Sports is a diversion and this year with the exhausting presidential political season, boy, do we all need a diversion.

I was born in the same year when the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958.  Maybe that connection is why they have always been my favorite sports team.

This week, the Dodgers won their 8^th World Series championship against the New York Yankees in five games.

I was too young to appreciate the marvels of the 1959, 1963 and 1965 teams, but I vividly recall the 1981, 1988 and 2020 teams.

This year’s edition may be the most inspiring.   After suffering the most pitching injuries of any other team and losing all-stars Mookie Betts and Max Muncy for months, the Dodgers still managed to have the best record in baseball.  Yet when the playoffs began, they were not expected to win the World Series; they were perceived as the underdogs.

The fact that unlike recent years they had to play meaningful baseball up until the final days of the season to secure a division title kept them on their toes.  There was no time to let up on the gas pedal with the San Diego Padres breathing down their necks (end of the cliches).

At the start of the season, the Dodgers were this year’s overdogs.  With over $1 billion of new contracts last winter, the bulk of that owed to Shohei Ohtani, perhaps the greatest baseball player of all time due to his high achievement as both a batter and a pitcher, the Dodgers were expected to win the World Series before the very first “play ball.”

However, their five-man starting pitching rotation in March was decimated come September.  Only Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the second huge acquisition after Ohtani’s, survived the 162-game season though he missed half of it due to injury; the remaining four starters were lost to season-ending injuries. 

At the mid-summer trade deadline, they signed right-hander Jack Flaherty.  Former ace Walker Buehler took two years to recover from his second Tommy John surgery and pitched poorly throughout this season.  No one gave him a chance of making it onto the postseason roster, but the Dodgers had no one else.

This gave them only three starting pitchers going into the playoffs whereas all the other teams had at least four.  What got them through the injuries was their bullpen, the highest performing of any other team.  

The role of relief pitchers has increased significantly.  In 2024, pitchers threw 26 complete games, an all-time low.  Back in 1975, Oakland A’s pitcher Catfish Hunter threw 30 complete games on his own.  Nowadays, if a pitcher completes six out of the nine innings and allows three or less runs, it is labeled a “quality start.” 

For the Dodgers, their starters barely reached five innings over the course of the season meaning the relief pitchers pitched nearly half of the total innings played.  And that trend increased during the playoffs.  In fact, due to the lack of a fourth starter, they scheduled bullpen games where up to eight pitchers were used to complete one game.   That should not be sustainable, but somehow the Dodgers rode that strategy all the way to a championship.  The Most Valuable Player award should have gone to the entire bullpen.

As the Dodgers ascended each step on their climb up to the title—winning the division, beating the Padres in the division series and the New York Mets in the championship series—their clubhouse celebrations were revelatory.  Their raw comments to reporters unmasked a gutsiness and a love for one another, an intense bonding not seen in recent memory.  Chemistry alone can’t count for success, but matched with each athlete playing for each other, lifting their teammates to another level, it made them unbeatable.

One refreshing aspect to the Dodgers’ championship is that for a change the team with the best regular season in baseball won it all.  In the past 29 seasons, the team with the best record won the World Series only eight times.

Up until 1968, baseball had two leagues:  American and National.  The first-place team in each league faced off in the World Series.

From 1969-1993, a second playoff round was added by dividing each league into two divisions, west and east, which doubled the number of teams eligible for the postseason.

From 1994-2011, a third round (division series) was added by rearranging some teams into a third central division and adding a wild card team from each league resulting in eight teams making it to the postseason.  No longer did a team have to win four postseason games; now it’s 11.

Today, more wild cards teams have been added with 12 out of the 30 teams go into the postseason.  That is why in one respect this year’s Dodgers may very well be the best team they have ever had.  And that’s why if you are a Dodger fan, you should still be grinning.  And if you a sports fan, you should feel validated that once in a while, a sports team that is the best during the regular season does win the trophy.

Seeing these high paid athletes get choked up over a game with a small ball and a long bat, their emotions catching in their throats, underscores that money isn’t everything.  Sports reminds us that joy can be found in myriad ways.  It’s up to each person to go find it.

The Dodgers’ championship is my antidote to whoever wins the election.