NEW YORK — It had felt so close, yet remained so difficult to cement.
For more than a decade, the Dodgers had aimed for more than just regular-season success. More than just repeated trips to the postseason. More than just a lone, COVID-bubble championship in a pandemic-shortened 2020 season.
This, as president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman had declared time and again, was supposed to be a “golden era of Dodgers baseball,” a generation of organizational excellence unmatched in the storied, but often tortured, history of the century-old franchise.
The fact it hadn’t become that yet was a source of annual internal consternation.