Brian Dozier’s lone season in Washington, and final full season in MLB, saw him play second base for the eventual 2019 World Series Champion Nats for much of the year – and while Asdrubal Cabrera and Howie Kendrick took over that job in the postseason, Dozier did appear in the Series, walking as a pinch-hitter in Game 4 in his only action.
Still, he has a ring, and this weekend, he’ll be back in Navy Yard as part of an alumni celebration of the five-year anniversary of the title, and when he joined the Junkies to talk about it Wednesday, he revealed he’s been VERY busy since retiring after playing for the Mets in 2020.
“Time does fly; I’ve got a four-year-old, a three-year old and a two-year-old, which is a lot tougher hitting a fastball, I can tell you that,” Dozier laughed. “But it's been great though. We’ve got the little group text going again and all that, and they want to play golf at 6:30 in the morning, and I said we can't be doing that! But it’ll be great to catch up and get to see everybody and get the band back together, tell some old stories and have a cocktail or two and have a little fun.”
Dozier was a Twin for six-plus years before being dealt to the Dodgers at the 2018 trade deadline, only to come up short in the World Series. That was, outside of the 2017 AL Wild Card Game, his first real playoff action, but he knew coming into ’19 in DC that those Nats were just as special.
“We were the oldest team in baseball collectively with a lot of veterans on the team, and I kept saying we had a bunch of veterans mixed in with some great talent like the Sotos, and I thought it’ll make for a good year,” Dozier said. “We got off to that horrible start and we had a little team meeting, and the thing about it was we lost so many one-run games where it could have flipped either way; a lot of veterans showed up and we started winning those games, and then the rest is history.”
And, yeah, don’t forget Gerardo Parra and Baby Shark, or their version of Lou Brown peeling a section in ‘Major League,’ too.
“We had a BP pitcher, Ali Modami, and I said, ‘we gotta do something for the boys, so here's what we're gonna do: after we win, you take your shirt off in the clubhouse and let me jump on your back, and I'm gonna ride you around the clubhouse,’” Dozier recalled. “Sure enough we won and that's where the shirt started coming off…and I can't tell you more stuff, but we had fun with it. We ran off about 12 in a row, and we made it where after every single win, we would do something funny. The baby shark thing, Parra, a great clubhouse guy when we got him, and Asdrubal…that just added to the veteran leadership and stuff and that's kind of when we took off.”
Dozier still keeps in touch with a lot of the guys but hasn’t seen many since 2020 – including Stephen Strasburg, who he thinks is coming even though he wasn’t listed on the Nationals’ official list. But, even as he’s enjoying life after and without baseball – he was at his hunting camp in Arkansas prepping for duck hunting when he called in – he looks forward to one more day in the sun this weekend.
“I don't know if I've watched a single game since I retired after the ‘20 season; I keep up with all my friends and check it weekly to see how everyone's doing, that kind of thing, but I kind of got burned out on the baseball aspect,” Dozier said. “I told my wife when the kids got older, I might try to get back into it, but my three-year-old, Rip, is obsessed with baseball, and he's never got to experience the inside a big league stadium and all that kind of stuff, so it'll be good for him to see it.”
And speaking of burned out on baseball, since Dozier does keep up, the guys had to ask him his thoughts on 2019 teammate Anthony Rendon and all the controversy around him.
“Anthony is unique in a lot of different ways. He's a tremendous talent and he puts his faith and family first,” Dozier said. “He's really good at baseball, he just doesn't super love baseball all the time, and we always used to make fun of him about that. But we talk all the time, and he's a good friend of mine, and as a clubhouse guy, he's one of the best. I think sometimes it portrays that he just doesn't care or anything like that, but he works his tail off and is a really good clubhouse guy. Anthony is very, like, lackadaisical, and because it comes so natural to him, it looks like he’s just kind of going through the motions when he's really not. It's just how his pace of play is, that kind of thing.”