Dodgers Digest Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Blog
It can be difficult to think clearly in the immediate aftermath of anything disappointing, including the 2026 Dodgers season ending with them crashing out spectacularly in the NLCS, and thus it’s a prime opportunity to start believing the worst is yet to come. I get it, in some ways that was how I thought before 2020 and even 2024 in a way, never having experienced them winning a World Series and subsequently not having a parade with proper celebrations.
As is tradition, there’s wild speculation about the Dodgers needing to make sweeping changes, dramatic articles about a dynasty being dead, and fans acting like all the players left are terrible now. But if you take a step back and think for a minute, it’s all a bit much for the current situation, and so I’ll be taking the very brave stance that the 2027 Dodgers (and beyond) should be fine, actually.
And this isn’t about toxic positivity or any of that, it’s valid to have a funeral of sorts for the best days of this specific core of players, as the 2024 and 2025 back-to-back champs are unlikely to see the team run it back again like they did this year (as Miguel Rojas‘ retirement would attest). There will likely be a bunch of (important) turnover at the margins, but the guys that remain should still make them viable contenders as is.
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Yesterday, Dustin reset the 40-man roster, and the evidence that they will likely continue to thrill us into October is evident just by the list of players they currently stand to lose.
- LHP Kris Bubic
- RHP Brusdar Graterol
- UTIL Enrique Hernandez
- LHP Eric Lauer
- RHP Evan Phillips
- IF Miguel Rojas
- LHP Tarik Skubal
- RHP Blake Treinen
- LHP Alex Vesia
While we’ll have months to follow-up with harder analysis on trades, signings, and stats for the roster, I mostly wanted to address the impression people have of the Dodgers going into 2027, especially the notion that they only figure to get increasingly worse results.
For starters, it’s a team that won 100 games last year, more than they did in 2024 and 2025, and as seen above, they likely are losing relievers, utility guys, and Tarik Skubal. There are important players to the dynasty, clubhouse, and leadership in that group, but a veteran team with continuity should be able to adjust. Regardless, the point is that even if they do nothing else and just get a year older, it’s hard to see this sky-is-falling narrative play out given they stand to lose just one impact player, and even he joined as a rental at the deadline.
Additionally, the 2026 team won all those games and got to the final four teams despite Will Smith, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, and Edwin Diaz missing like 75% of the year, Shohei Ohtani being hurt for half the year, and Kyle Tucker having an almost impossibly terrible season before figuring it out in September. Any one of those breaking the other way could provide a big boost to the team in 2027 that moves the needle the other way. But I know, if you’re a doomer you’re thinking the bad breaks could all happen again since they’re injury-prone and older. Still, there’s also really no reason guys like Andy Pages, Josue De Paula, Roki Sasaki, Dalton Rushing, Emmet Sheehan, Justin Wrobleski, Edgardo Henriquez, Alex Freeland, and others couldn’t either improve as younger talents, make successful transitions to starting roles, or capably fill in the gaps for the team (or all three). And barely any of those mentioned even account for the remaining top-ranked farm system, some of whom would likely have been giving chances to start on lesser teams already.
Mostly, I just feel like lost in the constant narrative and discourse around the core players aging and the Dodgers having free agent deals that are coming back to bite them now is that the changing of the guard has already been happening, albeit a slow process that’s going a roster spot or two at a time. I understand there’s a certain melancholy to watching this specific era with the core winding down, and that’s worthy of grieving in some way, but I can’t be the only one who feels at least somewhat optimistic about this transitionary phase.
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But let’s say despite all that, you believe things do get worse anyway. Well, perhaps most relevant rebuttal of all to the dooming is that the sport in question is baseball. It’s a sport where a best-of-75 playoff series would be needed for the better team on paper to win 80% of the time, and it’s why the Dodgers being overwhelming favorites this year still meant they had a 70% chance to lose. So even granting the assumption that their days of being overwhelming favorites are behind them, the same reason they were likely to lose this year also applies to whatever other team is ahead of them moving forward. Realistically, as long as they can hover above 90 wins their window for contention is still about as wide open as it has been and will continue to be, and it’s a mark the Dodgers have yet to fall short of under Andrew Friedman.
And on that note, while the point of this exercise was to show that even literally running back this same team a year older would still see their window propped open, there’s also little reason to not have faith that the front office won’t use the off-season to try and improve given that they attempted to do so both years after they actually won the whole thing. In my heart, I’m a “plan for the worst-case scenario” sort of guy, so I understand the fan anxiety and that this is a time for negativity to thrive and fester, but I honestly just don’t see the need for it if you take a breath and take in the big picture of the way the Dodgers are setup.
