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PHOENIX — Four months later, it’s the most grueling memories that have also become the most meaningful ones.
When the Dodgers won the World Series last October, it set off a cathartic celebration throughout the team and around the city. Old postseason demons had been vanquished. A club that had repeatedly fallen short of expectations — the pandemic-shortened 2020 season aside — finally returned to the pinnacle of the sport. After a three-and-a-half decade wait for a full-season title, the Dodgers relished all the recognition that came with their Fall Classic defeat of the New York Yankees.
Looking back, however, the most meaningful recollections for many Dodger players and personnel have less to do with the season’s triumphant conclusion, and more with the challenging road they traversed to get there.
None more so, perhaps, than one storyline that didn’t become completely clear until after the dust had settled.
There is no concern about Will Smith, who returned to game action on Friday against the Angels, missing the start of the regular season on March 18.
“We all wanted to win,” third baseman Max Muncy said. “But we were all going through something.”
That something was a reference to the tenuous state of the team’s overall health — with large swaths of the roster, players have noted in hindsight, playing at far less than 100% during the club’s run to a championship.
Injuries, of course, were always a central theme in the Dodgers’ 2024 season.
The pitching staff was never fully healthy, with absences wreaking havoc throughout the year and leaving the team shorthanded by the start of the postseason.
The arduous regular season, which began a week early in South Korea and concluded with a division race that wasn’t settled until the last week of September, rarely gave the lineup a chance to catch its breath.
And throughout October, several more health-related headaches defined the Dodgers’ run to a championship — most notably, Freddie Freeman’s well-documented battle with a severely sprained ankle and broken rib cartilage, and the torn labrum Shohei Ohtani played through at the end of the World Series.
But behind the scenes, the Dodgers’ October injury problems were even more pronounced than known at the time. Quietly, everyone from Muncy to Will Smith to Gavin Lux to Michael Kopech were fighting through their own physical limitations. And looking back, it has become one of the greatest points of pride for members of last year’s team.
“Baseball, it’s a battle of attrition,” manager Dave Roberts said. “You lose players and guys are playing banged up. [Especially] when we started to then go through October, there are going to be things that are ailing and you’re dealing with. But I’m not surprised they found a way to get through it.”
One of the first surprise revelations regarding the Dodgers’ October injury problems involved Kopech, who recorded some of the most important outs en route to the World Series title.
A midseason trade deadline acquisition who immediately became a trusted arm in the bullpen, Kopech’s 10 playoff appearances were tied for most on the team. But, he said last week, he was dealing with forearm inflammation that left him feeling “in the 60% range” health-wise.
“I think a lot of people look at the results of what you’re putting out there as how you feel,” said Kopech, whose forearm issue only became public knowledge once reports surfaced in January that he likely wouldn’t start the 2025 season on time because of its lingering effects on his offseason.
“I was still able to throw 100 mph in the last days of the season, so that’s great,” Kopech added. “But it was a lot more effort to throw that hard, and it was a lot more intensity and masking things. I definitely wasn’t 100%. But … I was determined to figure it out.”
There have been 2,555 major league pitchers who had Tommy John surgery. Of those, 162 had a second procedure, and fewer still achieved their previous level of success.
So, too, was Alex Vesia, another high-leverage reliever who finished the playoffs less than full strength.
After feeling his side cramp up in the Dodgers’ decisive Game 5 win over the San Diego Padres in the National League Division Series, doctors determined he had injured his intercostal muscle. An MRI exam confirmed there was no structural damage, but the problem was severe enough that, had it been the regular season, “I’m shut down for like 40 days or something,” he said recently.
Instead, Vesia and the club’s medical staff created a plan to fast-track his return. The left-hander was left off the team’s NL Championship Series roster. But in the meantime, he went through extensive training room treatments, strengthening the areas around his injury enough to rejoin the team for the World Series; when he made four scoreless appearances and recorded a save in Game 2.
“We had a small window, but we made a plan, we stuck to it, and I think that’s why it worked out the way it did,” said Vesia, who said his side had completely healed over the offseason.
Another top bullpen arm, Brusdar Graterol, wasn’t as lucky.
After pitching just seven times in the regular season because of shoulder and hamstring problems, Graterol was not available for the first two rounds of the playoffs. He eventually progressed enough to make the team’s World Series roster, pitching in three of the five games to bolster the club’s dwindling depth — which got even worse when yet another reliever, Evan Phillips, sustained a tear in his rotator cuff during the NLCS that ruled him out for the Fall Classic.
Weeks after the season, however, the Dodgers announced that Graterol needed labrum surgery, one that will sideline him for at least the first half of this upcoming season.
“There were a lot of sacrifices,” Vesia said.
The Dodgers’ lineup was no exception, even beyond Freeman’s ailing ankle and throbbing side.
Lux, the team’s primary second baseman, was limited for much of the month by a hip flexor injury, yet started in 11 playoff games and delivered a crucial sacrifice fly in the Dodgers’ Game 5 World Series clincher at Yankee Stadium.
Shortstop Miguel Rojas played in the NLDS and World Series despite a tear in his adductor muscle. He not only underwent surgery in the offseason, but also developed an infection that briefly delayed his winter training program.
Smith, who started all 16 postseason games behind the plate, had been battling an undisclosed bone bruise on his ankle since June — a situation that wasn’t publicly revealed until this spring, when continued ankle discomfort forced him to miss the opening week of Cactus League action.
At third base, Muncy was yet another health question mark. In the regular season, he missed three months with a severe oblique strain and displaced rib. While he was able to return to action by mid-August, he said his side continued to give him problems throughout the postseason.
Even as he broke an MLB postseason record by reaching base 12 straight times in the NLCS, he said simply taking the field required daily pregame doses of pain-relieving medication. By the time the Dodgers won the pennant, he reached a point where he couldn’t even take normal batting practice during the week off leading up to the World Series.
“You obviously trash your body,” Muncy said. “But we were all doing that.”
In the final days of October, the Dodgers encountered one last medical saga.
In Game 2 of the World Series, Ohtani injured his shoulder sliding into second base. Though, at the time, the team only publicly described the diagnosis as a partially dislocated shoulder, the NL MVP winner had also torn his left labrum. For a brief moment, it seemed his season might be done.
But then, during a team workout a day later, Ohtani not only informed his teammates he’d be good to go for the rest of the series, but displayed physical perseverance that even Freeman — who was undergoing four hours of daily treatment to push through his limitations — could hardly believe.
Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, who underwent surgery in the offseason to repair a labrum tear, hits a home run in his first at-bat of spring training.
“When you pop your shoulder out like he did, you usually can’t raise your arm above your head,” Freeman said. “And I watched him walk in on workout day in New York and raise his arm completely over his head.”
With a laugh, Freeman added: “I had to touch him before Game 3 to make sure he was real … I was like, ‘How is this man doing this?’”
In hindsight, such vignettes are what have made the Dodgers’ World Series triumph so rewarding; helping forge everlasting bonds between the players from last year’s team, and infuse their memories of last year’s October run with an extra layer of meaningful significance.
“You’ve gone through the wears and tears of a full season already, you’re feeling it, and then you have another month where you’re competing to win while you’re banged up,” Kopech said. “Everything is a little risk versus reward. But the higher the risk, usually the higher the reward.”
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