Dodgers: Who's Left from LA's Fan Favorite 2017 World Series Squad?

The Dodgers' current run of 10 straight postseasons started in 2013, but the real run of dominance started in 2017, when L.A. won 104 games and went to the World Series. Los Angeles lost that Series, of course, to a team that was later proven to have engaged in an unprecedented scheme to cheat their way to a title.

From 2017 until now, the Dodgers have gone 562-309, a .645 winning percentage that equates to 104.5 wins per season. They won the 2020 World Series after getting cheated out of the 2017 title, and I'll go to my grave saying a 2017 title would have led to a 2019 World Series championship, too, because Clayton Kershaw would have had a WS MVP under his belt already and Dave Roberts wouldn't have felt the need to try to force a Defining Postseason Moment for Kersh in the 2019 NLDS and would have, instead, used some of his eight rested, effective relievers to hold a two-run lead for two innings.

But I digress. My point is that 2017 really kicked off this era of dominance for L.A., but when you look at the roster of that team, it's shockingly different from what we have on the team today.

Of the ten players who got the most plate appearances for the 2017 Dodgers, only Chris Taylor is still with the club. Twenty-six different position players got at least one PA for that team, and Taylor and Austin Barnes are the only one still in L.A., although Trayce Thompson has since returned. Overall, the Dodgers had 6,191 plate appearances that year, and only 951 of them (15.4%) were taken by guys currently on the roster (568 for CT3, 262 for Barnes, 55 for Thompson, 59 for Clayton Kershaw, and 7 for Julio Urias).

On the pitching side, just 207.2 of the 1,444.2 innings pitched (14.4%) in 2017 were thrown by guys currently on the team — 175 for Kershaw, 23.1 for Urias, and 9.1 for Walker Buehler.

It gets even more sparse if we just look at the 2017 postseason. Thompson, Urias, and Buehler all didn't play in the postseason, so the only players left from the roster that should have won the 2017 World Series are Taylor, Barnes, and Kershaw. Gone are Cody Bellinger, Justin Turner, Corey Seager, Rich Hill, Alex Wood, Hyun Jin Ryu, Kenta Maeda, Joc Pederson, Kiké Hernandez, and so many others.

And yet, the Dodgers keep winning (in the regular season, anyway, although too many people too often gloss over the 2020 WS title) and we keep rooting for them. As long as it says Dodgers on the front of the uniform, we'll keep loving them.