How Los Angeles Dodgers’ Load Management Playoff Rotation Could Change Baseball’s Future

As fun and dramatic as it was to suggest last weekend that the Toronto Blue Jays or Seattle Mariners could save the 2027 season (and maybe the 2028 and 2029 seasons) by beating the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series, our David Brown had it right on Wednesday: Even with a deceptively cuddly underdog in the Blue Jays, nothing that happens in the Fall Classic, slated to begin tonight, will stop the lockout from happening next Dec. 1 or determine its length.

That is up solely to the owners and how far they decide to venture over the cliff in search of their salary cap. (Have you ever seen Thelma & Louise? It’s gonna be like that.)

But the result of this World Series may determine whether or not the next era of Major League Baseball is all about regular season load management.

Hey, if MLB wants the NBA’s salary cap, it also gets basketball’s cringe-inducing vernacular.

And frankly, for the next 13 months and one week at least, MLB is much closer to the load management era than it is to the salary cap era, as Los Angeles has proven by going 9-1 in the playoffs thanks to a rotation that’s posted a 1.64 ERA.

The Dodgers, who lost in the Division Series after winning at least 100 games in 2017, 2022 and 2023, went 93-69 this season while enjoying just two 10-game stretches in which they went 9-1. The only member of the playoff rotation to throw 100 regular season innings was Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

If the Dodgers can get to the World Series with a rotation that barely pitched together in the regular season, isn’t the next frontier figuring out a way to maximize the playoff performance of everyday players at the expense of their workload from late March through September?

NBA teams have focused more on preparing for the playoffs than dominating the 82-game grind since the 2015-16 Golden State Warriors set a record with 73 regular season wins before losing to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Finals. Three of the last seven full-season champs — including the two most recent winners, the Boston Celtics and Oklahoma City Thunder — have won it all after recording at least 60 regular seasons.

To be fair, the Warriors went 67-15 and won the title in 2016-17. But of the first 16 NBA champions this century, seven won at least 60 regular season games.

In addition, an average of 36 players per season played all 82 regular season games from 1999-2000 through 2015-16. An average of 16 players have played all 82 regular season games over the last seven full NBA seasons.

Load management got so rampant that the NBA ruled in 2023 players must see action in at least 65 regular season games in order to be eligible for individual awards such as the MVP and Defensive Player of the Year.

MLB is a long way from having to consider such rules (and, given the molasses-like nature of the sport’s leadership, much further away from actually implementing said rules). But contenders were already to some degree managing the workloads of their position players long before the Dodgers figured out their rotation life hack.

Only eight of the 20 teams to reach the World Series in a full season since 2015 have featured at least three position players who appeared in at least 150 regular season games. That total includes this year’s Dodgers with Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani and Andy Pages. (The Blue Jays have two, Ernie Clement and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.)

Twenty-two of the 38 World Series teams from 1996 through 2014 featured at least three position players who’d appeared in at least 150 games.

Not surprisingly, the number of players appearing in 150 games has also gradually dropped across the board — from an expansion-era high of 90 in 1998 to 66 each of the last two seasons, which represents the most players to play 150 games since 2016, when 83 did so.

And no team has won 100 games since 2023 — which may be less about widespread parity and more about teams saving themselves for October. Turns out the line between the start of the NBA season and the end of the MLB playoffs might be a lot more direct than anyone could have thought.