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Dodgers had a right to party after 5th consecutive NL West title – Orange County Register

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Baseball players rarely get those moments of release, not until their siege of a season is lifted, so forgive them if they feel like cutting loose afterward. The Dodgers just hope there are three m…
LOS ANGELES — No other sport talks so much about the big one, then celebrates so hard over the little one.
Kenley Jansen got Ryder Jones for the final out of the contested regular season on Friday night, and here came the champagne, the beer cooler, the protective goggles, and a whole Havana boatload of cigars.
The wives and children came into the inner sanctum, the clubhouse floor began to flood, and the whole immeasurable masthead of Dodgers personnel came down to celebrate the conquest of four other baseball teams.
The NHL and NBA and NFL don’t do that. You win a series and you shake hands and gulp for air and then you do it again. A lot of hockey and basketball teams don’t even know they’ve made the playoffs.
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Dodgers vs. Giants: Saturday game time, TV channel and starting pitchers Baseball is different. Yeah, it seems a little much. But it’s harmless if you avoid the broken glass, or if you’re not pitching coach Rick Honeycutt, standing by a doorway as Clayton Kershaw and Kenley Jansen approach with full bottles and fiendish smiles.
They empted it all on Honeycutt. “You’re giving me a heart attack!” Honeycutt cried. But he pitched in 30 postseason games and he has been running the Dodgers’ staff since 2006. He knows the sticky smoke of victory.
“This one is special,” Manager Dave Roberts said, behind dark glasses.
All sports have unique demands. Baseball is a long-playing mind game. There are 162 games in 180 days. You can spend literally half your life in a ballpark. In hockey you have team dinner on off days and in football you have quarterbacks buying steak dinners for their carnivorous linemen. Baseball players rarely get those moments of release, not until their siege of a season is lifted.
The Dodgers have won five consecutive division titles. The last team to do it was Philadelphia, from 2007 through 2011. Chase Utley was on all five of those teams, on three of these.
“It’s no easy feat,” Utley said. “You have to have the players, and some luck, too. Those Phillies teams had a lot of talent, but you need more than that. Since I’ve been here, everybody has bought into what we’re doing.”
The Phillies won the World Series in 2008 and won the NLCS in 2009, but squandered home-field advantages in losses to San Francisco and St. Louis in 2010 and 2011. The Dodgers began this streak in 2013. Only six of those players are still here, and the streak has required two managers and two general managers.
It’s a far different team, maybe even different since they ran aground with 15 losses in 16 games, and woke up like stockbrokers in late 2008, half their investment gone.
“I definitely believe that will be good for us,” Utley said. “Nobody enjoys losing games. But we were going so great for such a long time. It wasn’t realistic.”
“Ten games into that mini-slide, I remember that we were talking about how this could be a really good thing for us,” General Manager Andrew Friedman said. “Then when it lasted a little big longer, we said, all right, that’s enough.
“But the work ethic never wavered. This group hadn’t had any adversity. So this could set us up well for October.”
Through 162 games, unexpected pieces fall from the sky. Sometimes they’re big, vicious boulders. For the Dodgers they were mostly fruit baskets and ambrosia. Late-inning rallies, three months between lost series.
Cody Bellinger was the main gift from above, and he was the appropriate cause of this 98th win, driving an unfortunate pitch from Jeff Samardzija deep into the bedlam of the right-field pavilion.
It was Bellinger’s 39th home run and broke a National League rookie record, and there have been some powerful rookies. Bellinger didn’t even start the season in L.A. What was Friedman’s realistic expectation in the spring?
He laughed. “I thought he’d be a very good X factor for us in the second half of the season if the stars aligned,” Friedman said. “I didn’t know the stars would align in April.”
Roberts also said this was special because of the muscle in the division, because Arizona is definitely headed for the playoffs and Colorado probably is. That’s 38 games against tough lineups, against MVP candidates like Paul Goldschmidt, Charlie Blackmon and Nolan Arenado.
“It was almost like the old American League East,” Honeycutt said. “We had some tough games. But these guys have been warriors.”
The Atlanta Braves finished first in 14 consecutive full seasons, beginning in 1991, and they partied hard every time. Waking up the morning after, with the room moving? That’s adversity, too.
The Dodgers just hope their sleepless nights stretch into November.

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