Dodgers stay hungry, say ’25 ‘a unique challenge’
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Alden Gonzalez
GLENDALE, Ariz. — Five years ago, Mookie Betts stood in the middle of a clubhouse here and introduced himself to new Los Angeles Dodgers teammates by basically telling them they needed to master the details in February if they wanted to hoist the trophy in October.
On Tuesday, at the unofficial start of a season in which the Dodgers will face immense expectations, Betts relayed a similar message.
“We can’t keep thinking about being champions again,” Betts said on the day many of the Dodgers’ players underwent their preseason physical exams. “We haven’t even played Game 1. We have to take care of spring training, and then when Game 1 comes, then Game 1 comes. But we can’t keep talking about the World Series.”
It wasn’t long ago that the Dodgers resembled something like a Greek tragedy — continually fielding star-studded rosters and dominating regular seasons, only to absorb massive disappointment in the playoffs. That all changed last fall, when one of the Dodgers’ most injury-ravaged rosters overcame the deep San Diego Padres, dispatched the plucky New York Mets and made quick work of the sloppy New York Yankees to capture the franchise’s first title since 2020 — and its first in a full season since 1988.
The Dodgers followed by doubling down on what was already one of the most decorated rosters in baseball history, guaranteeing close to $400 million to nine players: Blake Snell, Tanner Scott, Teoscar Hernandez, Michael Conforto, Kirby Yates, Hyeseong Kim, Roki Sasaki, Enrique Hernandez and Clayton Kershaw, the latter expected to be official by Wednesday.
The Dodgers’ competitive balance tax payroll for 2025 projects to be in the neighborhood of $385 million, according to Spotrac, about $65 million more than the second-place Mets. Through it all, they’ve become the target of complaints about the state of the sport. Owners have held up the Dodgers’ financial capabilities in their push for a salary cap. Fans have bemoaned their use of deferrals — most notably with Shohei Ohtani, who earmarked $680 million for his retirement — to get deals done. Executives have chastised the Sasaki recruitment process, believing his signing with the Dodgers to be an inevitability.
“People are always going to find something to complain about,” Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy said. “We’re just trying to take care of our business and put ourselves in a good spot to make the postseason.”
Major League Baseball has not had a repeat champion since the Yankees won their third in a row in 2000, but the Dodgers have a good chance. Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA, which runs thousands of simulations to project win totals for the upcoming season, has the Dodgers at 104 victories in 2025, at least 11 more than any other team.
The reasons are obvious. The Dodgers’ rotation — featuring Snell, Sasaki, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and, eventually, Ohtani and Kershaw — is among the best in the sport at full strength. Their lineup — with Ohtani, Betts, Freddie Freeman, Teoscar Hernandez, Muncy, Will Smith, Conforto and Tommy Edman making up eight spots, possibly in that order — is one of the fiercest in history. And their bullpen, already a strength, has added Scott and Yates to a group featuring Michael Kopech, Blake Treinen, Evan Phillips and Alex Vesia, among others. If dynasties are still possible in an unpredictable sport with an ever-expanding postseason field, the Dodgers seem primed to become one. But it’s not something their players want to publicly embrace.
Their own playoff failures have taught them that.
“The thing about this sport is, it doesn’t matter what kind of roster you have — time after time, teams have shown that you get into the playoffs, anything can happen,” Muncy said. “You look at the Diamondbacks a couple years ago, they made it to the World Series with [84] wins. And technically, they improved last year — they had 89 wins — and they didn’t even make the playoffs.
“It’s one of those things where, all you have to do is get into the postseason and anything can happen in this sport. You can have the best player in the world in this sport, and he can’t always take over like in other sports, where if you have the best player on the court in the NBA, he’s going to take over a game for the most part. It’s not so much that way in baseball. That’s why it’s always a unique challenge trying to get to the World Series.”
And so, Dodgers players spent a lot of their time Tuesday dismissing questions about dynasty-building and chasing the all-time regular-season wins record — 116, set by the 1906 Chicago Cubs and the 2001 Seattle Mariners — and instead talked about the importance of maintaining their edge.
The Dodgers won’t host their first full-squad workout until Saturday, but the majority of their infielders — minus Freeman, who is back in L.A. going through the final stages of rehabilitating his surgically repaired right ankle — have spent the better part of the past two weeks taking ground balls at Camelback Ranch. The same can be said for the majority of their pitchers, who have started their throwing programs early in anticipation of a regular season that will begin March 18 from Japan.
Muncy has taken that as a sign that this team is “hungrier than ever.”
“We didn’t win last year because we were talking about the World Series every day,” Betts said. “I think 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 and not worry about getting there. We’ll get there when we get there.”
NASCAR driver Katherine Legge said she has been receiving “hate mail” and “death threats” from auto racing fans after she was involved in a crash that collected veteran driver Kasey Kahne during the Xfinity Series race last weekend at Rockingham.
Legge, who has started four Indy 500s but is a relative novice in stock cars, added during Tuesday’s episode of her “Throttle Therapy” podcast that “the inappropriate social media comments I’ve received aren’t just disturbing, they are unacceptable.”
“Let me be very clear,” the British driver said, “I’m here to race and I’m here to compete, and I won’t tolerate any of these threats to my safety or to my dignity, whether that’s on track or off of it.”
Legge became the first woman in seven years to start a Cup Series race earlier this year at Phoenix. But her debut in NASCAR’s top series ended when Legge, who had already spun once, was involved in another spin and collected Daniel Suarez.
Her next start was the lower-level Xfinity race in Rockingham, North Carolina, last Saturday. Legge was good enough to make the field on speed but was bumped off the starting grid because of ownership points. Ultimately, she was able to take J.J. Yeley’s seat in the No. 53 car for Joey Gase Motorsports, which had to scramble at the last minute to prepare the car for her.
Legge was well off the pace as the leaders were lapping her, and when she entered Turn 1, William Sawalich got into the back of her car. That sent Legge spinning, and Kahne had nowhere to go, running into her along the bottom of the track.
“I gave [Sawalich] a lane and the reason the closing pace looks so high isn’t because I braked midcorner. I didn’t. I stayed on my line, stayed doing my speed, which obviously isn’t the speed of the leaders because they’re passing me,” Legge said. “He charged in a bit too hard, which is the speed difference you see. He understeered up a lane and into me, which spun me around.”
The 44-year-old Legge has experience in a variety of cars across numerous series. She made seven IndyCar starts for Dale Coyne Racing last year, and she has raced for several teams over more than a decade in the IMSA SportsCar series.
She has dabbled in NASCAR in the past, too, starting four Xfinity races during the 2018 season and another two years ago.
“I have earned my seat on that race track,” Legge said. “I’ve worked just as hard as any of the other drivers out there, and I’ve been racing professionally for the last 20 years. I’m 100 percent sure that … the teams that employed me — without me bringing any sponsorship money for the majority of those 20 years — did not do so as a DEI hire, or a gimmick, or anything else. It’s because I can drive a race car.”
Legge believes the vitriol she has received on social media is indicative of a larger issue with women in motorsports.
“Luckily,” she said, “I have been in tougher battles than you guys in the comment sections.”
Legge has received plenty of support from those in the racing community. IndyCar driver Marco Andretti clapped back at one critic on social media who called Legge “unproven” in response to a post about her history at the Indy 500.
“It’s wild to me how many grown men talk badly about badass girls like this,” Andretti wrote on X. “Does it make them feel more manly from the couch or something?”
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