Opening Day is just a formality for supernova Dodgers in their quest for a three-peat

For 29 teams, Opening Day is about hope. It takes different forms — you have your hopeless cases, your rebuilders, your dark horses, your surefire contenders — but when you boil it down, it marks the turning of a page. No matter what kind of disappointment they may have suffered in 2025, 2026 could be different. 2026 could be their year.

For the Dodgers, Opening Day is just a fact. They'll play baseball at home in LA at 5:30 p.m. against the Diamondbacks. They might win, they might lose; it doesn't matter. They'll truck along.

Because the Dodgers aren't on the same page as those 29 other teams. They're reading a different book entirely.

Are the Dodgers perfect? No. But they may be as close to it as any team possibly can be. They have the best rotation in baseball, the deepest lineup in baseball, the most money in baseball. Opening Day, and the 161 other games they'll play from March 27 to Sept. 27, represent just incremental steps toward an inevitability. The regular season is an afterthought; talk to the Dodgers when we get to October.

FanGraphs' Dan Szymborski wrote that even in the worst of the Dodgers' projected regular season outcomes, they're still postseason contenders.

"Doomsday for the Dodgers may require an actual doomsday scenario like societal collapse, nuclear war, or a vacuum metastability event," he wrote. "Since I do not know how to prevent any of those, there's nothing more I can add."

The most perfect team in baseball doesn't need to be so perfect as to win 100 games. They don't even need a first-round bye. The Dodgers are an October threat just by existing. They're five, 10, 20 steps ahead of those 29 other teams, and they're daring everyone else to catch up.

2026, for the Dodgers, is about playoff dominance. It's about kicking their opponents while they're already down. It's about joining the Evil Empire Yankees and the (far more lovable) early-70s Athletics as the only teams to win three World Series championships in a row.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto already laid it out plainly last year. Losing is not an option.

Dodgers have the best ... everything in baseball, and nothing is slowing them down

How do you make a perfect team even more perfect? You add Kyle Tucker and Edwin Díaz. They were the only two free agents the Dodgers signed in the offseason, though "only" feels like the wrong qualifier. They only added the best position player and best reliever available in last year's free agent class. No big deal.

The narrative around Tucker has been rather ungenerous. During his free agency, the New York Post's Joel Sherman wondered aloud if he "burned to play," and speculated that a disinterested approach to the game might be holding up his market. And then he signed a record-breaking deal with the Dodgers.

The Dodgers don't care whether or not he burns to play. They don't care if doesn't stand out among all of the big personalities more befitting of Hollywood. They care that he keeps his head down, slugs 20+ homers, plays solid corner outfield defense, puts up another casual 5.0+ WAR season. His expected No. 2 spot in the lineup is just as symbolic as it is strategic. He'll be hiding behind the main attraction all year.

Do we even need to say his name? LA is home to a guy who might go down as the greatest baseball player who ever lived.

This year is only Shohei Ohtani's third with the Dodgers, but it's hard to come up with anything new to say. People who don't know the difference between a ball and a strike still know who Shohei Ohtani is. He's that good, that singular.

And this is the first year Dodgers fans will see a complete picture of Ohtani, the pitcher. He struck out 11 batters in four innings in his last Cactus League start. He's quietly ambitious about competing with his own rotation-mate Yoshinobu Yamamoto for to dethrone Paul Skenes and win the NL Cy Young — really, his final frontier in terms of awards.

If the Dodgers do have one major concern this year, it's one of Ohtani's countrymen. So far, Roki Sasaki has been all hype and no substance. His time in MLB so far has been one of the more baffling storylines in all of baseball. He was bad as a starter, and then he was hurt, and then he was amazing as a reliever, and now he's bad as a starter again.

But the Dodgers are unwilling to admit defeat with Sasaki (for now), and they're perhaps the only team in the game that can afford the luxury of being so bullish. Even if they lose every time Sasaki is on the mound, they're still the safe bet to win every other day. The Dodgers are just throwing him into the deep end and hoping he'll learn to swim, and it costs them nothing but their pride if he can't.

That's the keyword this season: pride. So much has been made of the Dodgers being the new Evil Empire while the Dodgers themselves just float above the noise. They're content to look down from their ivory tower as fans and owners wail about how unfair the game has become.

Sure, they might hit lulls. There may be moments as devastating as Yamamoto's ruined no-hitter and Teoscar Hernández dropped fly balls and injuries that will make us want to tear our hair out. The Dodgers will truck along.

Everyone knows what the real stakes are. We've established that the Dodgers don't care, and don't need to care, about the regular season. But when they get to the postseason (again: when, not if), it's about pride. It's about proving what everyone already knows.

Buckle up. It's three-peat or bust.