When a win streak reaches double digits, it tends to develop a kind of elasticity, stretching all surrounding reason and logic.
Another win begins to seem fated. It does not matter the opponent, the lineup, the fact that the game in question is scoreless in the bottom of the eighth. All of that shifts to accommodate the weight of the streak. The question of how the next win might happen starts to seem far less important than the assumption that it simply will. The details are but technicalities.
The Dodgers entered Thursday riding a 10-game win streak. This week and a half has sent them from a tenuous grasp on a division lead—3.0 games up Aug. 5, the day of their last loss, when they fell to the Padres 8–3—to a nearly insurmountable one. A team whose rotation appeared thin and patchy in the weeks leading up to the trade deadline now looks somehow perfectly set. As the Dodgers have won, and kept winning, they have answered just about every question that existed about them. They no longer feel like a compromised, injury-ridden version of the ever-successful Dodgers. They simply feel like themselves.
