The Los Angeles Dodgers have carefully prepared this offseason for a potential three-peat, though there is still a lot of baseball left to be played.
The Dodgers opened up their checkbooks and spent $309 million on two stars — outfielder Kyle Tucker and closer Edwin Diaz.
The team needed bullpen help after spending all of 2025 holding on by the edge of their seat with relief woes. Also, the corner outfield was the weakest spot on the roster in terms of depth and quality.
The organization responded by getting the best players at those positions in free agency, and now, the roster looks as good as reasonably possible for Opening Day, with veterans and youth that offer a good mix.
However, despite how things may look on the outset, things could still go wrong, with injuries or notable slumps causing them to underperform.
The “Doomsday Scenario”
FanGraphs senior writer Dan Szymborski filtered through the Dodgers’ projections, looking for the worst possible case scenario, and he found that even if things go terribly off track, October baseball should still be in the cards.
“It’s really hard to kill the Dodgers. I argued after the 2024-2025 offseason, a very busy one, that the Dodgers weren’t really improving their average outcome so much as drastically raising their floor,” Szymborski wrote.
“I stand by it; they’ve added Kyle Tucker and Edwin Díaz while losing nobody who was crucial to the 2025 team. That doesn’t mean they’re going to be projected to win 105 games or anything, but it does mean that in most of their worst projected outcomes, they’re still a playoff contender.
“Their 10th-percentile projection, for example, is 86 wins. Their 2% chance of finishing below .500 is the smallest percentage I’ve ever projected, a record that now goes back more than 20 years.
“Doomsday for the Dodgers may require an actual doomsday scenario like societal collapse, nuclear war, or a vacuum metastability event. Since I do not know how to prevent any of those, there’s nothing more I can add.”
It is quite shocking that, even in a feisty National League West, the Dodgers are seemingly guaranteed to make the playoffs.
Even if “Doomsday” does come for the Dodgers, they have spent millions to ensure they can reach a baseline of wins, and the investment has them looking likely to get a chance at baseball immortality.
