LOS ANGELES — First came the message. Then came rock bottom.

Before the Los Angeles Dodgers found their footing and tore through the postseason field to return to the World Series, Dave Roberts assembled his group in Baltimore. The manager has made these types of meetings infrequent. He reasoned that the more you do them, the more the words ring hollow.

The Dodgers’ slide was deep enough when the group traveled to Baltimore that Roberts felt it was time to speak. So he gathered a group of veterans and superstars who had stumbled through what was projected to be a record-setting season and told them to shed those expectations. The weight of repeating as champions had, in some ways, grown even heavier over the course of the summer.

So Roberts, on Sept. 6, told players to stop trying to be perfect.

Manager Dave Roberts recognized how much the preseason expectations weighed on the Dodgers. (Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)

Maybe it just took 24 hours to marinate. Hours after Roberts delivered his message, the Dodgers came close to perfect. They took an early lead over a hapless Baltimore Orioles team. Their starting pitching had already started to get on a roll, with Yoshinobu Yamamoto coming within one out of a no-hitter before surrendering a solo home run to Jackson Holliday. The turnaround appeared to be starting.

Then the Dodgers blew the game and lost 4-3. The second consecutive walk-off defeat dropped them to 78-64 in a tight division race.

“It was devastating,” veteran infielder Miguel Rojas said. “You started thinking, ‘What’s wrong with us?’ You don’t have an answer.”

Except the Dodgers did not crumble. When they arrived the next day, a Sunday, Mookie Betts noted a lighter feeling in the air. The message came through.

“The vibes were high,” Betts said that day.

The Dodgers won that day, then kept on winning. They finished the regular season on a 15-5 roll after that point and have since morphed into a juggernaut, winning nine of their 10 games this postseason to become just the second reigning champion in 23 years (joining the 2009 Philadelphia Phillies) to return to the Fall Classic the following season. It took the calendar turning to October for the Dodgers to look like the kind of team that could ruin baseball like they were supposed to.

Roberts’ message was simple and came through.

“Just giving everyone permission to let go of the prior, call it, five months of the year, the inconsistencies of play,” Roberts said. “Offloading all that stuff, myself included, to then go from that point forward and to play like a team that’s going to the postseason and how do we prepare to play like that.

“And it’s hard to do that when you are carrying baggage of recency. And I think we were all guilty of the here-we-go type of thing in all facets of the game.”

The Dodgers of early September were banged up. Will Smith, the franchise catcher, had just fractured his hand. Their bullpen was a mess, and things got so bad for $72 million closer Tanner Scott that he claimed the sport hated him. Their offense, still missing Max Muncy, was in many ways still broken.

The Dodgers opened the 2024 season on March 20 in Korea and played all the way through, winning the World Series on Oct. 30. This year, they opened on March 18 in Japan and are still at it in late October again.

The carryover effects are natural, even if the baseball gets ugly at times.

“At times it felt like we were kind of checked out during the regular season,” Kiké Hernández said.

The Dodgers went 8-0 to open the season, beginning with their global tour to Tokyo all the way through a celebratory homestand at Dodger Stadium. A 23-10 start gave the Dodgers a cushion. They held a nine-game lead in the division by early July, only to squander that within a month and a half. A season that started with talks of breaking the all-time wins record instead finished with the Dodgers not even qualifying for a first-round bye.

The Dodgers spent plenty of time fumbling around to find the switch before flipping it at just the right time.

“(Playing) 162 games is a long season,” reliever Alex Vesia said. “Things go our way, things don’t. But it is a breath of fresh air when October rolls around.”

“Despite what the results were at times during the season, we always knew we were going to be a really, really good team in October,” Muncy said. “And October is obviously the goal for us. Once you get to October, it’s, ‘All right, it’s game time.’ And that’s how we’re taking it.”

The ingredients are obvious. The Dodgers’ starting pitching has clicked into place, producing a 1.40 ERA this postseason while relying on a quartet of Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani. The Dodgers’ lineup has yet to truly explode this postseason, but Ohtani, Betts, Freddie Freeman and others have had their moments. Roki Sasaki has emerged out of nowhere to help solve several of the bullpen issues.

“Our strong feeling was that we were going to be going into October with the most talented team we’ve ever had,” president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said in the cigar-smoke-filled pennant celebration. “Doesn’t guarantee anything. Doesn’t mean a ton. But we felt very confident that we were going into October with the most talented team we’ve ever had.”

This is the team they were expecting to be. Roberts’ meeting in September, in many ways, was a reinforcement of what he said in spring training. The manager spoke of repeating and shooed away talk that his team would lack the fire required to get back into this spot.

“Every year in spring training, every team probably has a similar speech,” Muncy said. “‘We’re here to work. Our goal is to win the World Series.’

“The reality of it is there’s only a couple of teams where that’s the truth. With us, that’s the truth every single year. Our goal is to win the World Series. That’s what we expect. Anything less than that is a failure.”

The difference with the Dodgers, Muncy said, is that it’s not about want.

“For us, showing up to spring this year, it was, ‘Hey, we need to repeat,’” Muncy said. “It wasn’t like we wanted to repeat. It was like, ‘Hey, we need to repeat.’ Obviously, the season went the way it went. It’s a long season. It’s a lot of games. We dealt with a lot. But we always knew what we had in the clubhouse.”

Now, they are four wins away from cementing that belief with another title.