117 wins? 40 different pitchers? Four themes that will dominate the Dodgers' regular season

LOS ANGELES -- The identity of the 2026 Los Angeles Dodgers is presented in a 100-second hype video that airs before each home game. It's set to the beat of Billie Eilish's "Bad Guy" and begins with a question, asked by actor Jason Bateman: What's wrong with being the bad guy? Near the end, Bateman summons Tony Montana, the fictional drug lord from the movie "Scarface": You need teams like us so you can point your finger and say, "That's the bad guy."

So, yes, the Dodgers' marketing team is leaning into the "bad guy" narrative, even if the players are just along for the ride.

"I personally don't care," Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts said. "You can call us whatever you want to call us. At the end of the day, you've got to go play the game. Villains, not villains, whatever -- the game will determine who wins and who loses. The villains is outside noise."

If the outside noise was loud last year, this year, after a second straight championship and a third consecutive blockbuster offseason, it will be deafening.

With a bitter labor fight over the game's economics looming, it feels as if the entire sport has fixed its gaze on the Dodgers. It's them against everybody else. And while some, like Betts, find it best to ignore that reality, others, like Max Muncy, seem to draw strength from it.

"We always have that target," the Dodgers' longtime third baseman said. "It's just going to be even bigger now. It's a challenge, but it's something we get to look forward to. We get to embrace it. That's what makes it fun. That's why you've heard guys say, 'Being a Dodger is not for everybody.' You have to want to be out there and get everyone's best every single night. It just creates a challenge that you've got to find a way to embrace."

The Dodgers -- 4-2 in their first homestand despite getting almost nothing from the top half of their star-studded lineup -- will be challenged every night by opposing teams eager to take them down. Sometimes it will push them, other times it will wear on them. All throughout, though, the Dodgers' sights will be set on October. These six months are merely the buildup.

With that in mind, we identified four themes that will shape their regular season.

Break the regular-season wins record? The Dodgers don't care

Last year's championship team won 93 regular-season games, the Dodgers' lowest in a full season since 2018. In 2022 and 2023, they won a combined 211 times -- only to get bounced in the National League Division Series each year. So while many outsiders have spent these past two years wondering if the Dodgers could reach 117 wins, surpassing the 1906 Chicago Cubs and the 2001 Seattle Mariners for the single-season record, nobody inside the Dodgers' clubhouse cares.

"Anything's possible, certainly with this team, but that's not our north star," Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. "It's really not."

Their ultimate goal, of course, is a third straight championship, something no NL team has accomplished. But they still believe their best path is to secure home-field advantage and earn a first-round bye. The Dodgers survived a gauntlet last October, overcoming the randomness of a wild-card series, then playing the first two games of a best-of-five NLDS in Philadelphia and later having to win Games 6 and 7 of the World Series in Toronto.

They'll spend these next six months hyper-focused on avoiding that, regardless of how many wins it takes.

"There's so many challenges to that three-game series," Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes said. "We lose series throughout the course of the year to teams that aren't as talented as we are, but that's the nature of the game. So being able to avoid that three-game series and really set things up and use those five days to prepare is really important."

It almost feels like a distant memory at this point, but this era's Dodgers were long defined by dominant summers that only led to disappointing autumns. From 2013 to 2023, they won 10 division titles in 11 years, accumulated a major league-leading 1,031 regular-season wins -- 91 more than the second-place New York Yankees -- and came away with only one championship, during the COVID-shortened 2020 season.

The disappointments prompted an internal study to determine what failed. Some of it could be chalked up to the happenstance of October, but there was something about the way they prepared, about the way their rosters were built, about the way they approached the preceding six months.

The Dodgers aren't sharing that report, but one thing is certain: maxing out on regular-season wins is not on it.

"We won 111 games four years ago and we got eliminated in the first round," Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman said. "I just want to be home in the playoffs."

Will they really use 40 pitchers again? 'It's far from an exact science'

The Dodgers set a franchise record by using 40 players to pitch in 2024. In 2025, amazingly, they did it again. And through that, they sharpened what has become an organizational ethos: Because pitchers are so susceptible to injury, and because it's so difficult to predict when or how they happen, the Dodgers have become methodical in the rehab process, often giving them way more time than they need.

In short, they want to make sure that when pitchers return, they don't get hurt again.

"Going through a situation for guys to come back and either not be themselves or suffer injury spoke loudly," Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said. "And for us, it's about trying to build out the foundational steps in the rehab process to come back and stay back. And you can't possibly simulate the adrenaline and the stress of a major league game in that process, so we try to build up as much tolerance as we can to get them in the best spot to get back to stay back. But it's far from an exact science."

The Dodgers did this with Yoshinobu Yamamoto in 2024, then with Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and, to a certain extent, Shohei Ohtani in 2025. This year, they're doing it with Snell again. He's a two-time Cy Young Award winner on a $182 million contract, but he was slowed by shoulder fatigue in spring training and is progressing slowly, not set to return until late May at the earliest.

Snell being unavailable allows Roki Sasaki and Justin Wrobleski to get extended looks. Later, if any one of Yamamoto, Glasnow, Ohtani or Emmet Sheehan need to miss time, the Dodgers can call up another promising pitching prospect in River Ryan, who would help front most other major league rotations.

Slow-playing starters is a luxury perhaps only the Dodgers possess.

But if you're looking for a reason their regular-season win total might not match their talent level, this might be the biggest.

Load management for an aging lineup? Stay tuned

If you're wondering whether Freeman, now in his age-36 season, will take some additional time off this year, he already has that figured out.

"I'll miss probably two games when the baby comes," said Freeman, whose wife, Chelsea, is expecting the couple's fourth child. "And then I always take the day off after we win the division, so that's three. A hundred and fifty-nine -- that's good enough, right?"

The Dodgers are old, relatively speaking, especially on the position-player side (average age: 31.3, tops in the majors). One of their superstars, Freeman, is adamant about playing every day. Another, the 33-year-old Betts, now plays the second-most physically demanding position on the field. And given Ohtani's presence, the designated hitter is not an option to occasionally ease their workloads.

Keeping those two players fresh isn't just critical to the Dodgers' chances of three-peating, but of extending their contention window as much as possible.

"So much of that is going to show itself in terms of how guys are moving, whether they're going to be able to stay in their legs when they're hitting," Friedman said of planning additional off-days for Freeman and Betts. "There are so many things that present themselves that will give us a much better sense of how aggressive we want to be in that."

As he was learning shortstop in 2024 and the early part of 2025, Betts took hundreds of ground balls every day. Four hours before game time, he'd already be drenched in sweat. The continual toll on his body became a cause for concern, but it was only temporary. Betts hadn't played shortstop since high school. He needed to build volume and create muscle memory. His pregame work has since been pared down significantly.

"It needed to be," Dodgers infield coach Chris Woodward said. "You can't physically keep doing that."

Before every game, Betts, Freeman, Muncy (35 years old) and Miguel Rojas (37) are on the field for early defensive work. Often Woodward needs other coaches to help him navigate it all. It's a point of pride throughout the organization, a symbol of the dedication and meticulousness that has helped the Dodgers dominate this era. The work, Woodward stressed, is strategic and efficient. Rather than take a toll on their bodies, he believes it's a major reason they remain productive.

It's partly why Freeman doesn't want days off.

"I don't think I'm old," he said. "Like, I don't feel old, so it's hard to say that. And I know, I get it, in our sport, mid-30s is old in our job. But as players, our job is to be ready for the game that day."

Can Ohtani win a Cy Young? Only if he maximizes his opportunities

If there was any lingering doubt about Ohtani's readiness to be a traditional starting pitcher at the outset of this season, his six innings of one-hit ball on Tuesday should have erased it. Despite not pitching in his first spring training game until March 18, eight days before Opening Day, Ohtani is already a full-fledged member of this rotation, with the expectation being that, assuming good health, he will occupy a spot all season.

"The desire is high, and I think it's realistic," Roberts said of Ohtani going wire-to-wire as a starting pitcher, part of his grander ambitions to win a Cy Young Award. "Then the bigger question is: How are we going to manage that and navigate it?"

It will consist mostly of additional days of rest. The Dodgers are opening this season with seven Thursday off-days in nine weeks, and they'll use them to give Ohtani additional time between starts. Ohtani's second pitching start is expected to come on Wednesday, at which point he'll take the mound on seven days' rest. Expect that to be the norm. In his three-year run as a two-way player with the Los Angeles Angels from 2021 to 2023, Ohtani never started on the traditional four days' rest and made 40 of his 74 starts after at least six days off.

Ohtani will be in the lineup every day. When he's pitching, he will be as unrestricted as any other starting pitcher. The only real way to manage his workload is to maximize his time between starts -- a pursuit made easier by the Dodgers' pitching depth.

How pitching impacts Ohtani's offense is also worth monitoring. Here's what the numbers -- in this case, OPS -- tell us.

What can we conclude from this? It's hard to say. Some years Ohtani hit really well on his start days, some years he didn't. Some years there seemed to be a toll the day after his starts, some years not so much. Teams rely far more heavily on internal metrics and biomechanical data to determine their players' fatigue, not batted-ball outcomes. The Dodgers will do the same. Roberts said performance -- good or bad -- will not alter Ohtani's pitching schedule. The additional rest will simply be baked in, at least while it's feasible.

It's something Ohtani expects.

"I believe the team should be prioritizing Yoshinobu, Glasnow, and Snell when he's back," Ohtani said through an interpreter. "So, I think it's easy to kind of fit me into that schedule whenever the team feels that's a good thing. What's most important is that we're all healthy in October."