The Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the San Diego Padres in NLDS Game 5 on Friday, punching their ticket to the NL Championship Series. The Dodgers will take on the New York Mets in a best-of-seven set beginning on Sunday, with the winner advancing to the World Series against either the New York Yankees or whichever team prevails in Saturday's ALDS Game 5 between the Detroit Tigers and Cleveland Guardians.
Afterward, Dodgers infielder Max Muncy made it clear that he's tired of prognosticators -- and anyone who dares to doubt this Los Angeles squad.
"What was it, 80% of the f---ing experts said we were going to lose?" Muncy told reporters, including ESPN. "F--- those guys. We know who we are. We're the f---ing best team in baseball, and we're out there to prove it."
Proclaiming to be the underdog who is up against the world is a common approach in sports. We must admit, though, that Muncy is stretching the believability of that construct to its breaking point by casting the Dodgers in the role. (And lest anyone chalk this up to the idea that a hit dog hollers: 50% of CBS Sports MLB's staff, including this author, picked the Dodgers to defeat the Padres … and that was even with some reasonable concerns about the back-end of Los Angeles' injury-ravaged rotation.)
To be fair, Muncy is correct in his assertions about the Dodgers. They were the best team in baseball during the regular season. They've arguably been the sport's defining club for about a decade. Since Andrew Friedman was hired as Los Angeles' top executive during the 2014-15 offseason, no team has won more games than the Dodgers' 943 victories. In fact, no team has won within 50 games of that number. (The Houston Astros, the other strong candidate for this mantle, have won 54 fewer games.)
What's more is that the Dodgers fielded the second-highest tax payroll in the sport. (Coincidentally, their NLCS opponents, the Mets, ranked No. 1 in that respect.) They employ three former Most Valuable Player Award winners -- Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman -- as well as one of the best pitchers in the world (Yoshinobu Yamamoto), and a supporting cast full of solid to good players. There was a book written about this particular group with the title "How to Beat a Broken Game."
If you knew nothing else about baseball beyond those preceding two paragraphs, you'd absolutely pick the Dodgers to win any and everything. So, in that sense, we do get why Muncy is frustrated with the prognosticators who dared to pick the Padres. At the same time, it just goes to show that everyone -- even MLB's most elite franchise, complete with all the riches, talent, and brains in the world -- is Rocky Balboa in their own mind
