If they don’t quite meet the century-spanning standards of the iconic baseball curses, the Dodgers nevertheless give this year’s Fall Classic its cleanest redemption narrative. The Red Sox have won three titles since 2004; L.A.’s last one came back in 1988. As such, a potential victory would likely be talked about in the clichéd terms of failures corrected and tribulations overcome—of the differences, in other words, between this year’s team and the previous ones. But it may be closer to the truth to understand the quest for a World Series championship as an inherently chance-dependent, multiyear process, and to understand the Dodgers, win or lose, as the fluky system’s smartest players.

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Since MLB expanded its postseason in 1995 to three rounds—the league would tack on the one-game wild-card round in 2012—observers have tracked its highly unpredictable nature. Baseball is a sport designed for the long term; differences in quality between teams that may not show up in a given game or month make themselves known over a 162-game season. A five- or seven-game playoff series amounts to a drastic shrinking of scale, which makes lucky bounces and aberrational streaks, not true quality, the biggest components to success. “We allow small sample sizes and random events to determine the champion,” said the Oakland Athletics executive and analytics trailblazer Billy Beane in 2013. “That’s how it is in baseball.” Only three times in the past decade has the team with the most regular-season wins won the World Series.

Building a team that can reach the playoffs year after year, then, is paramount, and arguably nobody in the current era has done so better than the Dodgers. They’ve shelled out big contracts, routinely landing at or near the top of MLB payroll rankings, but they’ve also incorporated Friedman’s gifts for scouting overlooked talent, building a minor-league system, and assembling a flexible roster. Whereas other teams might load up for a one- or two-year run at a title, Los Angeles takes a longer view. “We feel like our responsibility is to do everything we can to sustain a certain level of success,” Friedman said in 2016. “As you look at it over a five-year period, a seven-year period, a 10-year period, we’re able to play through that time period as an upper-echelon, elite-level team.”

This year’s team isn’t the best of the current run; that would be 2017’s, which won an NL-leading 104 games en route to World Series heartbreak. It may be the most illustrative, though, of the depth and resourcefulness that have allowed the Dodgers to maintain their relevance for so long. After a 16–26 start to the season, Los Angeles turned things around behind contributions from seemingly every corner of the organization. Max Muncy, a formerly below-average Oakland Athletic who came to the Dodgers on a minor-league deal in 2017 and got called up this season as an injury replacement, ended up mashing 35 home runs. Justin Turner, who arrived in L.A. as a similar long shot in 2014, continued his ascent as a hard-hitting savant of the strike zone.