Dodger’s decade of dominance: How a risky trade 10 years ago TODAY led to nine playoff berths

A decade of dominance began in a deal with the devil.

On August 25, 2012, the Los Angeles Dodgers took on a record $260million in salary to acquire ageing stars Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett and Nick Punto from the Boston Red Sox.

It is the most expensive trade in baseball history – and from the outside, it was a bust. Why were the Dodgers tossing away their future for yesterday’s news? The deal could be a win for the 2012 Dodgers, but was seen as a portent for dark days in every year following it. Rival executives scorned LA‘s freshly minted ownership group, and general manager Ned Colletti.

For the players involved, results were mixed. Gonzalez homered a matter of hours later in his first Dodger at-bat while the ink was still drying on the trade details, and became a key figure in the Dodgers clubhouse for five seasons. Beckett pitched a no-hitter in Philadelphia in 2014, and Crawford and Punto were useful pieces.

But 10 years on, the deal was about more than just names and numbers – this was the Dodgers signaling loud and clear where they wanted to be, and where they would end up: back on top.

Guggenheim Partners, led by Mark Walter and Stan Kasten, and supported by LA icon Magic Johnson, Peter Guber, Bobby Patton and new Chelsea FC owner Todd Boehly, were 116 days into their Dodger ownership. They had beaten bids fronted by Steve Cohen, Stan Kroenke and Jared Kushner, and closed the book on a torturous year-long struggle to wrest the club from Frank McCourt, whose $130m divorce had threatened the Dodgers with bankruptcy. And they wanted to make a splash.

‘We want to build the Dodgers back to what they once were,’ said Kasten. ‘You have to be aggressive,’ said Colletti. ‘We want to win – now,’ said Magic.

The Dodgers of 2012 were a powerhouse in name only. They had not been to the postseason the previous two years, and would soon make it three. The Red Sox trade – the first in which a team had taken on two $100m contracts at the same time – brought stars back to Hollywood, and got the franchise back on track.

A decade later the Dodgers are the eminent force in the sport, with a 924-592 regular-season record since the trade – a 99-win pace over a single season. Before 2012, the franchise had never reached the post-season three years in a row. In a few weeks’ time, they will make it 10 consecutive Octobers, and are one of only three teams in the history of baseball – along with the 1991-2005 Atlanta Braves and 1995-2007 New York Yankees – to do so in more than five straight years.

For the first half of that run, the Dodgers were still growing into the dominant machine they are now. 

They were a very good team, led by the likes of Gonzalez, Yasiel Puig – another early Guggenheim era arrival – and McCourt holdover Clayton Kershaw, but the first few playoff runs were more promising than prosperous. 

They were punched in the mouth twice by the Cardinals in 2013 and 2014, then collided with a runaway Mets train in 2015 that rode Daniel Murphy’s bat all the way to the pennant. In 2016 the first signs of a title-winning team emerged, but the Cubs were ultimately too strong in the NLCS.

It was 2017 when the switch flicked, in the third year under Colletti’s replacement Andrew Friedman. Cody Bellinger was a rookie, Cory Seager a sophomore, Justin Turner and Kenley Jansen on career-best runs and unheralded pick-up Chris Taylor leading the charge at the top of the lineup. This was the year they first became the best team in baseball, at one stage going an astonishing 43-7 in a 50-game stretch and finishing with 104 wins.

They crushed the first two rounds of the playoffs to reach a first World Series since 1988 and seemed unstoppable when they were a game up on the Houston Astros and led 3-1 in Game 2 heading to the eighth inning. From then on, it was heartbreak. 

Houston roared back to win their first World Series in seven games with, it turned out, the help of an illegal sign-stealing system. The Dodgers’ shell-shock at the time of defeat quickly became outright fury when the Astros’ cheating was revealed two years later.

They channeled that rage into becoming the consensus best team in the sport for the last five years. They finally ended their 32-year title drought in 2020, have twice (2019 and 2021) won a franchise-record 106 games, and are on pace to cruise past that mark this year.

The 2022 team may be the best of the lot, and epitomizes what the Dodgers have been all about in the last 10 years. 

They entered Thursday at 86-37, after winning 41 of their last 50 contests. Their brutal top three of Mookie Betts, Trea Turner and Freddie Freeman leads baseball’s most fearsome lineup, streaking ahead of everyone else at 5.40 runs per game. And on the other side of the ball, they boast a team ERA of just 2.85, the best in the majors by almost 10 percent.

They’ve done it without ace Walker Buehler, first-ballot Hall of Famer Kershaw, 102mph fireballer Dustin May and bullpen wizard Blake Treinen for the majority of the year. And they’ve done it through offensive slumps by former MVP Bellinger and former MVP candidates Max Muncy and Justin Turner.

This is why they’ve been so successful. Outsiders point to the money spent, and have a case. But the fact that LA can crank out 100+ wins every year, regardless of personnel, is testament to the culture they have built over the last decade.

Few teams can afford to sign Betts and Freeman for a combined $527million, but even fewer teams can produce a 110-win team that has Tony Gonsolin, Tyler Anderson and Andrew Heaney competing for play-off starts, Evan Phillips and Yency Almonte among its best relievers, and former cast-offs Muncy, Taylor and Justin Turner as offensive staples. Even Joey Gallo, lost at the plate as a Yankee, has an OPS over 1.000 as a Dodger.

Two key elements allow for this ‘plug and play’ system, where seemingly any player can shine.

First is their player development, identifying and growing the finest young talent. Joc Pederson, Will Smith, Julio Urias, Seager, Bellinger, Buehler, Gonsolin, May, even going back to Kershaw and Jansen – all were Dodger-made and all were major players in the 2020 World Series win. Another Dodger trait is rehabilitating players on a downward trend, such as Anderson – who had a career 4.62 ERA when he signed in March and has put up a 2.73 this year with a tweaked change-up that plummets out of the zone. 

Then there’s Trayce Thompson, Klay’s brother, who the Dodgers released in 2017 and was close to falling out of baseball at 31 this spring. LA picked him up on the cheap and he has a .920 OPS in Dodger blue this season.

The second area is prudence, having the guts to hold on to these talents as they came through the ranks and not including them in trades. The Dodgers’ prodigious core of homegrown talent allowed them to stay away from big-ticket free-agent signings, too, resetting their luxury tax penalties for when the time was right.

Take the 2018 salary dump deal with the Cincinnati Reds, which sent Puig, Matt Kemp, Alex Wood and Kyle Farmer for three players. The first of these, Homer Bailey, was cut immediately. The second, Jeter Downs, became part of the trade for Betts – who they could then afford to give a $365m contract – and the third, Josiah Gray, was in the deal for Trea Turner and Max Scherzer.

Leading the band is manager Dave Roberts, who the Dodgers took a flyer on as a first-time skipper in 2016 and has given them in return one of the most successful stretches in MLB history.

Roberts will take charge of his 1,000th regular-season game next week against the Mets at Citi Field, and sports a .631 winning percentage – the third-best of any manager to oversee at least three seasons’ worth of games. Roberts has his critics for some questionable post-season pitching moves, but he is also in the post-season to make those calls every single year, and were he to win a second ring with the Dodgers, would already have a strong Hall of Fame case. 

There is one caveat to the Dodgers’ relentless winning machine: only once in the 10-year run have they lasted the distance. Five other clubs have also won a sole championship in the last decade – while Boston and San Francisco have two each.

LA cannot risk their legacy being that of Atlanta, the nearly team who won 11 straight division titles from 1995-2005 but only held the Commissioner’s Trophy aloft in the first of those years. In the clinching moment Bob Costas called them ‘the team of the 90s’, but that accolade fits more snugly on the Yankees or Blue Jays in strict terms of championships won.

However, thanks to the structure the Dodgers have built, the window is always open in LA. Now they don’t have to hear about 1988 anymore there may be less urgency year-to-year, as they know they will be pushing for the summit again next year. And the year after that. And why not the decade after that?