Dodgers’ have a chance to ‘finish the job’ of 1988
For someone as competitive and driven to be great as any athlete in his sport over the past decade, it pokes at Clayton Kershaw every time, like a rock that has worked its way inside his shoe.
“No disrespect to 1988 — we hear about that a lot,” Kershaw said early in this postseason. “I’ve said it before — but we are sick of it. It’s up to us to do something about it, obviously. We need to create some of our own history, for sure.
“I think it stands as a testament to this organization that they have such great history, that they take a lot of pride in their history, which I’m thankful for. I’m thankful to be a part of that and be in this organization. But at the same time, if we win one, we might not have to hear about it anymore, which would be awesome.”
The Dodgers will get their latest best chance to make 1988 recede deeper into that franchise history when they open the World Series on Tuesday night at Fenway Park against the Boston Red Sox.
The lore of 1988 has been in the Dodgers’ faces all season long with the franchise celebrating the 30th anniversary of its most recent championship. That they were unable to end the World Series drought last fall is the history this team will try to rewrite against Boston.
“You remember that feeling for weeks,” Kenley Jansen said of the Game 7 loss to the Astros. “You want to get back there. You understand not a lot of teams go back. Not a lot of teams go back 10 years after they got there. We understand it’s hard. It’s hard just to make the playoffs. We can’t take this for granted. This is an awesome feeling. We know how we felt last year. That was so recent for us. And I think that’s going to help motivate us.”
The conversations about getting a
World Series mulligan began even before Dodger Stadium emptied out after Game 7 last fall.
“We lost Game 7 and I remember the conversation from a lot of different guys was, ‘Kansas City lost in 2014, they came back and won in 2015,’” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said, dripping in champagne Saturday night. “That’s what we’re focused on. Three days after the World Series, Kenley is running stadium steps. Our guys are working out. That’s when I felt confident enough in the 2018 season.”
Friedman’s confidence — and a desire to reset their luxury-tax penalties — led the Dodgers to make few changes to the roster over that long discontented winter. Seventeen of the 25 players who were on the Dodgers’ World Series roster last fall were in camp when spring training opened in February, including eight of the nine players in the Game 7 starting lineup (all but ... Yu know who).
No major free agents were signed. The only multi-year deal the Dodgers negotiated last winter was a two-year deal with Chase Utley (who will retire after the first year).
And that confidence produced a 16-26 team in mid-May.
“We did feel like eventually, things were going to course-correct because of the talent we believed we had on the roster,” Dodgers GM Farhan Zaidi said. “You also can’t just sit around and wait for that to happen. This season was a mix of letting the guys play, but also being proactive and going out and getting some help for this team. Not just (Manny) Machado, but (David) Freese and (Ryan) Madson were big contributors in the first two rounds of the playoffs. That was a little bit of a trickier balance for us to walk this season.”
They walked it like a drunk leaving after last call.
Sure, there were injuries (like the loss of Corey Seager to Tommy John surgery) but the season-long theme was one of inconsistency and underachievement — until a sense of urgency kicked in late in the season. Third in the NL West after a late-August sweep by the St. Louis Cardinals at Dodger Stadium, the Dodgers have won every important series since — against the Diamondbacks and Rockies, a rematch with the Cardinals, Game 163 against the Rockies and now playoff series against the Braves and Brewers.
It was a hard road to take but one the Dodgers believe has them calloused and ready to “finish the job” they fell short of accomplishing last year.
“It feels a little more battle-tested this year. It was more of a joyride last year,” Zaidi said.
“This is definitely a more battle-tested group. Last year, we kind of cruised through the season and through the first two rounds of the playoffs. This year has been more of a grind, in the regular season and the playoffs, getting to this point.”
And now they face a Red Sox team that should remind them of those 2017 Dodgers.
Like last year’s Dodgers, the Red Sox reach the World Series having won so many games during the regular season (a franchise-record 108) that overheated media speculated on their chances to reach the all-time record (116 by the 1906 Chicago Cubs and the 2001 Seattle Mariners). Like last year’s Dodgers, the Red Sox dispatched a division rival in the first round of the playoffs then eliminated the defending World Series champions in the League Championship Series.
And like the Dodgers, the Red Sox are a franchise that bathes in its history. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts is part of that history. His stolen base during the 2004 curse-busting will be replayed on the Fenway Park scoreboard until they figure out a way to implant chips in the brains of fans — at which point, it will replay internally.
But Roberts too has had enough of history. “To be quite honest, you look at 1988 and a lot of Dodgers fans now, that fan base didn’t know 1988,” Roberts said. “There is something to — I don’t know quite how to phrase this — we inherited this. Clayton inherited it. So you sort of have that burden, speaking for Clayton, of 22, 23 years before he got here. And being with Boston, I can relate because when I was a player with Boston I didn’t know 1918. But you feel the weight. That’s all we heard. So there is an incentive for the current players to create their own memories.
“I want to create our own memory as well for our fans.”