Jim Alexander: Will the Dodgers seize their opportunity at baseball history?

The pursuit of history is not inexorable. And just because the Dodgers swept the Milwaukee Brewers a year ago on the way to their second straight World Series championship, that’s no reason to just assume a rerun. (But you probably already knew that.)

Then again, there’s this bit of history:

In 143 years of Dodgers (and Trolley Dodgers, Robins, Bridegrooms, Superbas, Atlantics, etc.) baseball, the Brooklyn/Los Angeles franchise has won 100 regular-season games 12 times. Only in 1889 — when the American Association was no longer a rival to the American League, the American League was 13 years from being launched and there was no postseason — could the 101-47 Brooklyn Superbas claim they were the champions of baseball.

Since then, count ’em: Ten 100-victory seasons and no parades.

The 1941 (100-54) and 1953 (105-49) teams lost to the New York Yankees in the World Series. The 1942 team won 104 games and finished second to the St. Louis Cardinals in what was then an eight-team National League. The 1962 team (102-63) lost to the San Francisco Giants in a best-of-three playoff after the Giants made up a four-game deficit in the final week.

The Dodgers won 102 games in 1974 and lost the World Series to Oakland — the third straight title for the A’s, so no shortage of irony there. They won 104 games in 2017 and lost to the Houston Astros in the World Series, and feel free to slap an asterisk on that one. They won 106 games in 2019 and lost to the eventual champ Washington Nationals in the NL Division Series, won 106 in 2021 and lost to the eventual champ Atlanta Braves in the NL Championship Series, and won 111 in 2022 and 100 in 2023 and were ousted in the Division Series by the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks, respectively.

And here they are again, but there’s a catch. The Dodgers were 100-63 this season, but the Milwaukee Brewers were 103-60, the first 100-victory season in their 58 years of existence. That’s why Games 1 and 2 — and potentially 6 and 7 — are scheduled for American Family Field, beginning Sunday at 5 p.m. PT.

There’s another bit of history for these Dodgers to overcome if they’re to become the sixth team — the second outside of the Bronx and first from the National League — to win three straight.

In the previous 122 World Series, eight other teams won two in a row but couldn’t get the third one. Of those, only two — the 1923 New York Giants and 1931 Philadelphia A’s — even got to the World Series that third year. A third, the 1994 Toronto Blue Jays, was denied the chance because of a players’ strike that led to the cancellation of the World Series.

And the last National League team to win two straight, the 1975-76 Cincinnati Reds? The Dodgers dethroned them by winning the National League West in 1977.

All of which means little, true, unless you’re superstitious.

More recent history, the Dodgers’ four-game sweep of the Brewers in last season’s NLCS, is equally irrelevant.

These Brewers are a better team than last year’s version. They have a dominant ace in 24-year-old Jacob Misiorowski, their Game 1 starter against the Dodgers’ Tarik Skubal. And their everyday lineup has a year’s postseason experience and, quite frankly, has more ways to succeed than the slug that has been the Dodgers’ main mode of attack.

Consider: The Brewers have stolen 162 bases this season and been caught 54 times, with seven players in double figures in steals. Dodger catchers have allowed 117 steals and thrown out 27 runners, and it just seemed that every time an opposing runner took off from first base he was safe, especially in the final few weeks of the regular season.

The Brewers do the little things to generate offense. That was a severe issue for the Dodgers over the last month of the season and then into the Division Series with Atlanta.

In 25 games in September, the Dodgers’ batting average with runners in scoring position was .214 (50 for 234). In the four-game NLDS victory over Atlanta, they went 1 for 16 (.063), and the Dodgers didn’t score a run without benefit of a home run until Andy Pages’ two-run single in the seventh inning of Game 4 broke a 1-1 tie.

That’s one issue to be solved. Another is getting Shohei Ohtani healthy and getting his swing right again. In the four games against the Braves, he was 2 for 13 with four strikeouts, two walks and one run scored, that in Game 4. Worse, he looked befuddled for much of that series.

Dodgers personnel insist that Ohtani will overcome the bumps and bruises and what has become a nearly two-month slump dating to mid-August, and will break out against the Brewers this year just as he did last year. For reference, he was 2 for 11 with five strikeouts in the first three games, and 3 for 4 — all home runs — along with 10 strikeouts in six innings as a pitcher in the clinching Game 4.

For their sake, it had better not take as long for him to heat up offensively this time.

Milwaukee won the season series 4-3, by taking three of four during a mid-August series at Dodger Stadium. That was during a stretch from July 10 through Aug. 27 when the Dodgers went 19-21 overall and 7-18 against teams that would finish over .500.

Then again, they were swept in Atlanta at the end of that stretch — and we saw what happened last week in the NLDS.

Misiorowski, considered by many the favorite to win the NL Cy Young Award, and Logan Henderson are a pretty darned good starting pitching 1-2. But Skubal and Yoshinobu Yamamoto are better, Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow are quite capable in the 3-4 spots, and Edwin Diaz’s performances in the NLDS suggest the back end of the bullpen might again be in capable hands after all.

And yes, Jackson Chourio (25 homers, 75 RBIs, .837 OPS), William Contreras (18 homers, 94 RBIs, .758 OPS) and Corona Santiago High’s own Brice Turang (21 homers, 100 RBIs, .816 OPS, 7.3 WAR) are capable of doing damage for the Brewers.

But if you have to depend on home runs for your offense and were told you would have to take your chances with Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and Max Muncy in your lineup, you’d jump at it, right?

Bottom line: This will be a more competitive series than last year’s NLCS, and I’m not expecting the same kind of individual performance we saw from Ohtani in Game 4 — but the Dodgers won’t need it. I agree with our beat writer, Bill Plunkett: They’ll win it in six and will be four victories closer to history.