Los Angeles Dodgers: The torture of supporting the Dodgers

The 2017 National League Champions are not living up to the high expectations and are adding to the tortures of being a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

If you’re reading this and remember watching the Los Angeles Dodgers won 104 games and a National League pennant in 2017, you probably think I’ve experienced a head injury of some sort.

Hear me out — in spite of the long and storied history that the Los Angeles Dodgers carry, when it is all said and done, it can be torturesome being a Dodger fan.

No, we don’t have fun little stories. There’s no Babe, Billy Penn or goat in the Dodgers heartbreak story.  Although in the thirty years since Kirk Gibson and Orel Hershiser literally took down baseball’s titans, the team’s on-field performance can be a Greek tragedy at times.

2018 is not like 2017

Take this season; for instance, the Dodgers, with the same talent from their spectacular 2017 season, struggled out of the gate. Once they turned it around they became the walking wounded.

Give me another season where a team lost their best hitters (Corey Seager and Justin Turner), their ace (Clayton Kershaw), and their closer (Kenley Jansen) long-term due to injury.

That is some sort of injury trifecta than no team can survive. Thanks to the shrewd Dodgers front office, somehow the Dodgers have survived. But in the mind of a tortured fan, how can anything go right when so much has gone wrong?

Maybe it’s the curse of 1988

"In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!"

The words of the great Vin Scully summarized the 1988 season for the Los Angeles Dodgers. The year where they battled improbability time and time again and then with the heroics of Gibson and Hershiser in the World Series, pulled off the improbable.

In the 30 years since then, it seems any “Dodger magic” has vanished. Consider since Gibson’s walk-off home run in the 1988 World Series the Dodgers have only two walk-off hits in the postseason.

That’s two hits to win the game in their last at-bat over 30 years, as random as that stat may be, consider the Florida/Miami Marlins.

The Marlins have five walk-off hits in the same amount of time but have only made the playoffs twice. To make it worse, no Dodger pitcher has matched the postseason heroics of Hershiser.

Cruelly, Kershaw, the greatest pitcher on the planet, may be known more for his postseason failures than his pitching prowess.

What Now?

The season isn’t over yet. With Kenley Jansen out until September and the bullpen being a tire fire it sure feels like it. Perhaps the Dodgers will find a spark and over come it on their push to a sixth straight post-season appearance.

No doubt Dodger fans will keep watching, that’s what you do when you’re a tortured fan you continue to watch expecting that one day maybe the magic will come back.