LOS ANGELES — The past two years, the Dodgers’ season ended with parades and calls to “Run it back” for the next season.
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After their four-game sweep in the National League Championship Series at the hands of a younger, hungrier Milwaukee Brewers team ended the dream of a ‘three-peat,’ how realistic is it to head into 2027 with the same core – the oldest position player group in MLB for the past four years?
“That’s not my job. I play first base,” said Freddie Freeman, at 37 the oldest returning player on the Dodgers’ roster (infielder Miguel Rojas announced his retirement and relief pitcher Blake Treinen, who suffered a shoulder injury late in the season, is a free agent).
“We’ve got a great group of guys. We’ve accomplished a lot of things. We came up short in these four days. But we’ll see where the wind blows this offseason, what happens, what it looks like, what baseball looks like.”
The winds of change could be coming. As Freeman alluded to, the anticipated showdown between MLB’s owners and the players’ union over the next Collective Bargaining Agreement could force the biggest changes in the Dodgers’ future. If the owners are able to get the salary cap or other payroll restrictions they are aiming for, the Dodgers might be forced to change their roster by shedding payroll.
Also looming over the team’s future are the ongoing legal and financial difficulties surrounding principal owner Mark Walter that threaten to eat into the Dodgers’ enormous financial advantages.
Threatening the franchise’s plans to keep its “Golden Era” going more directly, though, is the aging roster. The Brewers certainly made the Dodgers look old in the four-game NLCS sweep.
“I don’t know what you can really say to that. That’s just people’s opinions of what that is,” Freeman said before Game 4. “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.
“But that’s people’s opinions. I can’t change your opinion because we are, in this game, a little bit older than everybody else. I don’t feel old.”
Nonetheless, Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman acknowledged awareness – if not overt concern – about the aging core on the team’s roster.
“Yeah, we’ve talked about this a lot,” Friedman said before the start of the NLCS. “With where we are in the success cycle, the success we have had, we have done the opposite of being flippant about it. ‘Oh, it’s great that we won. Now we can put our feet up.’ For us, it’s about pressing the advantage we have right now.
“We have a very talented core, and while a good number of them are getting up there in years, the experience, the way they prepare, the way they play the game, we feel like is a real competitive advantage. So we’ve been aggressive to supplement around that group, all the while pouring ourselves into our next wave.”
The Dodgers’ farm system is indeed as strong as any in MLB. They subtracted two Top 100 prospects (outfielder Zyhir Hope and right-hander River Ryan) in order to trade for pitcher Tarik Skubal in August and still have five more led by outfielder Josue De Paula.
De Paula made the jump from Double-A to the majors in September and showed his readiness in that brief audition. The Dodgers will have to make room for him in their 2027 plan.
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That won’t be easy and it’s difficult to see how the Dodgers can get younger in 2027 other than around the margins where Kiké Hernandez acknowledged Game 4 of the NLCS might be his last with the Dodgers and Rojas made it clear, talking to the team after the game and saying he was retiring. He is expected to stay with the organization in some capacity, likely in player development.
“This is it as a player. That was my last game playing. That was the last time I put these cleats on and this uniform on as a player,” Rojas said, still in full uniform long after the game ended Thursday night. “From now on, I’m going to start thinking about what’s going to happen in my life as a baseball person other than being a player. I want to start my career on the other side of this business, and I’m looking forward to doing it here with the Los Angeles Dodgers as well.
“I’m ready to move on and start the next chapter of my career.”
Hernandez isn’t ready to stop playing. But he knows it might not be in Los Angeles next year.
“I mean, I love this place. I’ve played for three other teams, but every time I look at my career I kind of obviously go back to this place,” the 35-year-old Hernandez said. “I feel like I have a lot left. … I would love to be back. I would love to have one more try, trying to win another one. But I don’t really know what’s going to happen. I hope I’m back, and if I’m not I hope that I get to play for a winning team.”
Seven other Dodgers will become free agents this winter, most prominently bullpen stalwarts Alex Vesia and Evan Phillips and Skubal. Four others – Freeman, outfielder Teoscar Hernandez, third baseman Max Muncy and utility player Hyeseong Kim – are entering the final year of their contracts in 2027, though all but Freeman have club options for 2028.
If the Dodgers are going to change things by their own hand (as opposed to CBA mandate), Teoscar Hernandez clearly has a target on his back as the most likely Dodger to be traded this winter, clearing left field for De Paula. But the Dodgers have largely painted themselves into a corner with this roster. Freeman, shortstop Mookie Betts, catcher Will Smith, center fielder Andy Pages, right fielder Kyle Tucker, two-way star Shohei Ohtani and Muncy, each a year older, are all likely to be in the starting lineup on Opening Day 2027 – whenever that might be.
“I have no idea,” Muncy said of the potential for changes before next season. “That’s for people above me to make those decisions and it’s for me to show up next year, ready to go with whatever group we’ve got. There will come a time when we think about next year. But that’s not at this moment.”
Showing up at Camelback Ranch next spring with the same core is not necessarily a bad thing. Even with only minimal changes, the Dodgers will enter 2027 as the favorites in the National League West once again and a 15th consecutive postseason berth would bring another chance to win the “crapshoot” October has become.
But it also brings this Dodger core closer to “the cliff” Friedman has talked about avoiding.
“It’s tricky because you have to find the right balance,” he said. “It’s hard to transition young players onto your roster. It’s a hard adjustment from Triple-A to the major-league level. We’ve done it some over the years. Some guys we haven’t had the patience long enough to kind of see it through (perhaps an allusion to infielder Miguel Vargas, now an All-Star for the Chicago White Sox).
“That’s the challenge we have with the expectations we have. So we have to be mindful of having a really high standard but also transitioning some of our young players. We’ve seen it some, Andy Pages is featured prominently for us, Will Smith, Alex Freeland got a lot of opportunities this year. Dalton Rushing was a big part when Will missed time. And then late in the year we saw with Josue De Paula.
“We’ve got a lot of guys coming after that as well. So for us it’s about almost having a split personality – to do everything we can to maximize our chances of winning with our major-league roster, and the other side of our personality is pouring ourselves into doing everything we can to have as much talent coming, and we feel really good about that part as well.”
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