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As the MLB season began with an international spotlight in Tokyo, two of the Dodgers’ biggest stars — Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman — were noticeably absent from the Opening Day lineup.
While their omissions stirred concern, team doctor Neal ElAttrache provided a clear rationale rooted in long-term health and strategy.
Betts, battling a lingering illness, was sent home early from Japan to rest and recover. He reportedly lost nearly 15 pounds due to the disease, prompting the team to take a cautious approach.
“Dehydration is one of the worst conditions you can have for muscle strains,” ElAttrache told LA Times. “You have Mookie come out here, tear an oblique or hamstring; you can lose him for six weeks.”
Freeman, meanwhile, was a late scratch due to rib discomfort — a re-aggravation of an injury sustained during the previous postseason. Though he was initially slated to play, the risk of pushing him too soon was too significant.
“This time of the year is the worst time to take a chance,” ElAttrache explained. “If you’re wrong and too aggressive with it … they lose six or eight weeks.”
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The timing of injuries at the start of the season presents unique challenges.
ElAttrache emphasized that an early injury not only sidelines a player physically but erases the hard-earned momentum from spring training. “You have to start the whole thing over,” he said, describing the impact on conditioning and readiness.
Los Angeles, who are eyeing another World Series title, know the importance of keeping their stars on the field in October — not just March.
While unpopular with some fans, the decision to sit Betts and Freeman is a calculated move by the organization to prioritize long-term availability over early-season appearances. It’s a strategic gamble with championship aspirations in mind.
When Dave Roberts addressed his full team for the first time this spring, he didn’t use the word dynasty.
On Feb. 15, during the opening week of Dodgers camp, the 10th-year manager did discuss the team’s World Series title, its expectations to repeat and the long road ahead to get there.
Roberts looked around a room — one that included the reigning National League and World Series most valuable players, two more former MVPs, two Cy Young Award winner who had combined to win the award five times, and a host of other All-Stars, big names and expensive free-agent acquisitions — and told the group they were at “the epicenter of baseball.”
But, even with the Dodgers trying to win their third championship in six years, the manager shied away from “dynasty” talk, taking a more narrowed focus that his players have echoed in the run-up to this season.
“You can’t look at what we’ve already done; you can’t look at what we’re trying to do,” veteran third baseman Max Muncy said. “We’re just focusing on what we can do at this moment.”
And in Roberts’ view, what the team needs to do is adopt a certain mindset.
“Be the hunter instead of the hunted,” Roberts said last week, as the club opened its season with a two-game sweep of the Chicago Cubs in Tokyo. “I think when you’re the Dodgers, there’s always a target. You can’t run from it.”
The stakes of this Dodgers season have been pretty clearly laid out.
They are trying to become Major League Baseball’s first repeat champion since the New York Yankees from 1998 to 2000, the last undisputed dynastic run by any big-league club in the sport. The Dodgers are trying not to squander a roster that boasts a nearly $400 million payroll, the highest in history for luxury tax purposes, and was bolstered by yet another big-money offseason from an Andrew Friedman-led front office and Guggenheim-funded ownership group.
They not only retained almost every important piece from last year’s title team, which claimed the organization’s first full-season championship since 1988, but they also went on a spending spree, adding two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell, Japanese pitching phenom in Roki Sasaki, the top reliever on the market in Tanner Scott, and more depth than many in the sport can remember seeing on one roster.
“Our ownership group is doing everything they can on their end to provide us with the best team every year,” Roberts said. “And it’s up to us on the field to kind of help them realize that vision.”
With such lavish reinforcements, however, came a backlash of criticism from some corners of the sport.
The Dodgers, after all, already had Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman atop their lineup. They’d already spent almost half a billion last offseason to add Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow to their rotation.
Seeing the Dodgers dominate yet another winter, and turn a talented-but-susceptible team into a seemingly foolproof (and, the team hopes, injury-proof) juggernaut, raised alarm bells around the sport about a growing competitive imbalance.
As a result the Dodgers have been cast as something of a villain. And as he tried to shape the their approach entering another 162-game grind, Roberts was happy to embrace the added scrutiny.
“There’s an understanding with what we’ve done, who we are, that people are going to come at us with their best each night,” he said. “I think us being hunted or having a bull’s-eye, when you put on this uniform, that’s just the way it is.”
Roberts wants his players to feed off such pressure and match the sense of urgency they’ll likely face on a nightly basis.
“An analogy that I’ve used with our players is a mindset,” he said, referring back to the “be the hunter” message he has emphasized in recent weeks. “[We need to] flip it.”
The Dodgers still will need much to go right to wind up where they finished last year, when they celebrated the city’s first World Series parade since 1988 (the Dodgers’ 2020 title came during COVID and there was no parade).
The lineup faces its own questions, especially after Betts (who is transitioning back to shortstop on a full-time basis) and Freeman (who continues to battle the lingering effects of the ankle and rib injuries he played through last October) missed the team’s Tokyo games to begin the season.
“We didn’t win last year because we were talking about the World Series every day,” Betts said. “We won last year because we talked about the task at hand. I think we have to continue to talk about the task at hand and not worry about the end goal. We have an end goal, of course, but you have to take steppingstones to get there.”
The luxury for this year’s team is if things do go wrong, if players get hurt or fall short of personal expectations, the club’s sheer depth of talent should provide a sturdy safety net. The Dodgers should have the ability to endure unforeseen setbacks, clear unexpected hurdles and position themselves to cement their status as baseball’s next dynasty.
But for now, their focus is on the present, trying to turn a roster that looks almost flawless on paper into a dominant and unstoppable product on the field.
“I just think that we’re as good as anyone in baseball at putting the blinders on and getting better each day, with respect to expectations,” Roberts said. “Our guys do a really good job of doing that, which as a byproduct, guards against any type of letdown.”
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