It has been a dream ride for the Dodgers, an extraordinary trip through the first 107 games of the season. So maybe that’s what Magic Johnson was thinking the other day, at Clayton Kershaw’s charity ping pong event in Los Angeles. Maybe it was becoming too much of a dream.
And maybe he needed to translate for them, into the dialect of Real.
“The Dodgers are going to win the World Series this year,” Johnson said. “This is our year.”
He pointed at Kershaw, presently on the disabled list with a balky back, but when healthy the greatest pitcher on the planet.
“So get healthy, lead us. That’s the only ring I don’t have, and I need that ring.”
Johnson, of course, has spent the better part of the last four decades dealing in the commerce of victory in Southern California. He won five NBA titles as a player, starting his rookie year when he earned Finals MVP. His post-playing career was successful enough that he could buy a small piece of the Dodgers just as they were re-emerging as one of baseball’s elite. Now he’s running the Lakers, maybe the one man alive who can command the attention and respect of Lonzo Ball’s old man.
But this was something else. This was Magic Johnson making an old-school Namath/Messier guarantee on behalf of his favorite baseball team — a team that has won an awful lot of baseball games the past five years, and has won at an even more amazing clip this year, and has generally been in the hunt just about every year for decades (only three losing seasons since 1990) …
And yet hasn’t won a World Series since 1988.
Hasn’t, in fact, even been in a World Series since then.
And has tried to avoid buying into the hype even as this season has grown into a monster season, even as they brought a 75-32 record into Thursday night’s game in Atlanta before taking their traveling road show to Citi Field on Friday. Yu Darvish will make his Dodgers debut against Jacob deGrom, which means this might be as close as Citi gets to feeling like October all year.
For the Dodgers, it’ll just be a sweet preview.
“This group has handled the success we’ve had probably better than anyone could have imagined,” Justin Turner told L.A. reporters the other day. The ex-Met is one of the essential Dodgers, an All-Star slashing .353/.451/.537, and brings a large share of the glue every day in helping make the Dodgers cohesive.
“I talk about it all the time and it’s cliché … but we’re so good at taking it one day at a time and not worrying about what happened yesterday or what’s in front of us. It’s been a group of guys that shows up every day and tries to figure out a way to win that day.”
There are things about the Dodgers that never seem to change, whether it’s 2017 or 1977 or 1947. Rookies, for instance: No National League franchise has anywhere close to the 18 winners of the league’s Rookie of the Year, starting with Jackie Robinson in ’47, the first ever recipient.
Better still, those kids tend to arrive in bunches: Rick Sutcliffe/Steve Howe/Fernando Valenzuela/Steve Sax won four in a row from 1979-82; Eric Karros/Mike Piazza/Raul Mondesi/Hideo Nomo/Todd Hollandsworth won five straight from 1992-96.
Corey Seager won it last year, breaking a rare 20-year drought for Dodgers rookies. And Cody Bellinger is almost certain to back that up this year, thanks to a first four months that have yielded 30 homers and 71 RBIs.
Winning is a constant, too. Since Leo Durocher was hired to manage the Dodgers’ Brooklyn antecedents in 1939 – effectively ending an era of lovable losing that had nearly eliminated them as a credible franchise – they have finished with winning records in 65 of 79 seasons, soon to be 66 out of 80.
Amazingly, they’ve never won like this, a .701 pace that projects to 113 wins and would place the Dodgers among the very best regular-season teams of all time. It’s been 43 years since they last won 100 games – 102 in 1974 – and in their modern history the Dodgers have only won 100 games five times. (Also amazingly: In two of those five seasons, 1942 [104] and 1962 [102] the Dodgers didn’t make the postseason.)
(By comparison, the Yankees have won 100 or more some 19 times. And the Cardinals, forever the Dodgers’ chief rival for supremacy in the National League, have done it nine times.)
It has been an incredible season of consistency, especially the last 47 games heading into Thursday (of which they’d won 40). They haven’t lost three in a row since early June. They have yet to lose four in a row. Of the four teams the Dodgers are chasing for historic commemoration, three of them – the ’27 Yankees (110 wins), ’98 Yankees (114) and ’01 Mariners (116) all had one four-game skid in them. Only the 1906 Cubs (116) didn’t muddle through even one skein of at least four.
That’s some heady stuff.
And some sobering stuff, too, when you realize that only the two Yankees clubs won championships. The ’01 Mariners didn’t even make it to the World Series. The ’06 Cubs, 116-36, lost to the crosstown White Sox in six games, a .763 winning percentage reduced to .333 in October.
Maybe Magic wasn’t aware of that 111-year-old nugget.
But it’s certainly what he was speaking to.
For Mets fans, the Dodgers provide a little something for everyone – much of it marinated in agita. There is the star who got away (though, in fairness, probably not even noted scout Nostradamus could have figured Turner — .265/.326/.370 in four years in Flushing – could become this). There is Kershaw, who as good as he is has not yet experienced the postseason highs of deGrom, or even Noah Syndergaard, and a reminder that boasting an ace is still a smart course of action.
And there is Chase Utley, who over the years has emerged as perhaps the biggest of all Mets villains. The last time the Dodgers visited Citi, a year ago, Syndergaard was tossed from a game simply for attempting to exact revenge on the slide that broke Ruben Tejada’s leg in the ’15 NLDS.
Utley only plays about three-quarters of the time, is hitting only .241, isn’t near the same player he was as a Phillie. But if you remember the best qualities of those terrific Philadelphia teams, you clearly see Utley’s influence on these Dodgers, who play with a similar blend of fury and intelligence. The Dodgers, especially the younger ones, see him as something of a talisman. And should.
“I try to help them out as much as possible,” Utley recently told Sporting News. “I don’t make them follow me around on a daily basis or anything but if they have questions I’m going to try to answer them. I might not always have the right answer but we can at least talk through it.”
The Dodgers, thus far, have had every answer. The manager, Dave Roberts, thus far, has pushed every proper button. Two years ago the Mets beat the Dodgers on the way to the World Series. Two years later the Dodgers arrive, looking like they belong in a higher league. But with one of their owners’ words ringing in their ears. They need that ring.