Winter has come early in Los Angeles this 12 months.
There will be no World Series three-peat for the Dodgers this season. No downtown parade to have a good time the continuation of their modern-day dynasty. Not even a return journey to the Fall Classic to strive and defend their back-to-back titles.
Instead, despite a 100-win common season and league-record $432 million payroll, the two-time defending champions were eradicated in the National League Championship Series by the Milwaukee Brewers on Thursday, ending their bid for historical past and sending them into an unsure offseason –– one that could embody an prolonged lockout, notable adjustments to the roster, and existential questions about how to retool around their growing old veteran core.
Many questions loom about where the Dodgers go from here.
Many unknowns stay about what the sport at massive will look like in 2027 –– and when next season, amid what figures to be a protracted labor battle, will even start.
But for now, the focus will be on why a workforce with the most expertise in the sport, the most October expertise on their roster, and the best statistical odds of successful the World Series couldn’t even get back to it.
As a long winter begins, here are the 5 largest causes the 2026 Dodgers came up short.
No-Sho’ Ohtani
On paper, no workforce in the majors has a better-looking lineup than the Dodgers.
In actuality, however, cracks in their offensive manufacturing have grown more and more evident in current postseasons.
Dating back to the 2024 World Series, the membership has batted .219 in postseason play. In 5 of their seven playoff sequence in that span, their workforce average has been .206 or worse.
Even in regular-season play, they have endured prolonged lulls and repeated second-half slumps. They’re a supremely proficient unit, to be sure. But, despite all the massive names they boast, they haven’t carried out all that totally different from most other playoff groups, either.
Really, only Shohei Ohtani has been a true separator for them at the plate.
And this October, he was in no situation to help the membership compensate for its other shortcomings offensively.
That’s why the workforce’s mismanagement of Ohtani’s damage saga this 12 months proved so pricey. For all his expertise on the mound, his biggest significance to the Dodgers has long been as a hitter. And this season, the toll of his tried return to full-time two-way duties rendered that all-important talent set void.
After all, it was no actual shock that some of the workforce’s other growing old star hitters suffered inconsistent postseason campaigns. That was the case last 12 months. Ohtani’s eight playoff home runs and 1.096 OPS helped them overcome it.
But this fall, the four-time MVP’s proper arm and left knee accidents restricted his capabilities in the box. Where the Dodgers needed a celebrity to spearhead their offense, all they had for most of the month was a bodily diminished slap hitter who struggled to even attain base constantly instead.
And even when the outdated Ohtani finally re-emerged in Game 4 on Thursday, hitting a mammoth home run that gave the Dodgers an early 4-0 lead, it was too little, too late, with Ohtani later coming up short again on a three-pitch strikeout with the tying runner at third and one out in the seventh.
That Ohtani and the workforce couldn’t higher handle his health this season will be the largest remorse from this failed three-peat pursuit.
While he was far from the only slumping bat in their lineup, he was the one who, if absolutely healthy, could have made the largest influence.
A mortal rotation
The other method the Dodgers overcame their offensive inconsistencies last 12 months, of course, was through superhuman beginning pitching.
In the 2025 playoffs, their rotation posted a 2.68 ERA and while averaging more than six innings per begin.
Replicating that form of manufacturing again always felt like an unlikely problem.
Indeed, this October, even an equally star-studded employees encountered inevitable struggles.
Outside of Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s seven-inning, one-run gem in Game 3 of the NL Division Series, the Dodgers only had one other pitcher get previous the sixth inning. And that, of course, was in Game 3 of the NLCS, when Blake Snell gave up back-to-back seventh-inning home runs in a gut-wrenching loss that all but ended the Dodgers’ season.
That didn’t imply the Dodgers’ rotation pitched terribly this postseason. They still completed the playoffs with a 3.89 mixed ERA from their starters.
Given the nice margins that came with their lackluster offense, however, that wasn’t almost good enough.
In the NLCS, the Brewers got to each of their massive arms, chasing Tarik Skubal after 5 innings of two-run ball, knocking out Yamamoto in less than three innings the following day, ambushing Snell for three home runs in Game 3, then erasing their four-run deficit against Glasnow in Game 4.
In the same method Ohtani couldn’t put the workforce on his shoulders, neither could the rotation.
RISPy business
After every loss this postseason, the Dodgers’ explanations boiled down to the same futile failure.
They generated lots of probabilities for themselves. But, as supervisor Dave Roberts said for the umpteenth time after Game 3, “we’re just not getting those timely hits.”
No stat higher epitomized that than the Dodgers’ 5-for-43 mark in these playoffs with runners in scoring place.
Such challenges, of course, aren’t distinctive to their offense. Entering Thursday, the league-wide batting average with runners in scoring place was .221.
Still, the Dodgers’ output fell far below that mark.
For a workforce that prided itself on “winning the big moments” each of the previous two Octobers, they were repeatedly unable to do so en route to this 12 months’s early exit.
“It’s just one of those points in time where it seems to go that way,” utilityman Kiké Hernández said of the Dodgers’ RISP struggles. “And it just happened to be at the worst time of the season.”
While that might be true — there is an inherent randomness to situational hitting — the difficulty has also been a recurring drawback for the Dodgers not too long ago.
Last postseason, the workforce hit .204 with runners in scoring place. This 12 months, they ranked seventh in the majors in that class with a .262 but also skilled long stretches in which massive hits felt inconceivable to constantly produce.
Questions about why that was the case will reverberate long into the offseason.
Dino Dodgers
All season, the Dodgers downplayed considerations about having the majors’ oldest lineup. Throughout the playoffs, they embraced their “Dinosaur Dodgers” nickname.
But in the finish, it was exhausting not to really feel like the membership’s age ultimately caught up to it.
Exhibit A: They didn’t hit a home run in the NLCS until Ohtani’s blast in Game 4, missing the form of constant pop that has helped carry them through offensive lulls in earlier postseasons.
“I don’t know what you can really say to that,” Freddie Freeman, the second eldest of the bunch at 37 years outdated, said before Game 4. “That’s just people’s opinions of what that is. We do know we have an older team. That doesn’t mean we’re old and we’re playing bad because we’re old. We’re just not playing that great, in my mind.”
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