The Los Angeles Dodgers entered the 2024 season as the World Series favorites thanks to an offseason that saw multiple star players join the club, including Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and Teoscar Hernández.
However, the season didn’t go as planned for much of the year. The Dodgers dealt with an excess number of injuries, and then some.
The injury bug never stopped throughout the year, and perhaps the most devastating news for the team came when it was determined the Dodgers would be without their ace for the rest of the year as Glasnow was shut down for the remainder of 2024.
That lowered morale in the Dodgers clubhouse, which led to manager Dave Roberts calling a team meeting that ended up changing the course of their season.
“It was one time that we saw a lot of fans, that we saw not from the team but from the outside, everybody was panicking because we got a lot of injuries,” Hernández recalled. “We lost a lot of pitchers. It was one time that we felt like we were down as a team.
“One meeting changed everything. Then we realized that we have the potential, that we have the players, that we’re still the Dodgers and we can do special things with the people we have healthy throughout the year and just the opportunity to maintain the team until those guys were able to come back and keep helping the team win.”
Hernández said the meeting came while the Dodgers were playing the Atlanta Braves in the middle of September. The Dodgers lost their first two games against the Braves before holding the meeting and coming back to win the next two.
“I just wanted to get the guys together,” Roberts said. “I’m not a big meeting guy. I just felt that at that point in time, I think we had lost two straight to the Braves, we got news that Tyler was going to be done for the year. And I just got a feeling that there was some kind of a little woe is me, and that’s just not who we are.
“I knew Walker was throwing that night and felt that for us to win 11 games in October, we need him. So I wanted a little bit to have that meeting with him on the mound that night and challenged him a little bit. The message basically was, I can’t believe more in them than they believe in each other. They’ve got to believe in themselves, right?
“And I just felt we have enough talent in the room to do that. I just kind of wanted to bring that to light. The most important thing was that those guys responded amongst themselves.”
Teoscar Hernández: Dodgers needed little push
While the Dodgers were still playing quality baseball overall at the time, the meeting was more focused on the future and looking ahead to the postseason.
“It was just a meeting to put everybody’s head up again and just keep pushing until we win everything,” Hernández explained.
So far, the meeting has proved successful as the Dodgers find themselves one win away from the World Series. They still have some work to do, but this club has a the talent and mindset to get it done.
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