The mandate was set the moment the dancing Dodgers flooded the Yankee Stadium field on that glorious, gutsy October night.

One is not enough.

The bar was set the minute the Dodgers squeezed past the San Diego Padres then steamrolled all of New York to dominate baseball with their best team ever.

One is not enough.

Their mission was clear the instant those giant buses whizzed past adoring thousands on downtown streets and emptied a group of tearful hugging players into a roaring Dodger Stadium for their first-ever November celebration.

Read more:Tokyo takeaways: Dodgers relish experience, expect Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts back soon

One is damn sure not enough.

One full-season World Series championship is just not enough.

Not for these kinds of players. Not for these heaps of money. Not for these sorts of fans.

It might not seem fair, and it’s certainly not much fun, but this Dodger dynasty cannot be considered a real dynasty unless they win it all again this season, becoming the first team in 25 years to capture consecutive titles.

It’s not very dramatic, it’s six months of grinding aimed at one month of glory, but there is no escaping it.

For the 2025 Dodgers, it’s a World Series championship or bust.

Last season’s title didn’t lift the pressure, it doubled it. If they really want to fully destroy the ghosts of postseason failures past, they simply have to make it two in a row.

“I do know that we're trying to do something that hasn't been done in 25 years, to go back-to-back, that's certainly in our calculus,” Manager Dave Roberts told reporters this spring, later adding, “It’s a motivator.”

It’s more than a motivator, it’s a must.

In most cities a championship buys a team at least one season of relaxed grace, but not with this team. In most cases a franchise can live with losing for two or three seasons after a title, but these Dodgers are different.

These Dodgers have won 11 division titles in 12 seasons. These Dodgers have a payroll of almost $402 million, some $75 million more than anyone else. These Dodgers should not just win. They should win, and win, and win.

Los Angeles knows dynasties and so far, this ain’t it.

These Dodgers are not yet in a class with Wooden’s Bruins, Pete’s Trojans, Showtime or the Kobe-Shaq Lakers. All were brash, dominant programs that won at least two consecutive championships while the rest of the world was at their necks.

Read more:Roki Sasaki's MLB debut is tantalizing, and shaky, as Dodgers complete Tokyo Series sweep

The Dodgers haven’t done that yet. They haven’t become that yet. Considering the 2020 shortened-season title is discounted and last year’s title was their first full-season crown in 36 years, they need to add on.

And they know it. Roberts said he didn’t use the exact word “dynasty” in his annual speech on the first day of spring training, but he didn’t dance around it either.

“I do think that we're the epicenter of baseball,” he said. “I do think that we do a lot of things well, we have a lot of talented players. Our fans come out in droves. Our players understand that, like I said, there's a standard to uphold, and how we perform each day is important.”

The last baseball team to win consecutive titles was the three-peat New York Yankees from 1998-2000, and while they were memorable, these Dodgers can be better.

They can win it again. They should win it again. From ownership to the depths of the bullpen, they’ve done everything to put themselves in a position to win it again.

They ended the season as the best team in baseball by a fairly large margin, and guess what? With Mark Walter’s money and Andrew Friedman’s smarts, they got substantially better.

They signed the best veteran pitcher on the market in Blake Snell. They signed the best young arm in Roki Sasaki. They re-signed all of their free agent postseason heroes, from Teoscar Hernández to Blake Treinen to Kiké Hernández. They added veteran reliever Kirby Yates and outfielder Michael Conforto.

Then they capped it all off with a stunning signing of one of the best relievers in baseball, Shohei Ohtani’s nemesisTanner Scott, in a move that even surprised Roberts.

He thought they were finished buying. He was satisfied that they had greatly improved on greatness. And then…

“I just felt that we were tapped out…And we checked three boxes at that point in time, big boxes, so that would have been, like, good enough,” Roberts said. “So when I heard that Tanner Scott can still be in play, I was very surprised. And then when we acquired him, I was like, ‘I can’t believe that just happened.’ Because it would have still been a great offseason. A great offseason.”

It was indeed a great offseason, filled with several “I can’t believe that just happened” moments, manufactured by a front office that swings big and takes the extra base and works as hard as their hustling players.

“And I just think it speaks to ownership, and Andrew and the front office, how competitive they are, as our players are,” Roberts said. “And I just love the way they can put back into the players.”

Oh, the players. My, but they have the players.

This is not just the best and deepest roster in baseball. It might be one of the best and deepest rosters in baseball history. They're so loaded, they swept the Chicago Cubs in a two-game season-opening series in Tokyo without Mookie Betts or Freddie Freeman and without arguably their top two starting pitchers, Snell and Tyler Glasnow. They also used a different set of relievers each night.

Read more:Hernández: Shohei Ohtani's Tokyo Series home run is the culmination of the 'Week of Ohtani'

Could they go 162-0? Only half joking.

Start, of course, with Ohtani, who could be the most complete player in baseball history. Next up, former MVP Betts. Then, regular season and World Series MVP Freeman. Follow with two 30-home run guys in Teoscar Hernández and Max Muncy, then two-time All-Star Will Smith, then NLCS MVP Tommy Edman, then former 30-home run guy Conforto.

The starting rotation is so deep that Ohtani isn’t being rushed to the mound after Tommy John surgery and might only make a dozen starts this year. And the two-time former Cy Young winner Snell is only the No. 2 starter, behind Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Then there’s the bullpen is so rich that last year’s World Series hero Treinen won’t even be the primary closer.

All this, and Roberts just cemented the credibility of his clubhouse culture with a contract extension that makes him the highest paid in baseball by annual salary.

Seriously, who is going to beat them? They could win a major-league record 120 games if they didn’t stress load management and spend the regular season gearing up for October. That’s what this summer is going to be, one long pregame stretch in preparation for the playoffs. They might “only” win 95 games, but you can bet they’ll be ready for that first round.

Or… not.

What if they suffer a World Series hangover? Remember the Rams’ Super Bowl hangover? What if that happens here?

Roberts says it won’t.

“I just think that we’re as good as anyone in baseball at putting the blinders on and getting better each day, with respect to expectations,” Roberts said. “And I think that managing high expectations that we have every year, I think our guys do a really good job of doing that, which as a byproduct guards against any type of letdown.”

But what if…

What if Ohtani gets distracted in his return to pitching and declines offensively? What if Betts wears down during his first full season at shortstop? What if Freeman suffers an understandable letdown after one of the greatest homers in Dodger history?

Teoscar Hernández earned his biggest guaranteed contract, and what if that robs him of his fire? Muncy struggled with injuries most of last season, what if his body will never be right?

What if Sasaki pitches like an unfocused kid and Snell loses his edge and relievers Scott and Yates crumble under the new pressure?

Read more:Photos: Dodger Blue takes over Tokyo during season-opening series

Lots can go wrong, but here’s guessing it won’t. And the Dodgers are so deep, all of that would have to happen at once for them to struggle.

No, this season is not about histrionics, it’s about history. The Dodgers will make it. The Dodgers will cement it.

The Dodgers will win a second consecutive World Series to become one of baseball’s most dominant and Los Angeles’ most beloved dynasties.

At least, that’s the plan.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

When Dave Roberts addressed his full team for the first time this spring, he didn’t use the word dynasty.

On Feb. 15, during the opening week of Dodgers camp, the 10th-year manager did discuss the team’s World Series title, its expectations to repeat and the long road ahead to get there.

Roberts looked around a room — one that included the reigning National League and World Series most valuable players, two more former MVPs, two Cy Young Award winner who had combined to win the award five times, and a host of other All-Stars, big names and expensive free-agent acquisitions — and told the group they were at “the epicenter of baseball.”

But, even with the Dodgers trying to win their third championship in six years, the manager shied away from “dynasty” talk, taking a more narrowed focus that his players have echoed in the run-up to this season.

Read more:Tokyo takeaways: Dodgers relish experience, expect Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts back soon

“You can’t look at what we’ve already done; you can’t look at what we’re trying to do,” veteran third baseman Max Muncy said. “We’re just focusing on what we can do at this moment.”

And in Roberts’ view, what the team needs to do is adopt a certain mindset.

“Be the hunter instead of the hunted,” Roberts said last week, as the club opened its season with a two-game sweep of the Chicago Cubs in Tokyo. “I think when you’re the Dodgers, there’s always a target. You can’t run from it.”

The stakes of this Dodgers season have been pretty clearly laid out.

They are trying to become Major League Baseball’s first repeat champion since the New York Yankees from 1998 to 2000, the last undisputed dynastic run by any big-league club in the sport. The Dodgers are trying not to squander a roster that boasts a nearly $400 million payroll, the highest in history for luxury tax purposes, and was bolstered by yet another big-money offseason from an Andrew Friedman-led front office and Guggenheim-funded ownership group.

They not only retained almost every important piece from last year’s title team, which claimed the organization’s first full-season championship since 1988, but they also went on a spending spree, adding two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell, Japanese pitching phenom in Roki Sasaki, the top reliever on the market in Tanner Scott, and more depth than many in the sport can remember seeing on one roster.

“Our ownership group is doing everything they can on their end to provide us with the best team every year,” Roberts said. “And it’s up to us on the field to kind of help them realize that vision.”

Friedman’s hope is that it all serves as a motivator in the clubhouse, as the team tries to do something that hasn’t happened in baseball since the advent of the luxury tax almost a quarter-century ago.

“Winning a championship is really hard. Winning back to back is even harder,” he said this spring. “A lot of the challenge is, I think it’s human nature that a lot of guys can get complacent after you win. So it was important to us this offseason to not have that set in.”

Read more:Tokyo takeaways: Dodgers relish experience, expect Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts back soon

With such lavish reinforcements, however, came a backlash of criticism from some corners of the sport.

The Dodgers, after all, already had Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman atop their lineup. They’d already spent almost half a billion last offseason to add Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow to their rotation.

Seeing the Dodgers dominate yet another winter, and turn a talented-but-susceptible team into a seemingly foolproof (and, the team hopes, injury-proof) juggernaut, raised alarm bells around the sport about a growing competitive imbalance.

As a result the Dodgers have been cast as something of a villain. And as he tried to shape the their approach entering another 162-game grind, Roberts was happy to embrace the added scrutiny.

“There’s an understanding with what we’ve done, who we are, that people are going to come at us with their best each night,” he said. “I think us being hunted or having a bull’s-eye, when you put on this uniform, that’s just the way it is.”

Roberts wants his players to feed off such pressure and match the sense of urgency they’ll likely face on a nightly basis.

“An analogy that I’ve used with our players is a mindset,” he said, referring back to the “be the hunter” message he has emphasized in recent weeks. “[We need to] flip it.”

The Dodgers still will need much to go right to wind up where they finished last year, when they celebrated the city’s first World Series parade since 1988 (the Dodgers’ 2020 title came during COVID and there was no parade).

In the starting rotation, Yamamoto and Glasnow are trying to avoid the injury problems that derailed their seasons last year. Ohtani, Dustin May and Tony Gonsolin are attempting to return to pitching after missing all of last year recovering from elbow surgeries. Sasaki might be the biggest wild card, possessing frontline-caliber stuff but little experience as he embarks on his MLB transition. And even Snell is searching for a bounce-back campaign, trying to turn the dominance he displayed during the second half of last year (when he lowered his earned-run average from 9.51 to 3.12 over the final three months) into a full campaign of Cy Young-caliber production.

Read more:Hernández: Shohei Ohtani's Tokyo Series home run is the culmination of the 'Week of Ohtani'

The lineup faces its own questions, especially after Betts (who is transitioning back to shortstop on a full-time basis) and Freeman (who continues to battle the lingering effects of the ankle and rib injuries he played through last October) missed the team’s Tokyo games to begin the season.

“We didn’t win last year because we were talking about the World Series every day,” Betts said. “We won last year because we talked about the task at hand. I think we have to continue to talk about the task at hand and not worry about the end goal. We have an end goal, of course, but you have to take steppingstones to get there.”

The luxury for this year’s team is if things do go wrong, if players get hurt or fall short of personal expectations, the club’s sheer depth of talent should provide a sturdy safety net. The Dodgers should have the ability to endure unforeseen setbacks, clear unexpected hurdles and position themselves to cement their status as baseball’s next dynasty.

But for now, their focus is on the present, trying to turn a roster that looks almost flawless on paper into a dominant and unstoppable product on the field.

“I just think that we’re as good as anyone in baseball at putting the blinders on and getting better each day, with respect to expectations,” Roberts said. “Our guys do a really good job of doing that, which as a byproduct, guards against any type of letdown.”

Sign up for more Dodgers news with Dodgers Dugout. Delivered at the start of each series.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Phillies still bullish on the ‘pen but hoping for a better ending originally appeared on NBC Sports Philadelphia

CLEARWATER, Fla. — The Phillies had home-field going into the National League Division Series last October despite muddling through the second half of the regular season. The Mets were on a tear, scratching and clawing the final month just to claim the final wild-card berth.

Catcher J.T. Realmuto summed up what that meant the day before the festivities began. “I think it’s important for us to be able to come out and start well in this series and try to put an end to the momentum they’ve clearly gained,” he said. “They’re a really hot team.”

Zack Wheeler executed the plan to near-perfection in Game 1 the following afternoon before a frenzied sellout at Citizens Bank Park. He pitched seven shutout innings, allowing one hit and striking out nine. After throwing 111 pitches, He turned a 1-0 lead over to the bullpen that had been so dependable for so much of the season.

Oops.

Jeff Hoffman, Matt Strahm and Orion Kerkering combined to give up five runs on five hits and a walk. The Mets won and went on to easily dismiss the Phillies in four games.

Would it have altered the outcome of the series if the Phillies had held on to win Game 1? Maybe, maybe not. The lineup went AWOL as well. What can be said with certainty is that the bullpen saved its worst for last and the ghastly 11.37 ERA the relievers pitched to will live in the record books forever.

It also illustrates the importance of top-to-bottom relief depth in an era when starters prioritize max effort on every pitch and, as a result, rarely finish what they started.

Hoffman and Carlos Estevez have since departed as free agents. Jordan Romano and Joe Ross have been added. Strahm, Kerkering, Jose Alvarado, Tanner Banks and Jose Ruiz were penciled in before camp opened, leaving just one vacancy to be filled. It would be two if Strahm’s left shoulder impingement delays his start to the season.

While relievers are notoriously up and down from one season to the next, the Phillies like the group they’ve assembled going into the season opener at Washington on March 27. Given the inherent inconsistency of the role, though, like any team, they are counting on one or two from the group to take a step forward.

Dave Dombrowski nominated Kerkering.

“Even though he’s done well, I don’t think people realize how good a pitcher (2.29 ERA in 67 games last season) he’s been,” the president of baseball operations said while sitting in his BayCare Ballpark office this spring. “So I think he can definitely jump up and pitch late innings. He’s pitched more like the seventh inning, but he’s definitely a late-inning type of guy.”

Realmuto is impressed with the soon-to-turn-24 right-hander who has yet to earn his first big-league save.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that he’ll be a closer in this game for sure,” the All-Star catcher told The Phillies Show podcast. “He has that ‘it’ factor where when he steps on the mound. … He’s trying to execute and no moment really seems too big for him, so I definitely think he has that mentality.”

Said manager Rob Thomson: “There’s really two guys for me: Kerkering and Alvarado. One from the left and one from the right. They both have great stuff. And they have the capacity to throw strikes and command the baseball. If they do their thing, we’ve got a really, really good bullpen.”

Alvarado has been dominant at times but has also struggled with command. And that makes all the difference. Consider:

In 31 games from April 13 through July 3 last season, he had six walks in 29.1 innings while throwing 65 percent of his pitches for strikes. In those games, his ERA was 2.15 and he held batters to a .198 average.

In his next 18 games, he had more than twice as many walks (13) in about half the innings (16.1) and threw strikes 56 percent of the time. In those outings, his ERA was 7.16 and opposing batters hit .288.

The Phillies are also counting on Romano, who had a total of 72 saves for the Blue Jays in 2022-23 but is coming off elbow surgery that ended his season last May.

For most of the time Thomson has been the manager, he’s declined to designate a closer. This follows the sabermetric imperative that the ninth inning isn’t always the most critical late inning of a game. And that will be the case again this season, at least at the outset.

(He deviated last season after Estevez was acquired from Angels at the deadline, cognizant that the veteran was accustomed to being used in the ninth and closers frequently struggle when a save isn’t on the line. Similarly, when Craig Kimbrel was pitching well in 2022, he was largely confined to game-on-the-line situations.)

“We do not have a closer,” Thomson said. “Romano’s been a closer, but he was hurt last year. He could develop into the guy, but we’ve really got four or five guys where you could say, ‘Okay, you’ve got the ninth inning every night.’ And then you piece the other innings together according to what you’ve got and what you’re up against.

“But as of right now, I say we go by committee and do it by the pockets and by the innings.”

For the most part, that’s been a successful formula for the Phillies. And when it’s not, there isn’t much that can be done about it.

Said Dombrowski: “I don’t ever like to use the phrase, ‘That’s baseball.’ Things happen and I think ‘That’s baseball’ is a broken-bat blooper over your head. They just didn’t pitch well (in the NLDS). That was just really the way it was, for whatever reason. I was as surprised as anybody.”