LOS ANGELES — When the Dodgers returned from their trip to South Korea, they traveled at the speed of doubt.
The Dodgers landed in South Korea hailed as a potential ‘super team,’ praised for using their financial muscle to assemble a roster that was being compared to the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls as a touring collection of superstar talent.
Two games later, they returned to the United States critiqued as a flawed team and forecast by some as an expensive disappointment in the making even before they make their domestic home opener on Thursday.
“I’m pretty used to the season bearing out daily narratives based on the results of the game. I’ve gotten pretty accustomed to that,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said of the whipsaw nature of pundit opinion.
The split Seoul Series did seem to raise legitimate concerns about the Dodgers’ re-built infield defense and the ability of $325 million signee Yoshinobu Yamamoto to make the transition to MLB. The cloud of scandal surrounding Shohei Ohtani and his former interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, also raises the specter of a potential distraction the Dodgers did not have a week ago.
“I think to extrapolate a whole bunch of things from two games doesn’t seem like the wisest thing to do,” General Manager Brandon Gomes said. “It’s still a really talented team.
“I don’t feel any different than I did going into those two games in Korea.”
The idea that the controversy and ongoing investigations surrounding Ohtani could impact the team on the field was dismissed out of hand by Friedman.
“I am not worried about that,” he said flatly.
The late-spring decision to abandon the plan to make Gavin Lux their everyday shortstop and ask Mookie Betts to make the leap from Gold Glove right fielder to being the primary shortstop in an infield where third baseman Max Muncy has struggled at times is one concern Friedman acknowledges as having merit.
“I think that is a fair question and I think it’s the area that will probably take up most of our attention and focus,” he said. “We’re optimistic that we’ve got the right personnel to make it work well. But obviously it’s something we’ll monitor and continue to stay on top of as we go.”
Yamamoto will get his first chance to undo first impressions – and deflate the 45.00 ERA he brought back from Korea – when he makes his second MLB start on Saturday. Yamamoto lasted just one inning against the San Diego Padres last week, looking more like the vulnerable pitcher he was frequently in his limited Cactus League work and less like the front-of-the-rotation starter the Dodgers made the most expensive pitcher in baseball history.
Pay no mind, the Dodgers say.
“That’s just not who he is,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said immediately after the dreadful debut in Seoul.
“I think he’s still feeling his way through some delivery stuff,” Friedman said. “Early on (in spring training), we saw exceptional execution and his last few haven’t been as good from an execution standpoint. It is a significant strength for him and when that’s off it’s going to be tougher.
“But we will bet that it’s on way more than it’s not. … One of his super powers is exceptional feel for a number of different pitches. That’s been slightly off the last few. I know Mark (Prior) and Connor (McGuiness) are on it. It’s not anything for us to be overly concerned about at this point.”
Yamamoto has alluded to “adjustments” he has been making at least in part to combat pitch tipping that was an issue during spring training. Friedman wouldn’t say if he thought that remains a problem, saying that “delivery and that are all intertwined.”
What has not often been intertwined in MLB recently is being hailed as winners of the offseason and then raising the far-more-tangible trophy after the next World Series.
“I don’t think it means anything,” Gomes said of the Dodgers being declared winners of the winter with their billion-dollar spending spree. “I think we’ve seen that over and over again.”
Indeed, we have. The most recent contradiction might be the 2009 New York Yankees. They spent more than $420 million (big money for the time – really) to sign Mark Teixeira, CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett during the winter then beat the Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series.
The one thing that hasn’t changed for the Dodgers since they returned from South Korea is the perception that anything less than pairing their big offseason with a World Series title would make the expensive winter a failure.
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“I mean, it’s fair. We don’t play here to make the playoffs,” said utility man Kiké Hernandez, familiar with the World Series-or-bust expectations in Los Angeles. “We play here to win the World Series and if we don’t win it, it’s a failure. How many years has this team made the playoffs in a row? Division championships only get you so far. They’re not building this team to make it to October. They’re building it to go deep in October and win a World Series.”
Last winter was about more than that, Friedman and Gomes said. You don’t invest in 10-year (Ohtani), 12-year (Yamamoto) and five-year contracts (Tyler Glasnow) that total approximately $1.2 billion just to win once.
“Like we’ve talked about a lot over the course of the offseason, we wouldn’t have done these things if we’d say, ‘Hey, this is only to win a World Series this year and after that nothing matters,’” Gomes said. “There’s nothing we can do that says we 100% are going to win the World Series. We think we have an incredibly talented team that is well-positioned for the season and the postseason assuming health.
“So I think however you judge what we did I feel we added a lot of talent and it puts us in a good position to compete for a World Series this year and over and over again because the goal is to win multiples. But you have to win one on top of 2020 before you get into that.”
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