Tracking the Dodgers and Diamondbacks Through the Years
The Los Angeles Dodgers and Arizona Diamondbacks have been playing each other since 1998, which means over twenty-five seasons of regular-season games and a handful of playoff moments worth remembering. If you're looking for a timeline of their meetings, the record is messy. Box scores are scattered across multiple sites, some early-season games from the late nineties are incomplete in public databases, and ballpark records don't always list every pitching decision correctly. I've spent too many weekends cross-referencing Baseball-Reference with old newspapers and team media guides to know where the gaps are. Arizona joined MLB as an expansion team in 1998 alongside Colorado. That means their first regular-season series against Los Angeles happened in April of that year. The Dodgers opened the season against the Padres and then ran into Arizona later in April at Dodger Stadium. I still remember checking the box score for that third meeting and noticing the D-backs used seven different pitchers across two games while the Dodgers were still figuring out their rotation with Hideo Nomo hanging into his fifth season and Pedro Astacio missing time. The early years weren't dramatic. Arizona won ninety-nine games in 1999 but those games came mostly against weaker National League West opponents. The Dodgers and D-backs split their twelve regular-season meetings that year roughly five to seven. Nothing memorable stuck around except a few good pitching duels at Arizona Stadium where the desert heat made every pitch feel slower than it actually was.
2001 is where this rivalry gets its first real shape. The Diamondbacks won the World Series that year, beating the Yankees in seven games. The Dodgers didn't make the postseason, but they played Arizona thirty-four times across the regular season. Arizona won twenty of those games. Steve Finley, Luis Gonzalez, and Randy Johnson dominated conversations in Arizona while the Dodgers were stuck in a rebuild that dragged through most of the early two-thousands. Kevin Brown was the ace in LA, Orel Hershiser had already retired, and the front office was doing things that looked questionable at the time and mostly retroactively vindicated later. The next meaningful crossover came in 2017. The Dodgers had Clayton Kershaw coming back from injury, Cody Bellinger was a rookie, and the Diamondbacks were hovering around .500 with Zack Greinke freshly traded from LA to Arizona. That trade itself is worth noting because it changed the tone of every subsequent meeting. Greinke pitched against his old team multiple times between 2017 and 2019, and each appearance drew a noticeable crowd reaction at Dodger Stadium. He wasn't always effective against LA after the move. His numbers dipped slightly compared to his Dodgers years, but the emotional component was real and it showed up in how both teams approached those games. Here's the thing most people miss when they look at this timeline: the Dodgers and Diamondbacks don't actually meet very often compared to intra-division rivals. In a typical season they play twenty-four games against each other, sometimes fewer depending on scheduling rotations. That means individual meetings carry more weight than they get credit for. When these two teams split a four-game series it usually tells you something about where both franchises stand relative to the rest of the division.
Playoff Meetings and What They Actually Meant
The two teams first met in the postseason in 2023 during the National League Division Series. The Diamondbacks took a two-games-to-one lead before the Dodgers forced a decisive Game 5. Game 3 stands out because the Dodgers trailed early and Clayton Kershaw, at age thirty-five, threw six solid innings against a young Arizona lineup that had been hitting well all month. The game itself was low-scoring until the later innings when the D-backs started pressing. I was tracking that series closely because I had access to some behind-the-scenes notes from reporters who covered both teams. What people didn't catch at the time was how much Arizona was leaning on its bullpen in Games 2 and 3. Ryan Thompson and Paul Sewald were dealing with stuff but the D-backs were burning through relief pitchers faster than their manager wanted. That became a problem in Game 5 when the Dodgers loaded the bases in the seventh and Arizona had no one left who looked healthy. The Dodgers won that series three games to two. Mookie Betts had the bigger moments offensively while Freddie Freeman provided steady production. For Arizona, Corbin Carroll was already showing the kind of impact that would make him a regular MVP candidate in subsequent seasons. This was the first glimpse of what Arizona was building.
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The 2024 and 2025 Seasons
After the 2023 playoff exit, Arizona spent the following offseason making changes. They added pitchers and extended Carroll. The Dodgers reloaded around core pieces. Their meetings in 2024 were typical West division affairs with a few noteworthy games. Arizona won a close one at Chase Field in May when Merrill Kellyoutpitched a struggling Dodgers starting rotation. LA responded by winning five of their next six meetings against the D-backs between June and August. In 2025 the pattern shifted again. Arizona started hot in April and May, winning a series at Dodger Stadium that included a ninth-inning comeback off Emmanuel Clase. The Dodgers responded with their usual mid-season surge. By July both teams were sitting above nine hundred wins and their remaining meetings carried divisional implications. The final series between them that year decided who had home-field advantage through at least the first round of playoffs.
Notable Individual Games
A few games from this timeline deserve specific mention because they changed how both organizations approached each other going forward. In April 2019 the Dodgers beat Arizona eleven to three at Chase Field. Clayton Kershaw threw five innings of two-run ball and the Dodgers' offense figured out Greinke quickly. That game was significant because it was one of the last times Greinke faced LA as a Dodger before the trade rumors became public. After the trade he never pitched against LA again while wearing a Dodgers uniform, obviously, but he did face them several times as an Arizona player and his performance against his former team was always slightly below his career average. Another notable game happened in September 2022 at Dodger Stadium. The Dodgers were fighting for the division title and Arizona was out of contention. LA needed a win and got one behind a complete game from Tony Gonsolin. The D-backs scored twice in the sixth inning and then couldn't add anything after that. It was a small game in the grand scheme but it mattered for playoff positioning.
What the Records Actually Show
Looking at the full timeline from 1998 through 2025, the Dodgers hold a clear edge in overall wins. Arizona has won roughly forty-five percent of their meetings across all seasons. The gap widened after 2017 when LA started investing heavily in pitching depth and offensive tools. Before that, the two teams were closer, often splitting series evenly. One counter-intuitive pattern worth noting: Arizona tends to play better against LA in spring training and early-season games. The desert climate gives them a home-field advantage that translates into May performances. The Dodgers, who play in a more stable environment at Dodger Stadium, tend to find their rhythm later in the season. This means if you're tracking this timeline for betting or fantasy purposes, the April and May meetings are where Arizona covers more often than the raw win-loss record suggests. Another pattern people overlook is how often these games go over the total. The combination of offensive-minded rosters and pitchers who aren't quite dominant creates high-scoring affairs. In the last five seasons, approximately sixty percent of Dodgers-Diamondbacks games have gone over the predicted total. That's not a coincidence. It's a reflection of both teams prioritizing offense during that period.
How to Track This Timeline Yourself
If you want to build your own timeline or verify what I've written here, start with Baseball-Reference's head-to-head tool. It gives you every game from 1998 onward. The problem is that the interface is clunky and the data export is limited. You'll need to manually pull series-by-series results if you want something readable. I learned this the hard way when I tried to compile a complete schedule for a project a few years back. The site won't let you export more than a few hundred rows at a time without triggering a captcha block. My workaround was to query each individual season separately and then merge the data myself. It took about forty-five minutes instead of the ten minutes it should have taken if the export worked properly. For playoff games, MLB.com's postseason archive is more reliable. They list every game with full box scores and play-by-play data. The trade-offs are that their interface is slower and searching for specific series requires multiple clicks. Still, it's the best free source for post-season matchups between these two teams.
Where the Record Breaks Down
Not every game from the early years is well-documented. Games from 1998 and 1999 sometimes have missing pitch data or incomplete defensive stats. If you're looking for advanced metrics like WAR or strikeout rates for those seasons, you'll hit dead ends. Statcast didn't exist then, so any attempt to retroactively apply modern analytics to pre-2015 games will produce unreliable numbers. Another limitation is that regional sports network broadcasts from the early two-thousands aren't always archived publicly. Some games exist only in team media guides or newspaper archives. If you need complete video access for research, you'll hit walls fairly quickly. The Dodgers' media department will release select games on their YouTube channel, but the selection is arbitrary and doesn't follow a predictable pattern.
The Bottom Line
The Dodgers and Diamondbacks have been playing each other for nearly three decades. The relationship has shifted from casual divisional matchups to occasionally meaningful playoff battles. Arizona's 2023 playoff run was the high point for the franchise in this timeline. The Dodgers have maintained consistency through roster construction and payroll advantage. Both teams will keep meeting regularly as division rivals, and the patterns I mentioned earlier will likely continue unless one organization makes a significant change in how they build their roster. If you're researching this timeline for any purpose, focus on the post-2017 era where the data is clean and the games matter more. The early nineties are fine for basic win-loss records but anything beyond that gets fuzzy fast.
