LA Times drops aggressive Dodgers World Series take at worst possible time

Yoshinobu Yamamoto's return to the Dodgers rotation was exactly what the team needed to actually look like a team that wouldn't flame out in the NLDS again. The offense, with the exception of a few injury-related wrinkles for Freddie Freeman and Teoscar Hernández, was solid again after getting Mookie Betts, Tommy Edman, and Max Muncy back, and Michael Kopech has breathed new life into the bullpen.

The biggest Dodgers-related question marks were still hanging around the rotation, which had lost Gavin Stone ahead of Yamamoto's return, on top of Tyler Glasnow and Clayton Kershaw's absences. In his first start off the IL against the Cubs, Yamamoto pitched four innings (he was on a pitch count) and only allowed one run while striking out eight batters. The velocity was still there, and the curveball was confounding Chicago's hitters.

It was exactly what the Dodgers needed for a boost of confidence, but the rotation will still have to contend with a struggling Walker Buehler and Bobby Miller. There's more optimism, sure, but there are still many reasons to be concerned, and some of them aren't even pitching related. The same night Yamamoto made his start, the Dodgers blew a lead in the eighth inning with three errors from the defense.

Dylan Hernández of the LA Times didn't really take that into account in a new column. He wrote, right at the top of his piece, "You read it here first, or at least for the first time since their rotation started crumbling like the California coastline: The Dodgers will win the World Series."

Dylan Hernández of The Los Angeles Times got a little too excited about Yoshinobu Yamamoto's comeback start for the Dodgers

Now we're getting ahead of ourselves. The Dodgers proved during Yamamoto's start that a great pitching performance cannot always constitute a win if the rest of the team isn't at the top of their game. That inning represented a failure from top to bottom — from reliever Evan Phillips, who intentionally walked Cody Bellinger and gave up a two-run double after his defense fell apart behind him, all the way down to several members of that famed defense.

Yamamoto looked great, and no one's disputing that. He received advice from Clayton Kershaw when he curveball just wasn't clicking the day before his start, and the Kershaw influence was definitely observable. If he struck out eight batters on 60 pitches, imagine what he could do without the short leash.

But the Dodgers are still far from perfect, and we're going to need to see a lot more from this team over the last weeks of the regular season before we start making grand, sweeping proclamations like Hernández's.