In the last season in which the Los Angeles Dodgers did not make the playoffs, Barack Obama had not yet been re-elected. They were still pretty good in 2012, which was Andre Ethier's last good season, Chad Billingsley's last healthy one, and Kenley Jansen's first as a full-time closer. They improved from 86 to 92 wins in 2013 and have not been below 91 wins or out of the playoffs in any full season since. They won just one World Series in that stretch, and it was both fully earned—the Dodgers had an absurd .712 winning percentage when they won the version of the World Series that ended the plague-warped mini-season of 2020—and somehow not really an outlier. The Dodgers won 111 games in 2022, for an equally absurd .715 winning percentage, and that team didn't survive the NLDS. The Phillies team that made it through to the World Series that year won 87.
It doesn't feel quite right to say that the Dodgers were cheated out of World Series wins during any of those years, with the possible exception of the semi-year in which they actually won it. They have been in the postseason for nearly a decade and a half, and have during that time become the model organization in the sport—as astute and farsighted as the most financially optimized franchises, as detail-oriented and forward-thinking as the most development-oriented, richer and more ambitious than just about any other team in the sport, and exactly as cynical as everyone else. It would have been strange if the Dodgers didn't win a World Series somewhere in there, although it wouldn't have felt quite right—it wouldn't have been appropriately October-coded or appropriately Dodgers—if it wasn't a little stupid when it finally happened.
