How Dodgers past playoff failures helped find answer to bye week dilemma

This week two years ago, the Dodgers’ coaching staff and front office were looking for answers to a familiar problem.It was a proposal from some of the club’s veteran players that sparked a solution.In 2022 and 2023, the Dodgers had earned a bye for the first round of MLB’s expanded playoff format.Both times, they emerged from their weeklong break looking flat, getting eliminated in four games by the Padres the first year and embarrassingly swept by the Diamondbacks the next.Those results — each described as an “organizational failure” in their aftermath by president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman — led the Dodgers back to the drawing board ahead of another bye week in 2024.And this time, the team’s veteran roster helped concoct a new plan.In the previous two Octobers, the Dodgers not only struggled offensively following their five-day layoffs, seemingly losing their timing at the plate while their National League Division Series opponents stayed in rhythm during opening-round wild-card series.

But they also failed to conjure a necessary level of postseason intensity, suffering from what some players felt was complacency that set in during their extended pause in their schedule.“I think the hardest thing to replicate [during a bye] is the emotion of [the playoffs],” said third baseman Max Muncy, the Dodgers’ longest-tenured player.“The emotion, the stress, the ups and downs throughout the course of a game — you just can’t get that any other way than playing.”Thus, a group led by Muncy, Miguel Rojas and Will Smith approached team officials with a potential workaround.In the face of another bye-week break, they wanted to manufacture more urgency themselves.“It’s hard to go from an at-home setting to trying to find a way to flip the switch,” Muncy said.

“The best way for us to do that was to find a way to keep everyone together, you keep them at the field, you don’t let that switch ever get turned off.That was somethin...