Whicker: The Dodgers’ win bears an asterisk, but they didn’t put it there

Sixty games aren’t 162.

Nobody wins the Daytona 167. They don’t stop the Masters on the back nine Friday afternoon and award the green T-shirt.

Those who say the 2020 season, and the Dodgers’ championship, don’t deserve an asterisk have a fundamental misunderstanding of what an asterisk is. It is not a scarlet letter, necessarily. It is a mark of distinction.

Ford Frick, one of baseball’s nearly unbroken line of undistinguished commissioners, wanted to put an asterisk on Roger Maris’ 1961 home run record because he played a 162-game season and Babe Ruth played 154. Maris hit his 61st home run in Game 162 and the asterisk gradually went away, and wasn’t applied to Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa or Barry Bonds.

But one can’t speculate that the Dodgers’ six-month path to glory would have been as smooth as their .717 romp through the Cliff’s Notes season.

The Dodgers had several advantages. An elongated roster favored their depth, as did the designated hitter. The main advantage was a reprieve from yet another 162-game slog through the N.L. West in a time when winning the Series was the only acceptable outcome. Maintaining focus was difficult in 2019, and pressure built. Here, Clayton Kershaw said he felt fresh, and all the Dodgers played like it.

The extra 102 games contain a lot of trap doors. In 2012 the Dodgers were 38-22. Matt Kemp had an OPS of 1.163 and was hitting .355. Then he got hurt in the 50th game, missed the next 38 games, and wound up at .906 and .303. The Dodgers were 48-54 after Game 60 and didn’t win a division they have won every year since.

Add seven-inning games in doubleheaders, and the fulltime DH, and a schedule without travel challenges, and it was more like an experiment.

A real season tests the whole organization. It makes pitchers maintain their stuff, makes hitters fight through more slumps, makes managers decide how to keep a clubhouse fresh and peaceful. The ordeal is the point.

At least it wasn’t 1981, when there was a strike in June and a settlement in August. Bowie Kuhn, who somehow preceded Marvin Miller into the Hall of Fame, decided to split the season. That allowed the Cardinals and Reds to compile the best overall records in their divisions and miss the playoffs altogether. That rankled Reds’ manager John McNamara until the day he died this summer.

The NBA, NHL and NFL have endured interruption and decided champions. But in all those cases, the teams played more than 50 percent of the schedule.

The Dodgers’ title isn’t nearly as bogus as the awards that will follow next week. Yes, the season that featured ghost baserunners will mock the past and honor 60-game MVPs and Cy Young Award winners.

In 1969 Tom Seaver went 8-0 in eight starts after Aug. 25, pitched nine innings in each game and gave up no homers in his final seven. Shane Bieber will win the A.L. Cy Young for going 8-1 with a 1.63 ERA and 122 strikeouts in 77 innings. It was a marvelous slice of a season. But it isn’t the same thing.

Nevertheless, the Dodgers deserve admiration for pushing the rock up the hill one more time, like their Brooklyn ancestors, and finally making it stick.

Three consecutive seasons ended with champagne riots in the visiting locker room in Dodger Stadium. Nobody was yelling, “Wait Till Next Year,” as they did in Brooklyn when the Dodgers lost to the Yankees in ‘41, ‘47, ‘49, ‘52 and ‘53. Next Year arrived in ‘55 but the Dodgers didn’t win again until ‘59, in the L.A. Coliseum.

No one knows if the virus will permit much baseball in 2021, but it might not matter to the Dodgers. Mookie Betts, Walker Buehler, Cody Bellinger, Corey Seager, Max Muncy, Will Smith and Julio Urias have lots of odometer space left. Management is always good for a mystery newcomer who takes to the system immediately, and the homegrown kids never seem unprepared.

Every Dodger who threw a pitch in Game 6 was signed and developed by the franchise, and a rotation of Buehler, Urias, Clayton Kershaw, Dustin May and David Price would be unmatched. That’s not bad considering the Dodgers lost Hyun-Jin Ryu, Kenta Maeda and Rich Hill and then didn’t get a single pitch from  Price.

They rolled with the punches of 2020 and then they rolled through the playoffs, and in 2021 the Dodgers will welcome 162 games at the very least. The hardest part will be their wait till next year.

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