Brian Dozier is playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers, against the Boston Red Sox, in the World Series.
As a baseball player, does it get much cooler than that?
A night after scoring one of the Dodgers’ four runs in Game 1 of the Series, Dozier and his teammates will try to rebound from Tuesday’s 8-4 Red Sox win with a victory of their own before heading back to the West Coast. Save for four straight L.A. wins and a championship, the 31-year-old former Gold Glove winner and All-Star second baseman couldn’t be in a better position.
The longtime Minnesota Twins standout was dealt to the Dodgers on MLB trade deadline day over the summer, and for a slugger who told the Sports Spectrum podcast in 2017 that you can get “so tired of losing” that baseball no longer becomes about individual accomplishments but rather “trying to win championships,” Dozier is awfully close to living out that goal. He’s at least as close as he’s ever been.
World Series win or not, however, Dozier has long made it clear that his success on the diamond isn’t what defines him. No second baseman has hit more home runs than him over the last five years, and now he’s got a real chance at championship glory alongside bona fide MLB stars like Manny Machado and Clayton Kershaw. But Dozier also told Sports Spectrum that his personal relationship with Jesus Christ is the sturdiest pillar of his life.
“It all starts with a foundation,” he said. “If you have a foundation in Christ and not what you’re playing for but who you’re playing for, everything else seems like a breeze, in my opinion.”
The veteran may have had similar sentiments upon learning in July that he’d been dealt from the Twins, who drafted him back in 2009 and oversaw his rise to the majors, not to mention built his earliest fan base.
“We all go through adversity,” he said. “I can look back at the adversity that I’ve been through in my life. If those things had not happened, I would not be the person, the man, the player, the husband that I am. Christ puts those things in your lives to make you better people, to make you a better follower … Jesus works through us when the time is right in a way that we can’t do ourselves. Just let Him do the work.”
Dozier and the Dodgers return to the field Wednesday night for Game 2 of the 2018 World Series at 8:09 p.m. ET.
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