Dodgers put last year's pitiful finish in the rearview mirror
Max Muncy doesn't pull any punches.
“There's no way around it. We sucked,” he said of the Dodgers' three-game sweep at the hands of the Arizona Diamondbacks in last fall's NL Division Series. “We really kind of blew it. And I'm not trying to take anything away from the Diamondbacks. They obviously played very well and hats off to them. But we blew it.”
There was no need to analyze the result, Muncy said.
“I feel like you can have a dartboard and throw a dart and it would land on something that went wrong,” he said. “We didn't do a whole lot right. We didn't hit. We didn't score. We didn't pitch. Really wasn't a whole lot that we did well.”
It might have been a total team effort. But Mookie Betts took personal responsibility for his poor October.
“That's when I didn't show up. I didn't do anything to help the team,” said Betts who went 0 for 11 in the NLDS after a regular season that landed him as the runnerup to Ronald Acuna Jr. for the NL MVP award.
“Just didn't show up, bro. Whatever the reason is, didn't matter. I didn't show up. At the end of the day, that's all that matters. Got to be there.”
The Dodgers were all together again Wednesday for the first time since that NLDS loss — the second consecutive year and third time in the past five years the Dodgers have been eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.
But a billion-dollar splurge in the offseason has cleared the air of those clouds, giving the Dodgers something else to focus on as they held their first full-squad workout
GLENDALE, ARIZ. >>
Wednesday.
“I think so,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “I think reshuffling the deck with new players, I think that brought a lot of excitement to the fan base, to the organization itself. The newness part of it, yeah.”
But is that a good thing — should the Dodgers forget last October's disappointment or use it as fuel in 2024?
“I think it's a good existential question — as far as failures and how you deal with them, how you look at them,” Roberts said. “I think the feeling of not realizing a goal and how it doesn't sit well is important to remember and motivate. There's also a component of looking forward and giving yourself an opportunity to do it again.
“Everyone is different. Mookie certainly feels a responsibility as one of the best players in the game to perform at the highest level on the biggest of stages. I think his words are his words. But I think for everyone — for me and the `24 Dodgers there's a lot of guys that weren't on this ballclub the last couple years. So for them to have that burden, I don't think that makes any sense. I think for me, we've got something to prove. The `24 Dodgers haven't done anything. And as we clearly know, you don't win on paper. I just think we haven't done anything and we've got a lot to prove.”
There was an awareness of that on the group chat this winter, Miguel Rojas said, even as players celebrated the additions of Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and others.
“It's pretty obvious that everybody in this clubhouse feels like we need to find a way to close the deal, which is winning baseball games in the postseason and converting what we were trying to do here, which is winning a championship,” Rojas said Wednesday. “We haven't been able to do that. And last year was a bad taste. And hopefully with all the additions that we have, we we have a better chance to win.”
The excitement of the offseason can't completely wash away those past disappointments, Betts said.
“No, not at all,” he said. “It helps us on paper, but it doesn't do anything for us on the field. It doesn't do anything for us for years ago. It's all over, all done, in the past and no matter what we do, someone can always bring up, `Well, the last couple years, they didn't win.' Well yeah, we didn't. But we can't really focus on that. Got to focus on the task going forward. On paper we're good, but we got to go play.”
Wednesday's first full team meeting was a good chance to refocus on what matters now, according to Freddie Freeman.
“It doesn't matter who you lose to or how you lose, losing in the playoffs, that's not our goal,” Freeman said. “We got one goal every year and that's to win the World Series and that's just who we are. … We got swept. That makes it sting even more. But that was last year. We've got to put that behind us.”