Los Angeles Dodgers Star on Familiar Trajectory

The Los Angeles Dodgers are the presumed World Series favorites this season, not only because they have star players like Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman, and not only because they signed Roki Sasaki this offseason. It's not even because they won the World Series last season. The MLB postseason is a bit of a crapshoot, so the best team doesn't always win.

No, the reason the Dodgers are so intimidating is because of their depth. They have enough pitchers to fill out two MLB-quality starting rotations. They're versatile in how they can construct a lineup to maximize the production for each player.

Now they may also have peak Tommy Edman.

Whle Edman doesn't lead the Majors in homers (that would be Eugenio Suarez with four), he does have three on the season--albeit in five games played--which has him tied with Aaron Judge. It's not likely that he'll keep pace with a healthy Aaron Judge over the course of the season, but the home runs he's hitting harken back to his best season as a big leaguer.

Tommy homers on the first pitch of the inning! pic.twitter.com/X3DVxjAp36
— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) March 30, 2025

While his best year was technically his rookie year in 2019 with the St. Louis Cardinals, the former Stanford baseball product only played in 92 games that season while producing a 124 wRC+ and hitting over .300.

Over the course of a full season, his best year was 2022, where he hit .265 with a .324 OBP, hit 13 home runs, and held a 106 wRC+. Thanks to some sterling glove work that year, he was a 5.3 fWAR player.

So what does that have to do with Edman's 2025? That year he also began the season with a slew of dingers, hitting three in his first six games. That said, he was also collecting a few more hits overall, while batting .368 by the end of that sixth game.

If there is a team that can get Edman back to that form, it's certainly the Dodgers.

One caveat here is that this is largely based on the home run hitting, which isn't a flawless practice. That said, his Baseball Savant page is littered with red, including an expected batting average (xBA) of .330, an xSLG of .519, and a hard-hit% of 57.1. Those rank in the 88th, 88th, and 94th percentiles in all of baseball.

Yes, it's still very early on in the season, and making grand prognostications over a five-game sample are silly, but this is more of a belief in the Dodgers system.

They targeted Edman in a trade at last year's deadline, then he went on to win the NLCS MVP. Los Angeles subsequently extended Edman for five years and $74 million, and now he's a home run machine.

A team as well-run as the Dodgers knows what they're doing when it comes to player development, and so this could just be a small sample size for Edman, but it wouldn't be surprising at all if the Dodgers have unlocked something for him either, and he's just in the beginning of a big year.