In 1986, the Dodgers finished 73-89. Following the season, Bill James wrote about the team in his 1987 Baseball Abstract:

First, James put the disappointing Dodger season in historical perspective.

How serious was it? 1986 was the worst season for the Dodgers in almost 20 years. With a team that was supposed to be in the prime of its life, the Dodgers have had losing records in two of the last three seasons. Only one other time since 1938 have the Dodgers had a losing record twice in three years, and then they knew they were rebuilding. Is the Dodger dynasty moribund? Will they be back in the race in 1987? If not, when will they return?

Like the 2005 team, the 1986 team was one season removed from a division title. But the '86ers were bad in different ways than the 2005 Dodgers.

... To put the Dodgers of 1986 in two sentences: The starting staff was very good, the catching was adequate, and Steve Sax was brilliant. The rest of the team was awful.

The team was less than the sum of its parts, James notes in a fashion that also recalls 2005.

I should say right off that the Dodger team is not really as bad as it looked in 1986. It couldn't possibly be. To watch the Dodgers play last August and September, you would have thought that this team would never post a winning record again. The Dodgers combined a poor offense and a horrendous bullpen with the worst team defense that I have ever seen in the major leagues. The resulting combination would likely have reached last place if the season had gone on long enough ...

At times the Dodgers had Franklin Stubbs, who is not spectacularly mobile for a first baseman, in center field.

Contrary to popular belief, the lowpoint for Los Angeles Dodger defense was by no means last year's team - but this Tommy Lasorda-managed team from 1986.

... The Dodger team defensive statistics were so bad that I thought there had to be some sort of park illusion, something having to do with the surface or officious scoring. I asked Susie to go through the box scores and count home and road errors and DPs. The park has nothing to do with it; the Dodgers committed 95 errors in road games, 86 at home: they turned only 60 double plays in road games, and only 58 at home. Their defensive stats would be as bad in any other park.

Turning to the offensive woes ...

The Dodgers had only 376 extra base hits, the fewest of any team in the division.

The Dodgers had only 1,883 men on base, again the fewest of any team in the division.

And now, we start to get into the injuries. Eric Gagne, meet Pete Guerrero ...

The season went off course in the last days of spring training, when Pedro Guerrero changed his mind about sliding into third base and decided to destroy his knee instead. The injury to Guerrero, absent complications, should not have been devastating to this team.

True enough - but it was just the beginning of dashed expectations.

I do not recall this with pleasure, but I believed a year ago that the Dodgers were about equal to the Mets, with strong pitching and an exceptional power center. In 1985, the Dodgers scored 103 runs more than they allowed. With Madlock on hand for the full season, with the shortstop problem apparently solved by Mariano Duncan, it appeared they might be stronger in 1986. Guerrero's injury could have been expected to cost them maybe 40, 45 runs, less than half of their margin over their opponents. There was every reason to think the Dodgers could stay in contention until Guerrero returned in August.

And then the injuries started. ... Summarize it this way: With the exception of Steve Sax, every Dodger regular was lost for a significant portion of the schedule with injuries. All seven of them, and most of the top reserves. At least six Dodger pitchers had serious arm injuries during the season.

Yes, injuries matter. And I don't recall the general manager being blamed for every one of them.

However, what follows is perhaps the principal contrast between 1986 and 2005. The earlier team had good starting pitching.

Still, the Dodger starting rotation remained strong. Fernando Valenzuela had his best year. Bob Welch and Rick Honeycutt pitched extremely well, although their won-lost records do not reflect this. Orel Hershiser didn't have as good a season as in 1986, but he was OK. Dodger pitchers walked only 499 men (second best in the league), struck out 1,051 (tied for third) and allowed only 115 home runs (second best in the league).

The defense against the running game was good, allowing only 123 stolen bases in 197 attempts. The 123 OSB was the lowest in the league except for the Cardinals, and the opposition stolen base percentage was low.

Obviously, this is also a contrast to the Jason Phillips Dodgers, although Dioner Navarro showed signs in September of making thinks better.

The Dodgers completed 35 games, 8 more than any other NL team; this, however, is as much a reflection of Lasorda's terror of his bullpen as it is a tribute to the starting corps.

Yeah, well ...

The Dodgers declined in 1986 by 144 runs, from +103 to -41.

Still, one can't avoid the feeling that something may be seriously wrong with the organization.

Hello!

One of the historic strengths of the Dodgers has been their organizational decision-making. We were always given the impression that the Dodgers talked things over before they did them, thrashing through decisions that ordinarily would be made by a manager on the seat of his pants. In 1966 when the Dodgers picked up iron-glove slugger Dick Stuart and had him playing first in place of the light-hitting defensive wizard Wes Parker. Parker sounded off about it, saying that if the Dodgers were going to win he would have to play. The Dodgers held a meeting, talked it out, and decided that Parker was right: Back into the lineup he went, and the Dodgers did win. The Dodgers took input not only from the manager but from the scouts, the coaches, and the front office, and were stronger because of it.

I don't know how universally popular this kind of decision would be today, but the idea, if true, that everyone could talk things out and reach a solution without someone quitting or being fired certainly is appealing.

What seems to have happened since the death of Walter O'Malley in 1979 is that organizational decision-making has decayed into bureaucratic indecisiveness.

That certainly sounds familiar.

Confronted with a gap in the lineup, the Dodgers go into a delay game, trying to stall until a solution materializes from the farm system.

So the organization got the idea that they could look at a player's skills, put them on a chart, and decide what slot the player should fill. That approach makes insufficient allowances for the difficult adaptation of player to position, a process that usually takes years, requires the development of position-specific skills, and tests tiny but crucial attributes of the player which may turn out, after two or three years, to be missing. A byproduct of the belief that the organization can switch the player to wherever they have a need is that some Dodgers move into major-league jobs with little experience at the positions they are expected to man. The major leagues become a training ground where the players are expected to refine their defensive skills. The end result is the defensive nightmare that has plagued the Dodgers in three of the last four seasons.

Funny, this is the kind of problem you'd expect Paul DePodesta to be in trouble for - but actually, there wasn't much of this going on in 2005.

It is curious, and troubling, that the most conspicuous failures of the Dodger organization are at the two positions where good organizations most often produce surpluses: shortstop and center field. Most major-league players, when they enter professional baseball, are either shortstops or center fielders. The organizations draft athletes, and start the best athletes out at these two positions. If a young player can hit but has trouble defensively, he can be shifted to a less demanding spot. But if the organization is productive, as the Mets have been in recent years, they will usually have some surplus at one position or the other.

Al Campanis says that "we try to operate in eight year cycles, because we feel that is how many good years we can expect from a player who comes out of our system." Well, fine, but where are we in the cycle? I mean, are we starting a building cycle here, or what? I figure that with Fernando (1981), Sax (1982), Howe (1980), Marshall (1982), Guerrero (1980) and Brock (1983) if you're looking for eight years a player 1986 should be about the middle of an upswing. Why isn't it? Why is the bench so weak?

Maybe he just doesn't understand.

Maybe I just don't understand.

See?

Anyway, if the Dodgers can stay healthy, this is bound to be a better year. They could win the division. They've got the rotation; if Marshall and Guerrero are healthy they'll score enough runs. The Dodgers are still a young team, although the average age of the 1986 starters is misleading because it doesn't include Guerrero.

But the downside is this. If they don't get it together, the 1987 season could mark the formal burial of nearly five decades of Dodgers excellence.

There you have it. Dire fears from two decades past about the Dodger organization, top to bottom.

In 1987, the Dodgers finished with the same record: 73-89. And a year later, they won the World Series.