Remembering the Dodgers’ first NLCS: a 1974 return after years of waiting

The Dodgers’ current postseason run arrives with a piece of franchise history attached. On Sunday, Los Angeles began playing in its 18th National League Championship Series, a round that has existed since the league championship format began in 1969.

For fans tracing the lineage of the Dodgers’ October stages, the first NLCS in franchise terms carries extra weight. In 1974, the Dodgers reached the NLCS under manager Walt Alston for their first postseason appearance since 1966, a gap that underscores how long it can take for a team to return to the point where one series decides who advances to the World Series.

The 1974 NLCS also sits in a different baseball era, including how and when those games were presented. Looking back at that early NLCS period, the games were played in the daytime and were shown on both local and national television, reflecting a sport that was steadily expanding its reach while still being defined by classic broadcast rhythms.

That television and daytime context matters because it highlights how the NLCS was still establishing itself as the league’s defining high-stakes round. When the Dodgers reached it in 1974, they were joining a new postseason structure that had only been operating since 1969, meaning both teams and broadcasters were working through what the series meant in the public imagination.

Even without getting lost in the box-score details, the Dodgers’ 1974 breakthrough provides a useful lens for understanding how franchise success is often measured in cycles rather than single seasons. Alston’s team did not merely win a round. It ended a stretch that had kept the Dodgers away from the playoffs, then pushed the organization into a league championship setting that the franchise would revisit many times afterward.

As the Dodgers now prepare for yet another chapter in the NLCS, the contrast between eras is the point. The league championship round has endured, but the surrounding environment has changed. In 1974, the Dodgers were making their first leap to that specific stage in nearly a decade, while today the emphasis is on the familiarity of reaching the NLCS again and again. Still, that familiarity does not erase the core reality of the series itself: it is a narrowing funnel where the margin for error is always small.

The immediate task, then, is to connect today’s postseason moment to the franchise memory it echoes. Whether the Dodgers’ current run turns into a title is a question for the present. But the 1974 landmark remains a reminder that reaching the NLCS, even for a storied franchise, has always required both timing and perseverance.