Every championship is earned and should never be taken away from the team that played to win and so, in my opinion, I think the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Dodgers 2020 championships should not have an asterisk next to their trophies.

In my opinion, every team within the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball had a fair chance at winning their respective championships. All teams were under the same circumstances playing during the COVID-19 pandemic, with no fans and shortened seasons.

Even though the season was shortened due to the pandemic, the 2020 team was one of the most dominant Dodger teams the MLB had seen in a while.

“The entire postseason, in which the Dodgers went 13-5 with a staggering 101-66 run differential, was a validation of their otherworldly 2.27-run average margin of victory in the regular season,” Thomas Boswell wrote in an opinion article for The Washington Post.

Boswell also said that only two of the New York Yankees championships featured a greater run differential. It is a shame that the Dodgers of 2020 could not prove that they would have overcome the test of a full 162-game season. 

As for the Lakers, their dominance did not go unnoticed as well. The team claimed the number one seed in the NBA Playoffs and went 16-5 during their championship run. 

“The challenges of the bubble were different from those of a normal playoff run. This title is no less legitimate, even if the circumstances will (hopefully) never be repeated,” Sean Highkin, a journalist from Bleacher Report wrote.

Highkin also said that Giannis Antetokounmpo, a two-time Most Valuable Player and NBA champion said the Lakers winning in 2020 was more difficult than a normal postseason run. I think this is because the players were away from their families and were trapped in the bubble until the playoffs were over.

“At the end of the day, the Dodgers faced the same challenges as everyone else and they navigated it better than all of the other teams. Everybody was in that same situation. There have been other teams that have won championships in seasons where they didn’t play 162 games,” California Lutheran University’s Head Baseball Coach Erik Scherer said. 

Men’s Head Basketball Coach Russell White had similar thoughts to Scherer’s. In an email interview, he wrote that there should be no asterisk next to the Lakers 2020 championship because winning any championship is hard and there were 29 other teams that were trying to accomplish the same feat. 

Scherer said his team also went through similar challenges in 2020 and how he knows what it feels like to have a season be invalid.

“In 2020 when the season stopped we were 16-1 and we were the number one team in the nation. It was kind of tough with all the seniors that we had to not be able to finish that season. When we talk about that team we talk about how we had done everything we could do up until that point,” Scherer said. 

Losing games, especially championships, can feel personal to passionate sports fans; however, I think the desire to have asterisks added to the 2020 championships is rooted in jealousy and feels like a poor attempt to justify why certain teams lost. 

In my opinion, all successful seasons should be remembered without an asterisk, from professional sports teams like the Dodgers and the Lakers, to college sports here at Cal Lutheran.