MLB Playoffs 2017: Don’t be sold on the Los Angeles Dodgers yet
By Keith Rivas
While they’ve got home field through the NLCS now, the Los Angeles Dodgers are not a lock for the World Series.
What this really means for Los Angeles is that they are without even the slightest excuse not to perform well or even dominant their way through the post-season. In the Dodgers are serious about bringing home a World Series pennant, that’s starts and ends with how they play in the NLDS.
It’ll be against a wild card team that could give them some problems, especially if the Arizona Diamondbacks make it out of the wild card game alive. Arizona was at the heart of their late season fallout, dropping Los Angeles’ division lead to single digits at one point.
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LA has been here before, but that’s not necessarily a good thing either. We all know how Clayton Kershaw has been in the post-season more often than not, and unless these playoffs are an anomaly, we can expect that collapse to start at any point during the post-season.
This will be the Dodgers’ fifth consecutive trip to the post-season, and also the fifth straight time that they’ll enter the playoffs as winners of their division. However, there has been an uncomfortable trend in their previous playoff appearances that can’t be ignored.
While the World Series hasn’t been won by them since 1988, the Los Angeles Dodgers have had a rough go, to say the least, lately. Last year, it took a Clayton Kershaw save to get them past the Washington Nationals in the NLDS, only to blow a 2-1 NLCS lead to Chicago in the next round.
Prior to that, the Dodgers failed to get out of the NLCS in 2015 and 2014, with an NLCS loss to St. Louis coming in 2013. They have a losing record in the NLDS going back to 2013, with a 9-10 record in that round of the post-season.
What’s worse is that they have a losing record in the NLCS over that same span as well, standing just 4-8 in those games. Any happy Dodgers fan is obviously a little ecstatic over the fact that they’ve won 100+ games this year, but that doesn’t mean anything if they can’t perform when it matters.
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And unless numbers don’t speak for themselves this time around, we could be looking at the same old story for the fifth year in a row.