It's interesting to contemplate what the coming baseball offseason would have looked like if Jeff Hoffman hadn't surrendered a home run to Miguel Rojas in the ninth inning of Game 7 of last year's World Series.
Or, for that matter, if Addison Barger's Game 6 rocket to left field in the bottom of the ninth inning - when the Toronto Blue Jays were rallying against the Los Angeles Dodgers with a chance to win the championship - hadn't gotten stuck under the base of the Rogers Centre wall upon impact. Or if Barger hadn't been doubled off on a line drive later in the same inning.
You see where I'm going here.
If four or five things hadn't broken the Dodgers' way in that crazy finale last year, mighty Los Angeles - in the middle of a 14-season playoff streak in which the franchise is said to have broken the sport - would have won just two World Series titles during that streak, one of them in the COVID mini-season.
Not even an early four-run lead in Game 4 of the NLCS on Thursday night could prevent the Dodgers from getting comprehensively swept out of the postseason by Milwaukee. The Brewers scored six runs of their own and didn't allow any after the second inning.
That result dispels the feeling of inevitability that has pervaded the sport since the Dodgers followed their second consecutive World Series win by landing yet another monster free-agent signing in Kyle Tucker. That feeling was only strengthened when they added yet another all-world ace to their pitching staff by trading for Tarik Skubal.
But they ended up exiting the playoffs rather quietly. It turns out the Los Angeles Dodgers haven't broken baseball. (Yet.)
Probably nothing that happened in the NLCS, or might have happened in the World Series had the Dodgers made it there, was going to change the trajectory of the coming MLB offseason.
Even though three of the final four teams are the small-market Brewers, Cleveland Guardians, and Tampa Bay Rays, baseball's owners anticipate a work stoppage this winter because they want a salary cap. They've wanted a salary cap for ages and have been tilling the soil for months, running a PR campaign about the need for competitive balance.
But the Dodgers have never really been proof of an imbalance. Two things can be true at the same time. Yes, Los Angeles has blown past the constraints of MLB's luxury-tax system by signing star players to massive deals and then deferring much of their salaries, pushing it off present-day payrolls. Even with more than a billion dollars in deferred salaries on their future books, they have a luxury-tax bill of about $183 million this year, which is almost twice as much as the closest team, the New York Yankees. The Dodgers pay more in tax penalties than 12 teams pay in actual salary to baseball players. The Brewers, Guardians, and Rays are among those teams.
And it's also true that all of the Dodgers' spending has so far only really guaranteed them a ticket to the postseason dance. As we have seen time and again, that's where things get crazy. MLB's repeated playoff expansions have made the postseason wildly volatile, and any 162-game juggernaut can be derailed in a short series.
It started to look as though the Dodgers had gamed the system last year. They treated much of the season like extended spring training, kept their hilariously stacked collection of starting pitchers working part time, and then stormed into the postseason like a fully operational Death Star.
They cruised through three rounds, winning nine and losing just once - but then the Blue Jays pushed them to the very brink of failure in the World Series. Even that loaded Dodgers team couldn't smooth out the inherent unpredictability of the baseball playoffs.
And this year, the Dodgers couldn't survive that unpredictability.
The Brewers won 103 games this regular season, so the result of the NLCS doesn't really qualify as an upset, and yet the way they handled the Dodgers so easily was surprising. For example: Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the cheat code that allowed L.A. to eke past the Jays last year by closing Game 7 after starting Game 6, was chased early in his lone start against Milwaukee. At this time last year, that seemed, frankly, impossible.
The Dodgers are inevitable, yes, but only in the regular season. With 12 teams involved in baseball's random playoff outcome generator, there's still a good chance Los Angeles will get tripped up along the way.
Is that enough to make MLB owners think twice about a work stoppage? Probably not. But it's worth keeping in mind when the lockout arrives.
Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.
