Are the Los Angeles Dodgers the next Kansas City Chiefs? Are they the next great sports dynasty that plays for multiple championships? The answer, despite the Dodgers’ edge on paper against every other team, is most likely no, simply because MLB’s championship format does not reward greatness as thoroughly as the one in the NFL.
The irony is that the Dodgers open the MLB season with better betting odds to successfully defend their championship (+300) than did the Chiefs at the start of the NFL season to add a third straight championship (+500). Los Angeles began the offseason at +400, but the signings of pitchers Blake Snell, Roki Sasaki and Tanner Scott pushed it to +300, way ahead of the next most favored teams, the New York Yankees (+800) and New York Mets (+850).
Yes, the Dodgers are running away from everybody else in baseball when it comes to payroll and talent. But the great equalizer for MLB is the expanded postseason format. Los Angeles knows this truth well:
- 2021: Won 106 games, lost to an 88-win Atlanta Braves team in the NLCS.
- 2022: Won 111 games, lost to an 89-win San Diego Padres team in the NLDS.
- 2023: Won 100 games, lost to an 84-win Arizona Diamondbacks team in the NLDS.
- 2024: Won 98 games and won the World Series, but faced two elimination games against the 93-win Padres in the NLDS and was so short of pitching by Game 5 of the World Series that manager Dave Roberts was going to use a position player, Kiké Hernandez, to pitch if the Yankees tied the game against Walker Buehler, who was asked to close out the Fall Classic on one day of rest.
See, in the NFL postseason, the home team almost always wins, and the better team almost always wins. So, the path to the title is quick and geared to reward the best teams. It is less of a minefield. The Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles didn’t need to play a road playoff game to reach the Super Bowl.
First, let’s examine what postseason homefield advantage means in the NFL and MLB over the past four years:
Home teams, last four postseasons
Home field means next to nothing in baseball, so “earning” the advantage is a trifle. In the NFL, home field can matter because of weather and crowd influence (though teams have done a much better job in recent years with snap count strategies to diminish false starts that can be caused by noise). Football is also a sport where the better team simply wins more often.
Referee bias toward home teams, despite conspiracy theories, is not a factor. Check this out:
Penalties, 2024–25 NFL playoffs
Sometimes, the better team (the one with more wins) plays on the road, such as when the winner of a weak division “earns” home field over a wild-card team, despite having a worse record. So, let’s run the same test again, only this time looking at how the better teams have fared (tied win totals excluded), regardless of venue (and counting series wins for MLB playoffs):
Better team, last four postseasons
If you consider only matchups in the past three NFL postseasons when the home team is also the team with more wins, the edge is even more enormous. Those teams, including the Chiefs and Eagles this year, win 80.7% of the time: 21–5. Playoff upsets—like those that happened to the Dodgers in 2021, ‘22 and ‘23—rarely happen in the NFL. (Sorry, Detroit Lions fans. Too soon?)
With fewer upsets in the NFL, the better teams advance more often, which means the same teams keep showing up in championship games. The scorecard:
Teams to reach Super Bowl/World Series, past 12 postseasons
Only eight franchises account for the past 18 Super Bowl slots. Eight of the past nine Super Bowls have featured either the Chiefs or the New England Patriots.
Of course, that brings us to the biggest reason better teams in the NFL win more often than in MLB: quarterbacks. Their influence on outcomes is greater than any position in sports, even more than goaltenders in hockey and point guards in basketball. That has become truer as the NFL geared its rules to protect their safety and to allow receivers to run more freely, all to encourage the fan-friendly passing game. The plan has worked. It has driven strategy and enormous growth.
The Dodgers’ Sasaki can start only once every four, five or six games. Patrick Mahomes influences every game. Half of the 18 quarterbacks in these past nine Super Bowls have been Mahomes and Tom Brady. Only Joe Burrow of the Cincinnati Bengals interrupted what would have been nine straight AFC champions quarterbacked by Mahomes and Brady, and it took one of those rare NFL postseason upsets: Burrow’s 10–7 Bengals beat Mahomes’s 12–5 Chiefs in Kansas City.
The magic of Mahomes is not just that he can make plays through the air or on the ground in critical moments, but also that he rarely makes mistakes. Coach Andy Reid can put the game in his hands and not worry, which allows more freedom in play calling. Mahomes has thrown 51 passes in these playoffs without being intercepted. He plays the game with no fear of failure, putting him in the company of clutch athletes such as Brady, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, David Ortiz and Derek Jeter, all of whom played with a freedom from consequence.
Led by Reid and Mahomes, the Chiefs play such disciplined football that opponents feel the pressure of knowing Kansas City will give them nothing. In this postseason, Kansas City has:
- Scored 10 times on 19 possessions—while punting just four times, including only twice on a three-and-out.
- Scored five of the six times they took possession on no worse than their own 35-yard line (excepting running out the clock at the end of game).
- Been penalized only nine times for 50 yards compared to 14 times for 130 yards by their opponents.
- Run 113 offensive snaps and turned the ball over once.
The Chiefs also have an outstanding coaching staff. In a key fourth down stop, defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo disguised a blitz so well from the left side of the defense the Bills shifted their protection concern toward the other side (not to mention having only down linemen to protect Buffalo QB Josh Allen against the league’s most notorious big-down blitzer). And they stopped Allen three times on quarterback sneaks after he had failed to get the first down only once all year. With his penchant for taking the snap with his left leg back to dive left of center, Allen was too predictable for the Kansas City defense, which devised a scheme to stop it.
Watching the Chiefs play is like watching another dynasty: Joe Torre’s Yankees. Because Kansas City plays such disciplined football and because they have Mahomes, the Chiefs have won 17 straight games decided by one score. Because the Yankees played such disciplined baseball and had Mariano Rivera as their closer, they went 12–0 in postseason games decided by one run from 1998 until Game 7 of the 2001 World Series.
Forget the Chiefs for a moment; the Dodgers have a ways to go to measure up to those Yankees. Los Angeles will try to become the first team to win back-to-back World Series since the Yankees won three in a row from 1998 through 2000. It is the longest such drought without a repeat champion in the history of the World Series.
What set those Yankees apart was how well they solved what former Oakland A’s executive Billy Beane called “the crapshoot” of the postseason. From 1996 through 2001, the Yankees were 56–22 in the postseason, an absurd winning percentage of .718 against the best competition. That run included a 17–3 record in games decided by one run.
One of the keys to solving the postseason riddle was the depth of the Yankees’ pitching. It was so deep that no matter how a series broke, the Yankees could match up their No. 4 starter, such as Orlando Hernandez, against their opponent’s No. 1 and still feel as if the matchup was no worse than a push. The Dodgers will have that same enormous advantage come October, health permitting. If they have four of their big five healthy—Snell, Sasaki, Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow—nobody is going to beat them. That’s just too much ace-quality, pure stuff for an opponent to weather game after game.
Then again, all of them have durability questions, which is why Los Angeles is going to play the regular season so conservatively with a six-man rotation, extra rest and use of the injured list that nobody is likely to throw more than 130 innings. The staff leader last year was Gavin Stone, who threw 140 ⅓ innings—before blowing out his shoulder, ruling him out for the 2025 season.
Baseball is played much differently than when the Yankees fielded their dynasty. The addition of the second and third wild-card teams in each league has disincentivized both the bottom and top of the hierarchy—except for the Dodgers. Fewer teams buy into five-year teardowns like the Houston Astros and Chicago Cubs did, but also fewer teams are trying to assemble 100-win rosters.
The way forward has been to build a roster that can simply win more than it loses, then fortify it at the trade deadline to enter the tournament and take your chances. Look how far the bar has been lowered to play for the World Series:
League Championship Series teams
Half of the final four teams in the past four years did not win more than 90 games. Front offices are keenly aware of this.
The Dodgers are the antidote to playing the middle ground. They are so good that even before they play a game this year people are wondering if they are too good for the game, perhaps even the lever to a new economic system. Let’s wait and see. They aren’t Reid’s Chiefs or Torre’s Yankees, not yet anyway. October looms as baseball’s great equalizer.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Could the Dodgers Be MLB's Version of the Chiefs? It's Complicated..
