Adding Shohei Ohtani to their lineup should only help the Dodgers continue their dominance of the division, at least in the regular season.
In Los Angeles, the window does not shut.
The modern baseball fan has been conditioned to believe that each team has a competitive window, that you can keep the core of a contending team together for only so long before the window inevitably closes.
To that, Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers are here to say ho, ho, ho to Dodgers fans and ha, ha, ha to the rest of the league.
When might we expect any other team to win the National League West?
The Dodgers have won 10 times in the past 11 years. The exception was 2021, when the Dodgers still won 106 games.
The San Francisco Giants won 107, in a season that increasingly reveals itself to be one of the more remarkable flukes in baseball history. The Giants have not posted a winning record since then, and they did not post a winning record in any of the four seasons before then.
In 2018, the Colorado Rockies pushed the Dodgers to an NL West tiebreaker. The Rockies have not posted a winning record since then.
The San Diego Padres poured a gazillion dollars into beating the Dodgers. They did, once, over three games in October. They never got to the World Series. They could lose their best hitter, their best starting pitcher, and their closer this winter.
The Arizona Diamondbacks did get to the World Series this year, after beating the Dodgers over three games in October. They have a promising young core. They could be in a position to challenge the Dodgers for a few years.
But that is what we said about the Rockies in 2018, the Giants in 2021, the Padres in 2022 … and here we are yet again, this time with Andrew Friedman’s smarts and Mark Walter’s wallet fortified by Shohei Ohtani’s amusement park: He hits! He runs! He pitches (sorry, this attraction closed until 2025).
