Dodgers go for World Series trilogy: 5 reasons they'll pull it off and 5 reasons they won't

· Yahoo Sports

For the foreseeable future, the Los Angeles Dodgers will be the talk of baseball.

They enter the 2026 season as the two-time defending champions and are going for the fifth World Series three-peat in the history of the sport. They have the largest payroll in MLB, headlined by the most famous player in baseball in Shohei Ohtani. They are the most successful team in MLB over the past decade and could very well be even better for the next decade.

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Every Dodgers series will be under scrutiny in both the U.S. and in Japan. With a record $397 million payroll, excellence should be expected. But it’s not guaranteed.

The Dodgers are a Death Star, which quite famously have exhaust ports. Here’s a breakdown of everything they have going for them — and why it could all fall apart in 2026.

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This was true last year, but it bears repeating. A group of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Shohei Ohtani, Tyler Glasnow and Roki Sasaki is one of the most talented quintets of arms MLB has ever seen.

Yamamoto is the defending World Series MVP and a Cy Young Award finalist who has fully cemented his reputation as a big-game pitcher. Snell is a two-time Cy Young winner. Ohtani’s arm holds up his status as a two-way superstar. Glasnow has explosive stuff coming out of a 6-foot-8 frame. Sasaki had nearly every MLB team knocking on his door when he came to the U.S. last offseason.

That’s not the extent of the talent, either. For most franchises, arms such as Emmet Sheehan, Gavin Stone, River Ryan and Justin Wrobleski would be considered promising enough to be part of the Opening Day rotation. On the Dodgers, they are depth.

Sheehan actually will be in the Opening Day rotation, which is a good opportunity to discuss …

Of the above group, we already know Snell and Stone will start the season on the injured list, as will other pitchers such as Landon Knack and Bobby Miller. Ohtani is trying to pitch a full season for the first time as a Dodger, has undergone major UCL surgery twice and has cleared 132 innings only once in his entire career as a pitcher.

Glasnow is famously injury-prone and hasn’t thrown more than 134 innings — regular season and postseason combined — in any season of his 10-year career. Sasaki missed most of last season due to a shoulder impingement and looked awful in spring training, to the point that he could be benched if he doesn’t start the season well.

None of this is new for the Dodgers. Their organizational philosophy has long been to use their immense resources to go for big, risky arms and hope enough of them are healthy at the end of the season to field a competitive playoff rotation. This is a team that once featured a group of Miller, Clayton Kershaw and Lance Lynn as its playoff starting pitchers.

The club will be cautious with its rotation, utilizing a six-man rotation and making sure no one pitches on fewer than five days’ rest unless absolutely necessary. The Dodgers just don’t who will be pitching for them in October.

We probably don’t need to get too far into this.

In Ohtani’s two seasons as a Dodger, he has won two NL MVP awards (and now has the most MVP awards of any player not named Barry Bonds) and two World Series titles, and he recorded MLB’s only 50-homer, 50-stolen-base season. We are watching an inner-circle Hall of Famer at the height of his powers, and he grants his already rich team one of the biggest financial advantages in baseball with his deferred contract and Japanese advertising revenue (arriving in 2026: Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium).

Ohtani began his Dodgers career as a full-time hitter and waited until June of last year to pitch. This is his first season breaking camp as a two-way player, and he is as close to a lock to win MVP as you will ever see if he remains healthy.

The Dodgers have certainly been a different franchise since Ohtani arrived, but Mookie Betts’ contributions should never be taken for granted. His acquisition in 2020 brought the immediate reward of the franchise’s first World Series title in 32 years, and he has been a regular All-Star ever since. Upon taking the field Thursday, Betts will have played more seasons with the Dodgers than he did with the Boston Red Sox.

The past couple of years, however, haven’t been great if you’re invested in Betts avoiding the torments of Father Time at 33 years old. He missed a large chunk of 2024 due to a broken hand, then posted the worst OPS of his career in 2025. There has been a noticeable decline in his production at the plate and his peripheral numbers over the past three years.

Granted, Betts also transitioned to a full-time shortstop last year and was better than anyone could’ve reasonably expected, leading the position in Defensive Runs Saved. His offensive struggles can also be somewhat attributed to the illness that caused him to lose 18 pounds at the start of the season (that’s 10% of his listed body weight).

This could be a resurgent year for Betts now that he’s healthy, or it could be the year the Dodgers are forced to accept that he’s no longer the player he once was.

There’s a lot of that going around. The Dodgers are one of the oldest teams in baseball and will be depending on production from Betts (33 years old), Freddie Freeman (36), Max Muncy (35), Teoscar Hernández (33) and Miguel Rojas (37). Those players have all done an admirable job of aging gracefully, but the bill comes due eventually.

The Dodgers entered the past offseason with two major needs: the outfield and the bullpen. They addressed both with the best two players on the free-agent market at those positions.

Los Angeles gave former Chicago Cubs star Kyle Tucker $240 milllion over six years to take over right field, which will add one of MLB’s best all-around bats to an otherwise unchanged lineup that ranked second in runs scored last season.

It also lured Edwin Díaz from the New York Mets with a three-year, $69 million deal, giving L.A. baseball’s most dominant closer in 2025 after the team direly needed one last season.

This ain’t a fair game. The Dodgers had every reason to keep quiet this offseason and instead opted for two more big splashes. The top of their lineup is now a horror movie for opposing pitchers, who will have to worry about Tucker in addition to two former MVPs in Betts and Freeman behind Ohtani at leadoff.

Even if we assume Díaz is lights-out — and that’s by no means a guarantee — the Dodgers have work to do before we trust their bullpen again.

Their successes in 2025 will last longer in memory than their failures, but it cannot be forgotten how much of a catastrophe the L.A. bullpen was at one point. The club thought it was creating a super-pen with Blake Treinen, Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates, plus a strong supporting cast behind them, but instead the Dodgers had perhaps the worst unit in the MLB playoffs.

Scott and Yates didn’t appear in the postseason at all. Treinen led the team in appearances with 10, despite posting a 6.75 ERA and evoking dread every time he took the mound in a high-pressure situation. Some arms certainly came up big along the way (who could forget the Will Klein game?), but it was a turbulent ride.

Similar to how we don’t know which rotation arms will be healthy in October, we don’t even know which bullpen arms will be good.

Perhaps the most disheartening part of the Dodgers — for other teams, at least — is that they are going for a third straight World Series title while boasting one of the best farm systems in baseball.

MLB Pipeline (No. 2), ESPN (No. 4), FanGraphs (No. 3), The Athletic (No. 2) and Baseball Prospectus (No. 1) all rank the Dodgers highly among MLB organizations, while Baseball America is the outlier, with L.A. at No. 13.

Fans of other teams in the top five will be looking forward to seeing those prospects in action. The Dodgers, however, have a well-established history of leveraging their minor-league talent, produced by an elite player development machine, into big-league upgrades.

Where it gets interesting is how the top of that system is composed. Josue DePaula, Zyhir Hope, Eduardo Quintero and Mike Sirota are the Dodgers’ consensus top-four prospects and all consensus top-100 talents. They are also all outfielders.

With only so many spots in the outfield, the Dodgers have more reason than usual to trade a top prospect or two. A package of, say, Hope, Sirota and an MLB-ready arm would be strong enough to get something big, and that cost would barely make a dent in the Dodgers’ long-term outlook.

Will the Dodgers three-peat in 2026? Or is this the year it all falls apart? Grant Thomas/Yahoo Sports

The Dodgers are overwhelmingly projected to win the NL West. Even so, it can’t be forgotten that they play in a division in which the San Diego Padres, San Francisco Giants and Arizona Diamondbacks are all pushing for a playoff spot.

We thought the Dodgers were overwhelming favorites last year, too, and they ended up winning 93 games. That was only three games ahead of the Padres, who led the division as late as Aug. 24.

If the Dodgers underperform again this year and want another division title, they’ll have to hope none of those three teams has a particularly good year. They probably don’t need to worry about the Colorado Rockies, at least.

As much as the Dodgers are treated as a bowling ball hitting the pins of owners who can’t afford to give Ohtani $700 million, it’s also a fact that they stared down the barrel of elimination during both of their recent World Series runs.

The 2024 NLDS saw them fall behind 2-1 against a very good Padres team. Their response: Shut San Diego down for the rest of the series. The 2025 World Series saw L.A. fall behind 3-2 against the Toronto Blue Jays. Their response: Rip the Jays’ hearts out in Toronto.

For so long, the Dodgers’ narrative was that of a regular-season juggernaut that couldn’t get it done in a non-COVID postseason. That narrative is now dead, buried and getting visited by close family members.

The Dodgers could be one of the best teams in the history of baseball. At BetMGM, they have easily the best World Series odds, at +220 as of Wednesday evening.

But think about that number for a second. A moneyline of +220 odds implies a World Series probability of 31.15%. Las Vegas basically thinks this team’s odds of winning another title are less than one-third of all potential outcomes.

There is no more joyless way to view baseball than to see the Dodgers as inevitable. Sure, they escaped elimination in the previous examples, but maybe the bigger takeaway is that this team can be pushed into an elimination scenario by a complete baseball team.

The Dodgers have spent ungodly amounts of money to overcome the concept of entropy, but it always wins in the end. We just don’t know if that’ll be in 2026 … or later.

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