Tom Krasovic: World champion Dodgers have Padres in a predicament

On the rare times when a Major League Baseball franchise becomes a true dynasty, its closest rivals often bear much of the brunt.

That’s a predicament the Padres are living.

It’s not entirely a bummer for them. Pertinent history serves up a crumb or two of hope. Also, heightened competition often can spur growth.

There’s no gilding that the Los Angeles Dodgers’ growing mastery of baseball is troubling for Padres Land.

L.A. is too deep to lose the 162-game marathon, denying the Padres and other National League West teams a shot at skipping the first round.

And the past two autumns, they’ve gobbled up the World Series tournament, itself a test of depth.

Winning 25 of 34 games, including a Saturday’s nervy Game 7 in Toronto, they’ve become MLB’s first back-to-back champions since the 1999-2000 New York Yankees.

The Padres’ historical crumbs of hope?

The only true dynasties of the wild-card era saw a divisional rival emerge to win the World Series.

First were the 1997 Florida Marlins.

Their top rival, the Atlanta Braves, were every bit the 162-game marathoners these Dodgers are, winning each full-season NL East race from 1991-2005, making them an NL dynasty if not an MLB dynasty.

The addition of the wild card was thus a gift, dangling a competition against the Braves the Marlins could win: the best-of-seven League Championship Series. The Marlins won it, then the World Series..

The Red Sox are the other example. In the American League’s 2004 LCS, they overcame the regal Yankees, who’d won four World Series titles and six pennants between 1996-2003. Boston went to win the Fall Classic.

But again, these are mere crumbs.

The Red Sox are a big-market club, able to spend with the Yankees on payroll and infrastructure.

The Marlins or anyone else beating the Braves in October, it turned out, wasn’t earth-shattering. Atlanta got to just one World Series over its 11 postseasons starting the wild-card era.

I’ll buy that heightened competition, posed by a division rival-dynasty, contributed to the Marlins and Red Sox’s breakthroughs. Specifically, the Marlins went wild in free agency. Doing a pump-and-dump, they signed several stars who led them to the trophy, then sold them off. The Red Sox innovated better, leaning into the analytics revolution and selecting more for mental toughness.

But, crumbs of optimism are all I have. No Padres hopium here. Not with the Dodgers stretching the limits of what seemed possible in baseball.

Tell me that’s an exaggeration.

Consider:

In Game 7, ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto bagged the final eight outs just one night after throwing 96 pitches across six innings, and the 5-foot-10 righty did it with improved velocity on both his sinker and four-seam fastball.

This fall Shohei Ohtani pitched with triple-digit heat and hit home runs that resembled Herman Munster’s blasts in a stupid 1960s TV show. Ohtani authored this absurdity in Game 3 against the Jays: nine times on base over the 18 innings via two home runs, two doubles and five walks of which four were intentional and three were with the bases empty.

Mookie Betts pushed boundaries, too. At 33, the former right-field star led Major League shortstops in runs saved in his first full year at the position.

Betts’ close friend, Freddie Freeman, a year ago hit the first walkoff grand slam in a World Series and homered in the next three games. This month his home run that ended the 18-inning game made Freeman, 36, the first player with multiple walkoff homers in the World Series.

Let’s go macro.

The Dodgers stand now as Japan’s team, boasting a third Japanese star in rookie Roki Sasaki, 24, who late in the season morphed into a dominant closer, filling the roster’s lone glaring void. Last winter, Sasaki chose the Dodgers over the Jays and Padres, who were also finalists.

The Dodgers aren’t without vulnerabilities. Age is creeping up on several stars.

Baseball itself serves another countervailing force, such as the Blue Jays coming on very strong this fall.

In fact, the Jays would’ve won the World Series if not for Isiah Kiner-Falefa being thrown out at home plate — by a ham sandwich’s width — in the ninth inning, keeping the score tied.

Jays fans will rue that near-miss for years. And infield instructors will study it.

Kiner-Falefa, who has average footspeed, stayed quite near third base when Yamamoto began his pitch. Nor did he take a secondary lead when the ball was grounded toward drawn-in second baseman Miguel Rojas.

Answering reporters, Kiner-Falefa said he was told not to get doubled up.

Even still, he may have scored, if he’d run across the plate instead of sliding.

The Dodgers don’t need many breaks. They took advantage of them late in Game 7, hitting three hanging pitches for bases-empty homers.

This came to mind as L.A.’s Dave Roberts celebrated his third World Series victory as a manager to go with the ’04 ring he won as a Red Sox base-stealer deluxe: are the Dodgers indeed “brilliant” and “ruthless in their implementation of what they believe in,” as Billy Beane, the famed industry disruptor of the Oakland A’s described them in July to The Athletic?

It seems probable. Related, regardless of the economic system, they’d be tough to beat.

How are the Padres to respond?

Realiizing that it’s win-now time due to huge financial commitments to several older players, pull out the stops between now and the 2026 summer trade deadline to improve a good but not good enough roster.

And ahead of MLB’s looming round of labor negotiations, lobby for better terms in the next collective bargaining agreement.