‘Be the hunter.’ Dodgers focus on dominance, not dynasty, amid renewed title pursuit

When Dave Roberts addressed his full team for the first time this spring, he didnt use the word dynasty.

On Feb.

15, during the opening week of Dodgers camp, the 10th-year manager did discuss the teams 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 cant look at what weve already done; you cant look at what were trying to do, veteran third baseman Max Muncy said.

Were 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 youre the Dodgers, theres always a target.

You cant run from it.

The stakes of this Dodgers season have been pretty clearly laid out.

They are trying to become Major League Baseballs 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 years title team, which claimed the organizations 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 its up to us on the field to kind of help them realize that vision.

Friedmans hope is that it all serves as a motivator in the clubhouse, as the team tries to do something that hasnt happened in baseball since the advent of the luxury tax almost a quarter-century ago.

Winning a championship is really hard.

Winning back to back is even harder, he said this spring.

A lot of the challenge is, I think its human nature that a lot of guys can get complacent after you win.

So it was important to us this offseason to not have that set in.

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.

Theyd 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.

Theres an understanding with what weve 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 bulls-eye, when you put on this uniform, thats just the way it is.

Roberts wants his players to feed off such pressure and match the sense of urgency theyll likely face on a nightly basis.

An analogy that Ive 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 citys first World Series parade since 1988 (the Dodgers 2020 title came during COVID and there was no parade).

In the starting rotation, Yamamoto and Glasnow are trying to avoid the injury problems that derailed their seasons last year.

Ohtani, Dustin May and Tony Gonsolin are attempting to return to pitching after missing all of last year recovering from elbow surgeries.

Sasaki might be the biggest wild card, possessing frontline-caliber stuff but little experience as he embarks on his MLB transition.

And even Snell is searching for a bounce-back campaign, trying to turn the dominance he displayed during the second half of last year (when he lowered his earned-run average from 9.51 to 3.12 over the final three months) into a full campaign of Cy Young-caliber production.

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 teams Tokyo games to begin the season.

We didnt 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 years team is if things do go wrong, if players get hurt or fall short of personal expectations, the clubs 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 baseballs 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 were 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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