WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Without leaving a state, the Red Sox will travel to another world Friday.
It’s hard to exaggerate the Oz-like journey from the sepia of Sutter Health Park, the very temporary home of the Athletics, to the vivid brilliance of a weekend in Dodger Stadium. The Sox will be going from a minor league park — despite a rich baseball tradition in Sacramento, it is a disgrace that MLB and the Athletics chose to stage big league games in a Triple-A park for three years — to one of the sport’s shrines.
“There’s probably four stadiums that are top tier in the big leagues, and LA is for sure one of them,” said Sox pitcher Patrick Sandoval, who described Dodger Stadium as “the biggest of the big leagues.” And [Sutter Health Park] is . . . ” he paused, “an OK minor league stadium. I mean, it’s a huge jump [between parks], for sure.”
“[Dodger Stadium] is really, really special,” said Sox interim manager Chad Tracy, who frequently attended games there as a teenager, when his father, Jim, managed the Dodgers. “It’s obviously got a ton of history, and it’s massive. And walking out there and seeing it is something else.”
As impressive as the venue is, the team that resides there might be even more impressive.
The Dodgers entered Thursday with the best record in baseball, a 68-40 mark that puts them on a familiar 102-win pace (they have finished five of the last eight 162-game seasons with at least 100 wins). They had a 32-20 record at Dodger Stadium, tied for the majors’ third-best home mark.
Their offense ranks fourth in the majors with 5.15 runs per game while leading the sport in batting average (.262) and OBP (.341) and ranking second in slugging (.433). Five of their lineup regulars have an OPS over .800. (For the Red Sox, only Willson Contreras has performed to such a level.) The bottom half of the Los Angeles order includes slumping-but-dangerous stars Mookie Betts (wither, feats?), Kyle Tucker, and Teoscar Hernández.
The Dodgers have held opponents to 3.70 runs per game, putting them just ahead of the Sox (3.74) as the best run-prevention team in baseball. Their rotation has baseball’s lowest ERA (3.37). Their bullpen has not been as dominant (3.98 ERA, 13th), but their relievers have the second-highest strikeout rate in baseball (26 percent) and they just got back closer Edwin Díaz, who’d been out for more than three months after arthroscopic surgery to remove loose bodies in his elbow.
“You know who’s on the roster,” said Tracy. “They have a very good roster with some very well-known players on it. They’re a good team. They’ve been a good team for a really long time . . . When your team’s been that successful over the course of time, they’re going to get a lot of attention. They’re going to get talked about a lot. If you just follow baseball at all, you’re going to hear about the Dodgers.”
The notion of a measuring stick is sometimes invoked in advance of marquee matchups. The reality is that one series is rarely indicative of anything except how a team plays during an increment spanning about 2 percent of the season.
Case in point: In 2025, the Angels swept a three-game series at Dodger Stadium in mid-May. They finished with a 72-90 record and watched from their couches as the Dodgers won their second straight championship. So, regardless of outcome, the Sox won’t view their performance in LA as a meaningful indicator of their potential.
“If you’ve been around the game long enough, in any level, you’ve seen a team get swept and come back and play a team and sweep them later,” said Tracy. “So, I don’t put too much stock into [measuring sticks], especially with the trade deadline coming up and how in three days’ time, entire teams can change and dynamics can change.”
The Red Sox already have taken a more significant measure of themselves than a three-game series will afford. Their 24-5 stretch entering Thursday night included four-game sweeps of the Yankees and Rays, as well as a three-game sweep in Chicago against the White Sox, possessors of the best home record in the American League.
The Red Sox already felt they could compete with any other team. More relevant to the current moment, the Sox have concluded they have a strong chance to reach the postseason (69 percent playoff odds from FanGraphs, 86 percent from Baseball-Reference.com, 55 percent from Baseball Prospectus) with an incentive to add to the roster for a push toward and through October — the time of year when single series mean everything.
“The measuring stick,” said Sandoval, “would be October baseball.”
Even so, the weekend in Los Angeles promises to offer a taste of the energy and spotlight that awaits if the Red Sox do reach the postseason.
Alex Speier can be reached at alex.speier@globe.com. Follow him @alexspeier.