LOS ANGELES – Forty minutes after the Milwaukee Brewers emptied the visitors’ dugout at Dodger Stadium and turned the defending champs’ three-peat dream into a National League Championship Series nightmare, Miguel Rojas’ eyes were still bloodshot from tears. The Dodgers’ reign of baseball dominance ended Thursday night in stunning fashion, and only time will tell what’s next for their aging dynasty amid a changing baseball landscape.
The only certainty is that it will not look the same.
“We never intended to be in this position,” Rojas said, “and not be able to do it.”
(Photo by Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)
After a shutout, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts addressed his players before giving the floor to Rojas, one of the team’s prized voices. In a clubhouse loaded with superstars, the 37-year-old infielder had emerged as a key ingredient to the team’s championship push, and his no-nonsense heroics in Game 7 at home in the 2025 World Series helped put the Dodgers in position to make history this year.
Rojas had a hard time getting out of his uniform and underpants Thursday night, knowing that the Game 4 loss spelled the end of not only the Dodgers’ World Series aspirations, but also his journey as a major leaguer. He thanked his teammates for changing his life, then broke the news of his impending retirement.
“That’s it,” Rojas confirmed to me in the Dodgers clubhouse. “That was my last game to play. That was the last time I wore these cleats and this uniform as a player.”
Neither he nor the rest of the Dodgers could have imagined their journey ending on October 15th.
The Dodgers entered the postseason with one of the most talented teams ever assembled, a payroll more than twice the size of their NLCS competitors and the experience of winning three World Series championships over the last six seasons. They were trying to become the first team since the 1998-00 Yankees and the first NL team to win three consecutive World Series titles.
The Milwaukee Brewers, now playing in their first World Series since 1982, didn’t care.
Milwaukee won a franchise record 103 games this year despite ranking last in the National League in home runs. The Brewers earned a well-deserved reputation for wreaking havoc with their contact, speed and general unwillingness to leave the zone.
But they just didn’t work their way through this NCLSH.
(Photo by Luke Hales/Getty Images)
Undaunted, undaunted, undaunted, they outplayed the Dodgers at every turn, out-maneuvering their star-studded foes, countering every punch, applying constant pressure and stealing the will of the defending champs, who couldn’t help but flip the lids afterward.
“No matter how much you earn, these moments are bad,” said Kiké Hernández. “I’ve won a lot in my career, but I’ve had a lot of them. They don’t get any easier. But they’re playing unbelievable right now. Congratulations to them. I hope they end up winning it all. They’re almost playing perfect baseball. This is a team that’s incredibly hungry and incredibly talented. It was incredibly easy. Suffocating.”
The Brewers faced American League Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal in Game 1, reigning World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto in Game 2 and another two-time Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell in Game 3. They fell into an early 4-0 hole against the No. 4 starter who would be the G. Game 4.
And they won them all, despite coming from behind in each one.
The latest comeback was especially stunning, considering the swing that preceded the Brewers’ fusillade of the night.
Dodgers designated hitter Shohei Ohtani had looked like a shell of himself at the plate for months as he battled multiple physical ailments that could require procedures this offseason.
“Hard to say at this point,” Ohtani said through interpreter Will Ireton. “It’s something that will be analyzed, discussed during the off-season.”
Entering Thursday, Ohtani was hitless in his previous 25 games and had knocked in just one run in that stretch. So when he unloaded on an electrifying three-run, 428-foot drive, then turned toward the home dugout and released months of frustration with a flip and a scream, it looked like it could be a turning point not just in the game, but potentially in the series.
“He gets that moment, it’s like, ‘This is the swing we’ve been waiting for,'” third baseman Max Muncy told me. “We’ve got a good lead, we’ve got Glas on the mound, we’re safe behind him.”
If the Dodgers had won Game 4, they would have set up Skubal and Yamamoto for a second shot at the Brewers in Games 5 and 6.
“I was thinking this before the match started”, Skubal told me. “There was no doubt in my mind that we were going to get to a Game 5, and my thought process was, ‘I’m going to take the Yama ball in Game 6 and we’ll see what happens. But baseball … it’s hard to win.’
Especially against these brewers, who did what they always do.
(Photo by Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)
They kept pulling away — two runs in the fourth, two more in the fifth, a blast by Garrett Mitchell. Just like that, the Dodgers went down in the sixth inning and were facing another unpleasant battle against the Brewers’ dominant relief arms.
“They just kept coming together one after another after another,” Muncy continued. “They were just kind of ruthless.”
Even before the series returned to Los Angeles, the Dodgers seemed all but stunned by their opponents as Yamamoto was walked in the third inning of Game 2, marking the shortest start of the October sensation’s decorated playoff career.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
This was perhaps most evident in the attendance at Dodger Stadium. While 50,708 fans attended Game 3 and another 49,104 showed up for Game 4, neither was a sellout.
The Brewers had nine more hits, six more homers and 10 more than the Dodgers in the series. They became the first club to win all four best-of-seven games and the first to record six comeback wins in the first eight games of a postseason.
Meanwhile, their assortment of high-powered weapons crippled the Dodgers’ top sluggers, stripping them of more and more confidence with each passing day. Milwaukee’s bullpen finished the series 4-0 with a 2.08 ERA and 22 strikeouts to just six walks.
But the Dodgers had plenty of opportunities that went unpunished. The final frame of their season on Thursday night will go down as a fitting representation of their lineup’s unfulfilled potential.
Andy Pages, who yielded the team’s only two hits with runners in scoring position during the Dodgers’ first six playoff games, doubled to start the seventh inning, representing the tying run. Hernandez sacrificed Pages to third base, flipping the lineup for Ohtani, who was already out of his extended power outage.
This time, however, Ohtani returned to his previous October form, hitting three pitches against lefty Aaron Ashby while chasing a powerless third strike. Mookie Betts followed with a groundout.
An inning later, the Dodgers left Will Smith stranded at third base after a one-out double. With runners in scoring position, they finished 4-for-27 in the NCAA and 5-for-43 in the postseason.
With that, the Brewers became the first MLB team to sweep a playoff series against a team that swept them the year before.
“Sometimes you go out there and give it your all, and you come up short,” Freddie Freeman said. “It’s life. I’ve been playing this for a long time, I’ve only won three times. That hurts a lot at the end of seasons. Sometimes, you just can.”
However, the decisive way in which it happened was shocking.
(Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)
The two-time defending champions, a group loaded with veteran superstars, were supposed to be the team capable of relying on their experience under these circumstances.
The flip side of that argument? Their age may have been part of the problem.
The Dodgers didn’t buy into the narrative that Father Time had finally knocked for MLB’s oldest roster, but they had tried to prepare for the reality by giving 29-year-old Kyle Tucker a four-year, $240 million contract, making him one of only two players in their lineup under the age of 30.
Tucker and three-time All-Star closer Edwin Díaz, the Dodgers’ two biggest free-agent acquisitions — and two more reasons fans from 29 other fan bases decried the Dodgers’ payroll advantage and the sport’s competitive imbalance — labored through the worst full season of their careers.
(Photo by Daniel Shirey / MLB Pictures via Getty Images)
Coincidentally, by the time October rolled around, their two big offseason additions were finally giving the Dodgers what they had been hoping for. But they could not change the fate of their team.
And the signs of their aging roster were showing. They had pitched the most double plays in the National League this year, a problem that resurfaced this postseason, and their roster was ailing.
Among players with at least 100 plate appearances, the Dodgers’ fastest hitter this year was Teoscar Hernández, who celebrated his 34th birthday Thursday and was slowed by a hamstring strain this year. An injured knee for Freeman derailed the 37-year-old’s power late in the year, clearly playing a role at the veteran first baseman who hit just one home run in the second half of the season and one extra base hit in all of September.
More importantly, Ohtani also demonstrated his mortality.
Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)
A mix of aches and pains, including injuries to his left knee and right biceps, kept him from playing after July 3 and clearly affected him at the plate down the stretch.
He said he will have to “go back to the drawing board” in terms of treatment and training to see how best to prepare his body next year, although he still plans to try to play again next season.
By then, the group around him will have changed.
Skubal is set to become one of the highest paid pitchers in MLB history. Kiké Hernández and relievers Evan Phillips and Alex Vesia are both free agents. The Dodgers may also want to carve out more time for rookie standout Josue De Paula as they bring in a new wave of talent.
These are all conversations the Dodgers didn’t expect to be having so suddenly.
“We really tried to make something special at this club and I know next year we’ll be ready to get right back into it,” Muncy said. “But now, that’s bad.”
Of the previous 42 teams to trail 3-0 in a best-of-seven series, only one — Roberts’ 2004 Red Sox — overcame that deficit. Thirty-two of them were deleted.
The Dodgers made it 33, and now face a winter of uncertainty with their owner under federal investigation and a looming labor battle.
“You can’t think this is the end of an era,” Rojas said. “I think when you’ve got Shohei Ohtani on your team, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts and the years to come of these guys, you never think it’s going to be the end.”
At least, not for most of them.
