LOS ANGELES -- The Los Angeles Dodgers held a postseason rally following their 10-5 win over the Colorado Rockies on Sunday afternoon, with about half of the 48,278 fans in attendance sticking around to get whipped into a frenzy for the upcoming playoffs. The final speaker, fittingly, was Hall of Fame manager Tommy Lasorda, who recently celebrated his 87th birthday.

"I think we're going to get to the Fall Classic," Lasorda bellowed, "and then the Big Dodger in the sky can take me away!"

The Dodgers are hopeful one of those things comes true, but there are a few preliminary steps before they reach their first World Series since Lasorda stepped down. Step 1 is beating the St. Louis Cardinals, the team they'll play in the National League Division Series starting Friday and a team that beat them out for a wild-card berth two seasons ago, then knocked them out of the playoffs last October.

"It's kind of turned into a pretty good rivalry," Dodgers manager Don Mattingly said. "They've got a good organization, they play good baseball, they have good pitching. They're a tough team to play."

But the Cardinals, too, will be dealing with a different, seemingly more formidable team this time around. For one thing, Matt Kemp won't be on crutches this time. For another thing, Hanley Ramirez won’t be trying to play with a cracked rib, as he did in every inning he played in that series but one, and Andre Ethier, if he plays, won't be hobbling around on a bad ankle.

"We're pretty healthy right now, I guess," Zack Greinke said. "That’s good."

The Dodgers also plan on changing their signs before the series starts, Mattingly said, and they'll have four days to work on that. A year ago, many of the Dodgers people felt Cardinals baserunners were relaying the location of upcoming pitches to their fellow hitters once a baserunner reached second base.

But aside from the health of No. 3 starter Hyun-Jin Ryu, the Dodgers have this major riddle to solve: How will four days off affect a lineup that is averaging 7.5 runs in its final 15 games? The days off should help the Dodgers bullpen and allow the team more time to ensure Ryu is healthy before he takes the mound, but it certainly doesn't look like a good thing for the offense, considering Kemp is as hot as he has been since April 2012 and the rest of the lineup has been following suit.

"I don't know if we were playing this good at the end of last year," Greinke said. "Our hitting and defense has been fantastic, and that's usually good to be kind of hot going into it."

Kemp led the National League with 16 home runs after the All-Star break, hitting his 25th of the season in the first inning before taking most of the day off. Adrian Gonzalez led the league in RBIs in the second half, adding three more on his fourth-inning home run -- No. 27 -- before he, too, got to enjoy the rest as a spectator and, probably, heckle manager Juan Uribe along with the rest of the team. Mattingly said the lefty-righty combination of Gonzalez and Kemp in the middle of the lineup has been a "force together." If they keep this pace up, those two could give the Dodgers something akin to the Manny Ramirez-David Ortiz dynamic the Boston Red Sox had in October 2004.

But the question remains: Will the layoff -- not to mention the Cardinals' pitching -- cool them off? Mattingly dismissed the notion of the former.

"When you've put up 600 at-bats, 650 at-bats, three or four days is not going to make any difference in your timing," Mattingly said.

As for the effect of the Cardinals' pitching, stay tuned. It's probably going to be a little tougher than that of the Rockies or Chicago Cubs, the Dodgers' most recent opponents, but then again, Kemp and Justin Turner took Madison Bumgarner deep in the past week. It's fair to say they end the regular season and enter the postseason as a confident club -- maybe even confident enough to make half of Lasorda's vision come true.