The Los Angeles Dodgers winning back-to-back World Series titles in 2024 and 2025 should have been the ultimate validation of Andrew Friedman\u2019s galaxy-brain roster building. Two different paths, same champagne. <\/p>\n
But buried inside a recent piece from Katie Woo and Fabian Ardaya in The Athletic<\/a> (subscription required) is a quiet suggestion that should make Dodger fans squirm: that second title? It didn’t come from overwhelming teams. It came while the offense was running out of gas \u2013\u2013 and maybe running out of time.<\/p>\n Woo and Ardaya laid it out in plain numbers. The 2024 Dodgers bludgeoned teams with 95 postseason runs, one of the highest totals in MLB history. But in 2025, they needed only 72 \u2014 one of the lowest totals we\u2019ve seen during the Wild Card era. And that wasn\u2019t simply October randomness. It was the culmination of something we watched happen in slow motion.<\/p>\n Through June 2025, the Dodgers were baseball\u2019s best offense with a 121 wRC+. By July, they had fallen to 26th. Down the stretch, they had fits and starts at best. And in October, they literally could not score more than four runs<\/a> in a nine-inning game after the Wild Card round.<\/p>\n This wasn\u2019t just slumping. This was erosion. The margin for error evaporated. You could once show up as the Dodgers and assume five runs were coming. Now, you need to grind. You need to force hits. You need to rely on \u201cfighting\u201d instead of talent bailing you out.<\/p>\n This brings us to the inconvenient truth that many fans have been afraid to acknowledge \u2013\u2013 that the Dodgers had the oldest position player group in MLB last year. Mookie Betts and Teoscar Hern\u00e1ndez \u2014 two cornerstone bats \u2014 had the worst offensive seasons of their careers<\/a>. Both are entering their age-33 seasons.<\/p>\n So we\u2019ve reached the big question: was the Dodgers’ 2025 offensive downturn a slump, or was it the first sign that their core is finally aging out of its superteam era?<\/p>\n Dodgers’ late-season slump in 2025 may be symptomatic of an aging roster<\/p>\n It\u2019s uncomfortable because \u201cold\u201d and \u201cdeclining\u201d are not concepts Los Angeles has needed to acknowledge in a decade. The machine always regenerated. Prospects turned into All-Stars. Stars stayed stars. Regression was something that happened in other zip codes.<\/p>\n But aging curves do not care about market size. And when you zoom out, the warnings multiply. Older players don’t just slump more \u2013\u2013 they slump longer. Recovery time widens. Bat speed reduction is gradual (until the day that it isn’t). And the first thing to go? Damage on velocity.<\/p>\n Which looks a whole lot like\u2026 the inability to string together big innings. Sound familiar, Dodgers fans?<\/p>\n The Dodgers didn\u2019t fall apart in 2025. They tightened. The offense shrank. The fireworks became smoke bursts. They still won because their margin for error remains enormous, but the model is shifting.<\/p>\n Los Angeles once built lineups around players approaching or at peak age. Now the roster feels heavy. Locked-in contracts. Aging timelines. <\/a>Long-term bets on yesterday\u2019s certainty.<\/p>\n This doesn\u2019t mean the doom is here. It means the handwriting is on the wall \u2014 faint, but legible. The Dodgers aren’t collapsing. They’re calcifying. <\/p>\n And the danger isn\u2019t that the offense becomes bad, but rather that it becomes average until October \u2013\u2013 when the lights are brightest and the arms are nastiest \u2013\u2013 and suddenly, that lineup built on superstar pedigree<\/a> looks\u2026 mortal.<\/p>\n What if the slump isn\u2019t a glitch in the system anymore? What if it\u2019s the new operating software? That’s the unsettling thought that Dodgers fans will have to live with going forward because once decline settles in, even they can\u2019t out-spend gravity<\/a> forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Los Angeles Dodgers winning back-to-back World Series titles in 2024 and 2025 should have been the ultimate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":406148,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,591,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-406147","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-mlb","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406147\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/406148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}