Major League Baseball

Los Angeles Dodgers are latest example of why winning doesn't always cut it

Updated Oct. 7, 2021 2:15 a.m. ET

By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist

"When you’re in professional sports, winning is the only thing that matters," said Leo Durocher, the controversial but downright effective manager of four different Major League Baseball teams.

Vince Lombardi, the sage of professional football coaches, believed winning wasn’t everything. "But making the effort to win is."

Mid-20th century UCLA football head coach "Red" Sanders agreed with Lombardi, with a twist. "Winning isn’t everything," Sanders said. "It’s the only thing."

But what about when even winning just isn’t enough? At times during sports’ evolving modern history, the quirks and foibles of the way professional leagues arrange themselves can lead to situations where teams that spent a lot of time winning end up whining – with some justification – after being placed in an unfavorable dilemma.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are the latest example of how winning doesn’t always cut it. The 106 wins Dave Roberts’ team accumulated between opening day and Wednesday night’s win-or-go-home wild-card showdown with the St. Louis Cardinals was good enough to be tied for the fifth-best record achieved in Major League Baseball since the turn of the 21st century.

Jake and Jordan defend their predictions on Dodgers' World Series chances

Jake Mintz & Jordan Shusterman from the @CespedesBBQ debate the odds that the Los Angeles Dodgers make the World Series.

Problem is, it was only good enough to be the second-best team in Major League Baseball this year, and the only team ahead of them, the San Francisco Giants, just so happened to reside in the same division, the National League West.

And so the Dodgers were forced to defend their right to avoid an early vacation over just nine innings at Chavez Ravine. While other division winners that managed 18, 13 and 11 wins fewer got to sit tight with a place in the division series already assured, the Dodgers had to sweat it out in a wild-card matchup against the St. Louis Cardinals, needing a walk-off home run from Chris Taylor to advance.

Remarkably, the Dodgers had caught some ill-informed criticism for being unable to overtake the Giants, to the annoyance of Roberts.

"It’s the people that have never played at a high level that think they know what they don’t," Roberts told reporters. "People who share that view are clueless and haven’t been in the grind to understand what it takes to win 100 games in the major league season."

There is a precedent for teams putting together spectacular campaigns yet not winning their division. It happened to the 2003 Giants and the 2001 Oakland Athletics, who came unstuck to the Yankees in the ALDS, with Derek Jeter’s backhand flip to nab Jeremy Giambi at the plate providing a defining memory. It happened to the pinstripes themselves in 2018 (100 wins), finishing eight back from the Boston Red Sox.

In the National Football League, seven wins has been good enough to reach the playoffs three times and 9-7 good enough to launch a Super Bowl-winning run (2011 New York Giants), but so too has 11-5 twice been insufficient to even reach the postseason.

That happened to the 1985 Denver Broncos, who failed to reach the playoffs courtesy of losing a tiebreaker to the New England Patriots and in 2008, when the 11-5 Patriots were on the receiving end, losing a three-way tie with the Miami Dolphins and Baltimore Ravens to miss out in the season Matt Cassel filled in for an injured Tom Brady.

"We can walk out of this locker room with our hats high," Pats center Dan Koppen said that day. "Things happen, and you’ve got to deal with it."

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic movement, said "the most important thing is not winning but taking part," but as much as we love the Olympics, that notion doesn’t really fly in American sports.

Heck, the word "winningest" wouldn’t even be a word without sports, the good folks at the Oxford English Dictionary and at Merriam-Webster both attributing its invention to American athletic pages of the 1970s.

It’s fun to win and not much fun when winning doesn’t get you to where you wanted to be. It’s a mixed feeling, with pride in the excellence, yet disbelieving resignation that the prize remained elusive.

In 2019, famed English Premier League soccer team Liverpool hadn’t won the title for 29 years but pieced together a spectacular haul of 97 points over 38 games, the third-most in EPL history. Not good enough, as it turned out, with Manchester City finishing on top with 98.

In college football, it seems barely feasible these days for the SEC to be left out of national title consideration but consider that in 2004, Auburn, the 13-0 SEC champion, did not get to play for a championship after being ranked third in the BCS standings behind USC and Oklahoma.

In college hoops in 1974, No. 4 Maryland lost an overtime thriller to North Carolina State in the ACC Tournament, thereby missing out on the NCAA Tournament, promoting change to wider expansion beyond conference champions only.

Some things never change, in that everyone still wants to win, or at least wishes they were in a position to do so.

Sometimes winning sets you up for a shot at greatness and sometimes being second best isn’t quite enough, which is where the Dodgers find themselves now, having won more than almost everyone, yet needing to win again immediately to survive.

Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider Newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.