In early August, there was no fanfare as the Los Angeles Dodgers claimed their 70th win of the season. They held a double-digit lead in the National League West and had outscored their opponents by hundreds of runs. It was part of a 12-game winning streak in a 111-win season, the most in the NL since 1909.
For Dodgers baseball president Andrew Friedman, 70 wins was once a milestone. At least for his team, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who had never reached this mark in their young history. It was 2004, Friedman’s first season in baseball, and he didn’t need a financial background to calculate that 70-91 was a terrible record.
“They won 70 games and then toasted with champagne,” Friedman said. “And I remember thinking, ‘This is really nothing to celebrate. We aim higher than that.”
Soon, the renamed Rays would do more than just meet Friedman’s original goal of playing meaningful games in September. They drove all the way to the World Series in 2008, setting a new standard for efficiency and innovation and making Friedman a star.
When the Dodgers hired him after the 2014 season, Friedman had a jewelry franchise in a big market to mold him to his liking. The result is an annual masterpiece, with Tuesday’s latest edition hosting the San Diego Padres in the opening game of a National League divisional series.
“It’s actually pretty amazing,” said first baseman Freddie Freeman, who starred in his freshman year as the Dodger. “When you take a step back and see the continued success – it’s so hard, especially in sport in general, to lead a ship that produces talent. But that’s exactly what they do.”
The Dodgers become the first team to win at least 106 games in three straight seasons. They recently completed the best 1,000-game streak of any team in the expansion era that began in 1969 with 636 wins. That year, they surpassed their opponents with 334 runs, the largest run differential for any team since the Yankees in 1939.
These Yankees, led by a young Joe DiMaggio, were perhaps the greatest team in baseball history. They advanced straight to the World Series – the playoffs were decades away – and won their fourth straight title.
And this is where the Dodgers’ legacy gets complicated. They’ve won the NL West in nine of the last 10 seasons, winning as a wild card 106-56 last year. Still, they’ve won just one World Series title in three appearances during that stint, against the Rays in 2020. Their mandate never changes.
“The Dodgers need to continue showing the world that they didn’t just get that one ring,” said Pedro Martinez, Hall of Fame pitcher and postseason analyst for TBS. “You are too good. You are too deep. They have invested a lot to make this franchise the kind of franchise they are.”
Friedman, 45, grew up in Houston and rooted for the Astros. He still mourns a painful loss to the Mets in the 1986 NL Championship Series, when the Astros’ 16-inning home loss robbed their ace of a chance to win the pennant.
“Little Andrew was down 6 in that crazy extra-inning game,” he said. “Mike Scott was ready to pitch Game 7.”
It was an early lesson in the fickle nature of baseball’s postseason, which now spans six teams and four rounds per league, though the Dodgers got a bye from the new wildcard series. In seven postseasons under Friedman, the Dodgers have gone 46-36 postseason – impressive enough considering the competition, but little championship bling.
“I try to break that down as much as possible,” Friedman said. “We have one goal for the regular season, which is to win the division, which puts us in a better position to achieve our ultimate goal. But I don’t subscribe to the theory that every year there are 29 failures and only one success.”
It’s important, Friedman added, “to appreciate the art of doing whatever it takes to be as successful as possible this current year, but keeping yourself in the best possible position to be able to hold it.” We’ve seen a lot of high-revenue teams go on the road to success and fall off a cliff.”
The Mets eliminated the Dodgers in 2015 but have not won a division title since. The Chicago Cubs defeated the Dodgers in 2016 but are now stuck in a rebuild. The Boston Red Sox beat the Dodgers in the 2018 World Series but have finished bottom in two of the past three seasons. (Not to mention the suffering of the neighboring angels.)
The team closest to the Dodgers’ consistency at a high level has only one title themselves: the Astros, who defeated the Dodgers in the World Series in 2017, the year of their electronic sign-stealing scheme.
Friedman could have made more win-now trades early in his tenure, but the mission at the time was to deepen the farm system while holding on to top prospects like Julio Urías, Cody Bellinger, and Corey Seager. As of 2017, top-flight talent regularly went on sale: Yu Darvish, Manny Machado, Mookie Betts, Max Scherzer, Trea Turner.
“Over the past five years, we’ve been as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than any other team in baseball when it comes to selling young talent, and we’ve obviously stuck with some key players,” Friedman said. “I cannot praise our amateur and pro scouting departments as well as our player development group enough for being able to trade as many young players as possible and still having our farm system in as strong a position as it is – especially with the current system, which is designed to make this next to impossible.”
In Friedman’s first two drafts, the Dodgers found two everyday players (catcher Will Smith and second baseman Gavin Lux) and a two-time All-Star starter (Walker Buehler) while picking no higher than 20th place. They’ve unlocked the potential of previously marginal players – Max Muncy, Chris Taylor – and more recently assists who have struggled elsewhere like Yency Almonte and Evan Phillips.
The Rays did this repeatedly under Friedman, which helped them struggle despite a low payroll. They were among the pioneers of a philosophy that seems obvious today: tailoring instruction to target a player’s specific strengths.
“It’s far more challenging than just having a blanket statement, ‘Everyone will do X, and you will never do Y,'” said Brandon Gomes, who works under Friedman as the Dodgers’ general manager and has promoted the Rays.
“I got drafted from San Diego and I enjoyed my time there, but it was a lot more like ‘hey, that’s how we see pitching’ or ‘that’s how we see batting.’ And look, it works for a lot of people, but there’s just some people it doesn’t work for. So now there is a higher return for drafted players who get into the big leagues.”
Creating better prospects has obvious benefits: more salary space for Superstars and more inventory for trades. And when an opposing team misjudges their own talent and wants to trade your prospects for overrated veterans, let them do it.
In December 2018, the Dodgers sent two famous but flawed hitters – Matt Kemp and Yasiel Puig – and two other players to the Cincinnati Reds. The Dodgers took over the contract from pitcher Homer Bailey, who was promptly fired but still saved enough money to reset her luxury tax rate. They also got two prospects – Jeter Downs and Josiah Gray – who helped them jumpstart their success.
Friedman used Downs for Betts in the deal with Boston. He brought Gray into the deal with Washington for Scherzer and Turner. While Scherzer went to the Mets on free agency last offseason, Turner has helped out for two playoff runs — and Betts signed a 12-year, $365 million contract extension ahead of his first game with the Dodgers.
“I’ve talked to these guys a lot about the future: ‘Okay, are we going to keep investing resources to win?'” Betts said. “Obviously they won so many times before I came here so it was obvious they would continue to do so. But it was just to make sure. Once I realized they wanted to keep winning, it was pretty easy.”
The Dodgers’ resources — baseball’s polite slang for money — were staggering: a payroll of about $248 million in 2021 and $281 million in 2022, both the highest in the majors. However, those riches led to an infamous hype: a three-year, $102 million contract in 2021 for pitcher Trevor Bauer.
The Mets also tried to sign Bauer, who the Dodgers didn’t really need; They came off a championship and already had a deep baton. Bauer made 17 starts last season and is now serving a two-year unpaid suspension for violating baseball’s domestic violence policy. Friedman declined to comment on Bauer, citing Bauer’s unresolved appeal.
Last offseason, the Dodgers made a safer, high-end investment: Freeman, who was handed a six-year, $162 million deal to leave Atlanta, where he had deep roots as a franchise cornerstone. From the start, Freeman said, the Dodgers empathized with him and didn’t try to rush his move. His tearful press conference in Atlanta when the Dodgers played there in June was a turning point.
“I called Andrew and said, ‘I’m sorry it took three months,'” Freeman said. “And he said, ‘Excuse me? I didn’t think you would do it for a year to get that degree.’ That’s how wonderful they are. You knew what I was going through. You let me go through my feelings. And I think that’s why I played so well because they’ve been great with me and my family to acclimate us.”
Paying Freeman – who ended up leading the NL in hits, runs, doubles and on-base percentage – was the easy part. The trick was to build an infrastructure in which Freeman and so many others could thrive. That’s why the Dodgers have the best chance of toasting to well over 70 wins this November.
Scott Miller contributed reporting.