Why the Dodgers Won't Win the 2025 World Series (and Your Team Will)
The 2025 MLB season is about to begin on Thursday. And according to the general consensus of the moment, it is the Los Angeles Dodgers' year and nobody else's.
The Dodgers are the defending World Series champions and already off to a 2-0 start. Expectations for how many games they'll win run into triple-digit territory. The exact figure of "117" has been mentioned at ESPN and MLB.com. Bah gawd, that's the 2001 Seattle Mariners' music.
And yet we propose: Eh, these Dodgers aren't all that.
The Dodgers Are Obviously World Series Favorites. So What?
This is not to imply the 2025 Dodgers won't be good. That they will be is so obvious that one struggles to cut their odds of repeating as champs down to size.
According to DraftKings, they're a +290 favorite to win it all, all over again. FanGraphs, meanwhile, gives them a 22.9 percent chance of doing so. Both numbers place them leaps and bounds ahead of MLB's 29 other teams.
Look, we all see the talent. In Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, there's a trio of MVPs atop the lineup. Ohtani will also be returning to the mound this season, and what L.A. has there is the single most talented collection of arms in the sport.
The Dodgers are going to have a target on their back in 2025, but that's not anything they don't already know.
"Flip it, and be the hunter instead of the hunted," manager Dave Roberts said, via Sonja Chen of MLB.com. "I think when you're the Dodgers, there's always a target. You can't run from it."
Yet as counterintuitive as it may sound, to say the Dodgers won't win the 2025 World Series is just playing the odds.
There hasn't been a repeat champion in MLB since the 1998-2000 New York Yankees. And since 1995, the team with the best record for the regular season—i.e., the thing the Dodgers are ostensibly a shoo-in for—is only 8-for-30 in winning the World Series.
That's how much MLB's wild-card era has leveled the playing field, and things got especially wonky with the introduction of the 12-team playoff field in 2022. Yes, the Dodgers did parlay the best regular-season record of 2024 into a title. But prior to that, the 2023 World Series featured the team with the eighth-best record against the 12th-best record from the regular season.
The argument here boils down to "anything could happen," which is admittedly weak sauce on its own. So, let's spice it up by considering teams that could actually take the Dodgers down.
Threat Assessment: American League
The entire American League is going through some stuff right now, with not one team ranking higher than No. 7 in our Opening Day Power Rankings.
According to FanGraphs, though, only the Chicago White Sox have a 0.0 percent chance of winning the World Series.
The AL West has two recent champs in the Houston Astros (2022) and Texas Rangers (2023), and both are still contenders going into 2025. The Astros are diminished, sure, but the current iteration of the Rangers is like if someone took the 2023 team and stapled Wyatt Langford and a healthy Jacob deGrom onto it.
Otherwise, sleep on the Seattle Mariners at your peril. Their pitching co-led the league in ERA last season, and Julio Rodríguez and friends were last seen leading the AL in scoring after Scott Servais got the boot in August.
The AL Central is supposedly the soft underbelly of the Junior Circuit, yet the Cleveland Guardians, Detroit Tigers and Kansas City Royals all won a playoff series in 2024. The Tigers have baseball's best pitcher (Tarik Skubal), while the Guardians (José Ramírez) and Royals (Bobby Witt Jr.) employ MLB's best third baseman and shortstop, respectively.
In the AL East, the Yankees still have the best odds of reaching the World Series of any AL team despite how banged-up they are. It'll be a revenge tour if they get there and it's the Dodgers in the other dugout, and particularly for Aaron Judge.
For their parts, the Baltimore Orioles project to have the best offense in MLB and the Boston Red Sox are a team to buy stock in now. If you like them with Alex Bregman and Garrett Crochet, you'll love them if Roman Anthony, Kristian Campbell and Marcelo Mayer live up to the hype.
The Minnesota Twins, Tampa Bay Rays and Toronto Blue Jays are at least worth mentioning as would-be contenders. But if one had to subjectively rank the AL's top five threats to the Dodgers, it would go like this:
- Red Sox
- Mariners
- Yankees
- Rangers
- Orioles
Threat Assessment: National League
Part of the reason the Dodgers "only" won 98 games in 2024 is because they had the misfortune of sharing the NL West with two contenders that each gave the Boys in Blue some bruises.
The Arizona Diamondbacks went 6-7 against Los Angeles en route to an 89-win season, while the San Diego Padres won eight out of 13 in winning 93 games. Both are still contenders now, though Arizona's acquisition of Corbin Burnes and Josh Naylor has it positioned to be a greater threat.
The San Francisco Giants are there, too, and hoping to ascend from merely competitive to actually good. No team with Bob Melvin at the helm should ever be underestimated, and the rotation trio of Logan Webb, Justin Verlander and Robbie Ray looks better the longer you gaze at it.
The NL Central is no stronger than the AL Central, but the Chicago Cubs now have a superstar (Kyle Tucker) to help make their outstanding run prevention machine count.
And speaking of superstars, the National League may not be ready for Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Jackson Chourio to break all the way out in 2025.
The Cincinnati Reds are "there, too" in the same way the Giants are in the NL West. Their roster is not without its flaws, but we could see just how much a future Hall of Fame manager (Terry Francona), a proper superstar shortstop (Elly De La Cruz) and a budding ace (Hunter Greene) can lift them.
Which brings us to the NL East, home of not one, not two, but three aspirational juggernauts: the New York Mets, Atlanta Braves and Philadelphia Phillies.
Taking a cue from the Dodgers, the Mets dropped $765 million on Juan Soto as part of $1 billion offseason. Their offensive quartet of Soto, Francisco Lindor, Pete Alonso and Mark Vientos is among the best in the league. Their pitching is more suspect, but that was also the case last year until pitching coach Jeremy Hefner abracadabra'd the staff into a cohesive unit.
For the Braves, the hope is they'll get more than the 0.0 WAR they got from Ronald Acuña Jr. and Spencer Strider in 2024, thus allowing for a return to the promised land of 100 wins.
The Phillies are the one team whose pitching projects nearly as well as that of the Dodgers, and their lineup trio of Bryce Harper, Trea Turner and Kyle Schwarber almost feels underrated at this point.
Once again, if one had to rank the NL's top five threats to the Dodgers, it would go something like this:
- Braves
- Phillies
- Diamondbacks
- Mets
- Cubs
As a Final Warning, Things Could Actually Go Wrong for the Dodgers
We talked earlier about how hard it is to make the case that the Dodgers won't have a good year. Yet even if it's an eyeroll-worthy distinction, that is not the same as saying nothing could go wrong.
They've already had a fright with Betts, who has lost a significant amount of weight (i.e., 18 pounds) as a result of a mysterious illness. It is unequivocally good news that he's feeling better, but that's a scary amount of weight for a player to drop at any point, much less on the eve of a 162-game season.
Otherwise, the injury trouble the Dodgers experienced on the mound in 2024 is hardly irrelevant history. Every starter in their extensive inventory has some kind of red flag, including newcomer Roki Sasaki.
There's also the dreaded World Series hangover, of course. It's an abstract malady, never affecting reigning champs in quite the same way from year to year. And yet, it has been a mainstay for the last 24 years.
If all this comes across as a take doomed to age poorly, well, that's fair. But for what it's worth, it's not meant to be a guarantee.
It's more like a plea. A request, as it were, to ignore how much it feels like the Dodgers own Major League Baseball and to recognize that, come Thursday, they're no better than any other team until they prove otherwise.
In other words, don't let them have all your hope.
Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.