Game 7. Minute Maid Park. November 1, 2017.
You could hear it through the television broadcast—that suffocating silence in the visitor's clubhouse as the Houston Astros celebrated on the field. The Los Angeles Dodgers had just blown a 104-win season and their first World Series appearance in 29 years, losing in seven games to a team that, as the world would later learn, had been banging trash cans to decode signs all season long.
That moment perhaps served as the motivation for where the Dodgers find themselves today. After back-to-back World Series titles, Tinseltown's finest is the consensus pick with online betting sites to complete the first threepeat since the Yankees of the new millennium. The latest odds from the popular uptick outlet LuckyRebel make the reigning champs a +220 favorite to claim a third straight commissioner's trophy at the end of the year. With Kyle Tucker now added to the ranks in a blockbuster deal, it would certainly take a brave punter to bet against them.
But while the weight of that October 2017 failure pushed LA to what they have become today, their journey began well before they were gunned down by the notorious Astros.
Bankruptcy and Rebirth
Frank McCourt's almighty mismanagement of the Dodgers from 2004 to 2012 saw one of MLB's most storied franchises fall some $400 million in debt. While the team was busy filing for bankruptcy protection, Magic Johnson was on his way into Guggenheim Partners' offices, pitching Mark Walter on something audacious: spend a record-breaking amount—$2.15 billion—to buy baseball's most storied National League franchise and rescue it from humiliation.
The sale closed in March 2012. Magic brought Hollywood swagger and something the Dodgers hadn't seen in years—an ownership group willing to spend as the market demanded. But money alone doesn't build dynasties. Vision does.
Andrew Friedman arrived from Tampa Bay in October 2014 on a five-year, $35 million deal that made him the highest-paid front office executive in baseball. He'd built winners in Tampa with pocket change. Now he had unlimited resources. The approach? Blend sabermetrics with checkbook diplomacy. Expand the front office. Rebuild the farm system. Win the organizational infrastructure war before the first pitch is thrown.
The Weight of Perfection
From 2011 to 2014, Clayton Kershaw won three Cy Young Awards. That 2014 season still doesn't seem real—21-3 with a 1.77 ERA in just 198.1 innings. His slider evolved from an 81 mph transitional pitch into a 90 mph weapon that batters whiffed on more than a quarter of the time between 2014 and 2017.
But October remained cruel. The narratives piled up: best regular-season pitcher of his generation who couldn't deliver when it mattered. Never mind the small sample sizes or bad luck. Baseball doesn't care about context when you're losing elimination games.
In 2013, Yasiel Puig burst onto the scene like nothing Los Angeles had ever seen. He went 2-for-4 in his June debut against San Diego, then obliterated the Giants the next night with two home runs and five RBIs. Puigmania was real—reckless baserunning, cannon arm, electric bat. He gave the post-bankruptcy Dodgers their first true jolt of must-watch energy.
They were building something. It just kept breaking in October.
104 Wins and a Stolen Title
The 2017 squad won 104 games behind franchise-record 221 home runs and league-leading pitching. Cody Bellinger mashed 39 bombs as a rookie. Corey Seager anchored shortstop. Kershaw posted a 2.31 ERA. They steamrolled through the NLDS and NLCS, setting up that World Series clash with Houston.
Game 7 went to extras. The Astros won 5-1. Months turned into years. In 2019, the athletic world learned what many suspected—Houston had used a center-field camera to decode signs, banging trash cans in the dugout tunnel to alert hitters to off-speed pitches during the 2017 postseason. The Dodgers had been robbed. No banners came down. No championship was reassigned. Just an asterisk that burns to this day.
The 2018 team returned to the World Series. Boston demolished them in five games. Two straight Fall Classic losses. The questions intensified: could this core actually win?
The Asterisk They Earned
Global events shattered the 2020 season into 60 games played in empty stadiums. The Dodgers went 43-17—a .717 winning percentage that extrapolated to 116 wins over a full season. They were healthy. They were dominant. And immediately, the asterisk debate started before they'd even won anything.
"To say there's an asterisk on it or things like that, I don't think is fair," Kershaw said that July. "I think there needs to be a whole different category for what this season is. But at the end of the day, I think if you win this season, it's going to feel pretty good no matter what."
They beat San Diego. Survived a seven-game NLCS against Atlanta thanks to Bellinger's seventh-inning homer in the clincher. Then faced Tampa Bay in Arlington—neutral site, no fans, everything weird. Game 4 nearly broke them. Up 7-6 in the ninth, one strike from a commanding 3-1 series lead, Brett Phillips singled. Chaos. Two errors. Rays walk it off. The kind of gut-punch that ends seasons.
Except it didn't. In Game 6, manager Kevin Cash pulled Blake Snell while he was cruising. Corey Seager—already locked in as NLCS MVP—singled home Mookie Betts for the go-ahead run. Julio Urías closed it with 2.1 hitless innings. Thirty-two years of hurt ended. Champions at long last. A dynasty that would span the next five years (and counting) was born.
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