differentials of the modern era. Not only is nearly the entire core of talent responsible for those lofty numbers back for 2021, but it’s been augmented by 2020 NL Cy Young Award winner Trevor Bauer.
Thus all major projection-based forecasting systems flag L.A. as baseball’s top team entering the campaign. My system is even more hyped about the Dodgers than most, giving them an average of 106.1 wins during my most recent run of simulations. Out of 10,000 sim seasons, the Dodgers had two — two! — records under .500, won at least 79 games every time, broke the all-time wins record (116) a number of times and even had five simulations in which they won at least 117 games then swept their way to another World Series crown with an 11-0 postseason.
As unlikely as both of those outcomes — a new single-season wins record and a perfect postseason — might be for any team, even the Dodgers, it does set one to thinking. What would the ceiling for a team like that even look like?
In an effort to put my head around that outlandish notion, I ran an experiment. I took my projections and loaded them up into my replay game of choice, which is Action! PC Baseball. The goal was simple: I would run the 2021 season as many times as it took for the Dodgers to break the wins record and go on to win the World Series. I would run those replays all day if I had to.
On the first and third of those replays, the Dodgers won the World Series but did not break the wins record. On the second, they also didn’t break the record and lost the World Series to the Yankees. Then on replay No. 4 — boom. New wins record. World Series title. Here was the blue-tinted Dodgers dream season that my simulation model told me was possible, fully documented. And it took me only four tries to produce it.
What did that too-fantastic-to-imagine season look like? Let’s watch it unfold.
Opening Day
Dodgers’ record: 0-0.
Historical antecedents: All teams start 0-0.
The obvious narrative when a defending champion starts a new season falls under the “what can they do for an encore?” umbrella. The Dodgers will deal with that and the weight of wildly optimistic expectations. Forget the lofty win expectations that my little projection system is assigning to them. Just about everyone thinks they will once again be a behemoth, including the betting markets.
Now, consider this: Last season, the Dodgers became the 48th team to post the best record in the big leagues and win the World Series. Obviously, the feat occurred much more often during the two-league era, when the World Series was the only playoff series. Thirty-five of those best-record champs came from that era.
That still leaves 13 such champs during the divisional era. But as the playoff format expanded, this naturally became more difficult to do. From 1990 through 2013, only three teams paired these feats: the 1998 Yankees, the 2009 Yankees and the 2013 Red Sox. For whatever reason, that pace has picked up. Last season, the Dodgers became the third champion in five years that was also baseball’s top regular-season team, joining the 2016 Cubs and the 2018 Red Sox. So perhaps it’s a trend.
Of the 12 division-era teams that matched a best record with a title before the current Dodgers, 11 of them won fewer games on a per-162 basis than the previous campaign. The average drop-off was 12.6. Only the 1990 A’s bucked the trend. After leading the majors in wins en route to a title in 1989, Tony La Russa’s squad won more games in 1990. But the A’s didn’t repeat: Oakland was knocked off by Lou Piniella’s Reds in that season’s World Series.
So when the fictional Dodgers begin their quest, like the real Dodgers are doing right now, they battle against the dual weight of the highest of expectations and the grim reality of history. And the fictional Dodgers, like the real ones are scheduled to do, begin that quest by putting Clayton Kershaw on the mound at Coors Field to face the Colorado Rockies and German Marquez.
This of course means that Bauer, one season after being recognized as the NL’s top pitcher, is not the Opening Day starter. That’s unusual. It happened to 2016 NL winner Max Scherzer, who didn’t get the nod for the Nationals in 2017 because an injury put him behind schedule. It also happened to Scherzer in 2014 when he was in Detroit. Scherzer won the 2013 AL Cy Young, but Justin Verlander still got the Opening Day gig the following spring. Before that, you have to go back to 2004 AL winner Johan Santana, who lost out to Brad Radke for Minnesota’s 2005 opener.
With Bauer watching from the dugout, Kershaw and the Dodgers serve notice that they are up for the challenge of repeating the unrepeatable. Mookie Betts gets things started with a leadoff single and scores on A.J. Pollock‘s two-out knock. Kershaw allows two solo homers but nothing else, as he pitches into the seventh with a low pitch count and is backed by homers from Justin Turner, Chris Taylor and Corey Seager.
The Opening Day final: Dodgers 7, Rockies 3. The game is not just the first win in the fictional Dodgers’ historic quest. When the Dodgers win on each of the next five subsequent days — all on the road — it means that L.A. will traverse the entire 2021 replay in first place without spending a single day under .500.
Memorial Day
Dodgers’ record: 40-14 (.741 winning percentage, on pace for 120 wins)
Historical antecedents: 16 teams have won at least 40 of their first 54 games. The last was the 2001 Mariners (42-12).
Memorial Day this year falls on the last day of May, and while we have much work to do, it’s possible that by then the country will be in the midst of a great opening up as the citizenry gets vaccinated for COVID-19 and the ballparks gradually fill up with baseball-starved fans.
The holiday is a traditional signpost for baseball executives. It’s long been a trope that Memorial Day is the time when you can stop downplaying results to date as small sample phenomena, and make some real hard assessments of your team. As with all tropes, it’s not as simple as that, but it’s still an important date on the baseball calendar.
What do Andrew Friedman and his front-office staff see that day in this fictional season of magical realism? He sees a thrilling 10-7 Dodgers win over St. Louis that ups L.A’s record to 40-14. After Nolan Arenado caps a fifth-inning Cardinals rally with a three-run blast, the Dodgers need an eighth-inning comeback to get that 40th win. They put up five runs in that frame, aided by Taylor’s 13th homer and second of the contest.
With the win, the Dodgers widen their lead in the NL West to 9½ games over Arizona. The D-backs’ fast start is fading and the Padres are about to overtake them, but already, people around baseball are talking about the Padres in terms of landing the home edge in the NL wild-card game. The Dodgers’ plus-110 run differential is easily tops in the majors.
By that point, the star power of the Dodgers is on full blast. Bauer is 8-0 with a 1.33 ERA, making him the NL’s Cy Young front-runner ahead of Kershaw, who is 6-0 with a 2.48 ERA. None of this should come as a surprise for ESPN readers, who saw that in our MLB Top 100 for this season, the Dodgers had Betts at No. 2 and five of the top 22 players overall.
With the Dodgers, those lofty ratings go well beyond the best-right-now window. They are replete with standouts who dominate our rankings year in, year out. I keep a register of our annual rankings that goes back to 2012. Kershaw is one of just three players who have placed in all 10 versions of the rankings, joining Stephen Strasburg and Giancarlo Stanton.
Let’s say we created a point system where the ESPN Top 100 gave 100 points to the No. 1, 99 to the No. 2 and so on for each ranking of the past decade. If you take the points compiled by every player on a team’s roster entering the 2021 season, here is how they stack up:
1. Los Angeles Dodgers (3,667)
2. New York Yankees (3,253)
3. Washington Nationals (2,910)
4. Houston Astros (2,711)
5. New York Mets (2,681)
6. St. Louis Cardinals (2,558)
7. Los Angeles Angels (2,275)
8. Chicago Cubs (2,113)
9. Philadelphia Phillies (1,960)
10. San Diego Padres (1,687)
11. Atlanta Braves (1,577)
12. Boston Red Sox (1,408)
13. San Francisco Giants (1,320)
14. Minnesota Twins (1,270)
15. Chicago White Sox (1,077)
16. Cincinnati Reds (962)
17. Milwaukee Brewers (948)
18. Toronto Blue Jays (845)
19. Baltimore Orioles (725)
20. Detroit Tigers (673)
21. Kansas City Royals (643)
22. Arizona Diamondbacks (610)
23. Colorado Rockies (553)
24. Oakland Athletics (499)
25. Cleveland Indians (462)
26. Tampa Bay Rays (449)
27. Seattle Mariners (238)
28. Miami Marlins (183)
29. Texas Rangers (94)
30. Pittsburgh Pirates (15)
All-Star break
Dodgers’ record: 67-24 (.736 winning percentage, on pace for 119 wins).
Historical antecedents: The 1998 Yankees (68-23) are the only other team to have won at least 67 of its first 91 games.
Panic in Los Angeles! Not exactly, but the Dodgers do end their first half with a loss, dropping a 4-2 decision to Arizona. Kershaw is beaten by Zac Gallen and the Diamondbacks rally for four runs in the eighth, capped by Christian Walker‘s three-run homer off Blake Treinen. Still, there is no possible reason for the Dodgers to worry. Entering the game, L.A. had won 11 of 12.
The 2021 All-Star Game is scheduled for July 13 in Atlanta. If the real season were to unfold as it did during this fictional replay (which, again, could happen!) the Dodgers would dominate the chatter around the events. L.A.’s lead over the second-place Padres in the NL West has bulged to 17 games. The Dodgers would indeed be breaking baseball.
The standout on the team of standouts at this point is Bauer, who of course would accept that happenstance with the utmost humility and understatement. He enters the fictional All-Star Game at 14-0 with a 1.68 ERA, outshining Kershaw (10-2), who is enjoying another banner season. At the plate, the Dodgers are spreading it around, but already five players have hit at least 16 homers, led by Pollock’s 19.
Needless to say, the Dodgers would have a good bit of representation on the NL All-Star roster. In fact, Action! PC Baseball generates its version of the voting, and according to the game, the Dodgers have All-Star starters at six spots: Bauer on the hill, joined by catcher Will Smith, first baseman Max Muncy and the entire outfield of Pollock, Betts and Cody Bellinger.
Most of the All-Star Dodgers would feel right at home. L.A.’s 2021 roster features players who have made a combined 31 previous All-Star Game appearances.
Trade deadline
Dodgers’ record: 79-27 (.745 winning percentage, on pace for 121 wins).
Historical antecedents: No team has won 79 of its first 106 games. The closest was the 1998 Yankees (78-28).
There is no trade deadline in the replay game, and for the algorithms running the fictional Dodgers, that’s just as well. The team is loaded. The Dodgers were loaded last year. They’ve been loaded for years. Thus the standard by which L.A. can improve its roster is much higher than that of most teams. With immense resources and plenty of coveted minor league talent, the Dodgers could win any number of trade bidding wars. The problem is finding a player who actually improves what they already have.
This is precisely why the Dodgers spent most of the winter snoring away in the weeds before pouncing on Bauer, one of the few free agents with a profile that actually improves the outlook of the L.A. roster. The Dodgers also have a consistently producing minor league system, which this year ranks in a range from ninth to 16th depending on where you look. Baseball America has had the Dodgers ranked among its 10 best systems in each of its past seven preseason guides. The Dodgers have all the pieces they need to swing a deadline deal. It’s just that they don’t always need to use them.
The 2021 MLB trade deadline is July 31. In the fictional season, the Dodgers have a 21-game lead over the Padres in the NL West by that point. Their bulge over the Mets for the second-best record in the National League is eight games. No one in the American League is within 10 games. Good luck improving on that.
As if to validate the decision of their front office to stand pat, the Dodgers win in Arizona, 5-2, the night of the deadline. They have to come back to do it with a seventh-inning rally capped by a two-run homer from Edwin Rios. That makes the Dodgers the first team of the modern era to win 79 of its first 106 games.
Coasting to October
Dodgers’ record on Sept. 1: 100-33 (.752 winning percentage, on pace for 122 wins).
Historical antecedents: No team has won 100 of its first 133 games. The closest was the 1906 Cubs, who won 99 of their first 133, with one tie.
As you’d imagine, there is no drama for the Dodgers down the stretch of the season in terms of striving for a seeding advantage. They end up 16 games better than the Mets for NL supremacy and 13 games better than the Yankees for the overall best mark in baseball. That the Dodgers would be the top seed in the postseason bracket is a foregone conclusion by early September.
The real drama comes in the Dodgers’ race against history.
On Aug. 30, the Dodgers reach 100 wins in their 132nd game, a 6-1 victory over the Braves in which Kershaw improves his record to 18-2. They trudge along for about three weeks after that, going a pedestrian 9-8. Los Angeles still racks up win No. 110 on Sept. 21. That one is a 10-1 drubbing at Coors Field in which Bauer beats the Rockies to improve to 20-3. And, yeah, by that point the NL Cy Young race is a dogfight between the Dodgers’ longtime ace in Kershaw and their newest ace in Bauer.
On Sept. 30, the Dodgers and Padres hook up in a tense affair in L.A., with Walker Buehler and Dinelson Lamet going toe-to-toe. Muncy hammers his 38th homer in the seventh inning to put L.A. up 3-2 and Kenley Jansen finishes up for his 36th save. The victory is No. 116 for the Dodgers to match the record held by the 1906 Chicago Cubs and the 2001 Seattle Mariners. They have three games left at home against the Milwaukee Brewers to set a new regular-season standard.
The Dodgers lose the first of those games. Getting a late-season start, Dodgers prospect Josiah Gray gives up homers to Keston Hiura, Travis Shaw and Orlando Arcia and the Brewers cruise to the win, a much-needed one en route to what becomes a wild-card berth for Milwaukee. Then on Oct. 2, the second-to-last day of the season, Bauer takes the mound.
It isn’t Bauer’s best game. He gives up two homers to Hiura and another to Christian Yelich. But he hangs in for six innings, during which he strokes an unlikely two-run single. Meanwhile, Bellinger rings out three hits, including a double and a two-run triple. The Dodgers grab the lead early and hold on to win 6-4. Jansen picks up save No. 37, getting Hiura on a game-ending groundout.
It is win No. 117 and a new single-season MLB record for the fictional Dodgers. For Bauer, it is win No. 22. L.A. tacks on one more win on the last day of the regular season, though it takes 18 innings to do it. That the Dodgers have to play so long in advance of their playoff run is probably the low point of a season that pretty much doesn’t have any low points.
The playoffs
Well, you know the Dodgers win it all because the whole point of the exercise was to pick a replay in which they win it all and see how it looked. L.A. enters the bracket with Bauer having pulled away from Kershaw in an epic Cy Young race. Six Dodgers hit at least 28 homers and L.A.’s 283 homers as a team gives them 44 more than any other club in the NL.
In other words, the Dodgers dominate across the board. Which would not register as a surprise in any fashion. According to my current projections, the Dodgers rank as baseball’s top offensive team, once park factors are taken into consideration. They are also first in park-neutral runs allowed. The rotation ranks — you guessed it — first. The bullpen is fifth. The defense is fourth. L.A. even ranks second by the system’s roll-up of a baserunning metric.
There are no weaknesses on this Dodgers team. The Dodgers’ winning percentage (.728) is not quite a record, despite the milestone win total. But it makes the Dodgers just the 12th team to put up a .700 winning percentage and the first to do it in back-to-back seasons since the 1906 and 1907 Cubs. But, as we all know, that guarantees you exactly doodley-squat once you get to October, as Kurt Vonnegut might say.
Of those 11 teams that won at a .700-or-better clip before the fictional Dodgers, just six of them ended up winning the World Series. The 1902 Pirates didn’t get a Fall Classic to test their mettle against the brand-new American League. But the 1906 Cubs, 1931 Athletics, 1954 Indians and 2001 Mariners all came up short in their title quests after historic regular seasons. The Mariners didn’t even get to the Fall Classic.
If the Dodgers were to come up short after a record-setting 2021 regular season, it would not be due to a lack of postseason experience. Not when you’re talking about what would by then be a nine-time reigning division champion. The players on L.A.’s spring roster have together made 682 appearances in postseason play, easily tops in the majors. That’s 106 more than the second-place Astros and 255 more than the Cubs, who come up second among NL teams.
All three of the fictional Dodgers’ postseason series would be marquee matchups if they came to pass in reality. And they could: All three opponents are prime contenders in the actual 2021 season. Here is the fictional Dodgers’ path:
National League Division Series: The Dodgers take on the rival Padres, putting baseball’s newest most intense rivalry in the spotlight. Alas, the match turns out to be anticlimactic. As they did last October, the Dodgers turn back Fernando Tatis Jr. & Co. in three straight.
National League Championship Series: The Dodgers — former denizens of Brooklyn — are matched against the Mets in what turns out to be the first of two straight high-stakes series against New York clubs. Though overshadowed by L.A. during the season, the Mets won 102 games and generated a lot of excitement of their own.
The series takes a shape reminiscent of the 1960 World Series, as the teams trade narrow Mets wins with romps by the Dodgers, including a 15-0 win behind Buehler in Game 3. But it still comes down to a Game 7 at Dodger Stadium. In that one, Buehler strikes out 10 over seven innings and Pollock homers twice, lifting the Dodgers to a 7-1 victory that puts them back in the World Series for the fourth time in five years.
World Series: Once there, the Dodgers face down the Yankees in the latest version of baseball’s most prolific World Series pairing, one that has happened 11 times but none since 1981. The hype meter, one could imagine, would be off the charts.
Alas, we have to remind ourselves that this is the Dodgers’ dream season, not the Yankees’ fantasy, and the series turns out to be one-sided. The Dodgers need just five games to dispatch the Bronx Bombers, taking the clincher at Yankee Stadium 9-7 in 13 innings. Muncy hits a two-run homer to put L.A. ahead, then Jansen strikes out Aaron Judge to finish it.
And that’s the way our fantasy version of a baseball-breaking season by the Dodgers ends, with Jansen throwing his glove in the air, Smith running out to jump into his arms and the gray-clad Dodgers dancing around the infield at Yankee Stadium. Counting the regular season and the title-winning postseason run, the fictional Dodgers win 129 games.
The aftermath
You can sense where the discussion would head if this kind of season were to come together for the Dodgers. Is this the best team ever? Is this baseball’s greatest dynasty? After nine division titles, four pennants, two titles and a two-year winning percentage well north of .700, it would be a discussion worth having.
Then there would be the question of how — or even if — this Dodgers run will ever end. Could the talented Padres make yet another transaction splurge to close the gap? Is there any slowing down this Dodgers juggernaut?
The postseason awards in the fictional realm are dominated by the Dodgers, with Bauer taking the Cy Young, Pollock winning MVP — barely edging Betts — and Dave Roberts winning Manager of the Year. Mercifully, L.A. doesn’t have any leading NL Rookie of the Year candidates, so at least that honor serves as solace for some other club in the senior circuit.
The thing is, you can take any team and imagine a slew of core players who reach the upper reaches of their range of probabilities for a season, perhaps factor in unusual health and maybe even a down season by a rival to open the window to a dream season. You can muse on all those lucky breaks and dream of an epic season that has little chance of actually happening. With the Dodgers, you don’t even have to strain yourself to envision an epic, history-upending campaign. They are that good. Expectations are that high.
At the same time, this is baseball and we all know baseball. None of this guarantees a thing. Padres fans will read this scenario and scoff. Yankees fans will read it and guffaw. Mets fans will read this and say, “Wait, we’re going to be that good?” Empirically, it remains true that even if the Dodgers are 3-in-10 favorites to win it all, which gives them far better odds than any other team, they still don’t win the title in 7 in 10 scenarios. That’s baseball.
All those caveats dutifully offered, this team has a real chance to be special. The Dodgers have a chance to place an exclamation mark on what has already been a run of success stunning in its duration. There are months and miles and hundreds of games to go between now and the end of October. But there is one team in baseball that could stand out not just this season, but in relation to all seasons.
And if the Dodgers make that happen, it will look something like this.