Dave Roberts Just Proved He’s MLB’s Top Manager
Despite the number of superstars on the Los Angeles Dodgers, Dave Roberts deserves the credit for guiding them to the World Series win.
Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts won’t win the National League Manager of the Year award in 2024. That will likely go to Mike Shildt of the San Diego Padres or Pat Murphy of the Milwaukee Brewers, either of which will be a solid choice to win the honor.
However, while Shildt or Murphy will get the accolades for what they did with their teams during the regular season, Roberts is the one who is holding the World Series trophy for the second time in five seasons.
Trust me, I understand it’s easy for MLB fans to roll their eyes at the thought of Roberts being considered as the top manager in all of baseball.
After all, the Dodgers opened the season with the third-highest payroll among MLB’s 30 teams (trailing only the New York Mets and Yankees) and would have had an even higher payroll for the season had Shohei Ohtani not deferred $68 million of his $70 million salary this season to 2034 and beyond.
However, even when fielding a team of superstars, including three former MVPs in Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, there are still minefields during the season that must be navigated. Roberts did just that.
Once the Dodgers finished their additions of talent such as Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Teoscar Hernandez and others this offseason, Los Angeles was considered the betting favorites to win the World Series. With that came great expectations, especially for a team loaded with talent but also burdened with past postseason failures.
Those expectations and the pressure that came along with them were amplified during the National League Division Series when the Dodgers were on the brink of elimination at the hands of the arch-rival Padres.
However, the Dodgers advanced by navigating through the final three games of that testy series with its pitchers shutting down the Padres and not allowing a run over the last 24.0 innings of the NLDS.
Part of that can be attributed to a hot streak on the mound … and part can be credited to Roberts making the right decisions and putting the right relievers in the right situations to finish off victories.
Pitching has been part of the key to the Dodgers’ success this season, and Roberts was a wizard when it came to keeping his staff together when it was threatened to be torn apart by numerous injuries. Clayton Kershaw, Tyler Glasnow and Gavin Stone all were lost for the season, and Yamamoto made just 18 starts.
That same injury bug bit the lineup as well, with Betts playing in just 118 games and Freeman missing a pair of weeks after the All-Star break when his son, Maximus, was temporarily paralyzed and diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome.
Freeman not only came back, however, to get the Dodgers back to the top of the NL West standings and the NL’s top seed but would power L.A. throughout the World Series, eventually winning Most Valuable Player honors.
But for the Dodgers to get back to the mountaintop, it took Roberts acting as the sherpa, making the moves throughout the regular season and postseason, to reach baseball’s summit.
And Roberts’ work wasn’t done until the final out was recorded on Wednesday night. Holding a one-run lead, Roberts went to Walker Buehler, the Game 3 starter, to finish off the victory. A depleted bullpen held together, including a gutsy 42-pitch, 2.1-inning effort from Blake Treinen, who would earn the win, enough before Buehler logged the final three outs.
In perhaps his boldest move of the series, Roberts left Treinen in the game when the Yankees were threatening in the eighth inning. After an Aaron Judge double and Jazz Chisholm Jr. walk, Roberts chose to stick with Treinen and the risky decision was rewarded with a fly out and strikeout to end the threat.
Had Roberts pulled Treinen then, could someone else from a depleted Dodgers bullpen have gotten the ball into Buehler’s hands? It’s a “what if” question, but Roberts eliminated any second-guessing by making the right call, something he had done often throughout the postseason.
In past seasons, Roberts had been an easy punching bag after the Dodgers whimpered out of the postseason. But not in 2024, a year when Roberts showed why he is the right man to guide a superstar-laden team to MLB’s pinnacle.