Is Dave Roberts managing for his job in 2024?
That seems … well, weird to write. Remember, the Dodgers’ manager has the fourth-best managerial winning percentage in the history of baseball, .630 (753-443) in his nine years at the helm, and the three men in front of him were managers from the Negro Leagues: Bullet Rogan, Vic Harris and Rube Foster. Rogan and Foster are in the Hall of Fame.
Additionally, five of Roberts’ Dodger teams have won 100 games in a season, including the last three in a row. And while the haters think of 2020 as a bogus championship, consider that the Dodgers’ 43 victories and .717 winning percentage in that pandemic-shortened season would translate to 116 victories over a full schedule – and, may we add, they waded through four postseason series that October and played the last three in a bubble. You spend three weeks or so not allowed to leave your hotel except to go to and from your workplace, and see how well you perform.
That’s the case for Roberts. The case against, as lots of Dodger fans will remind us: No full-season championships. Two losses in the World Series (though, as we all know, 2017 comes with an asterisk). One loss in the National League Division Series. Two losses, the last two years, in the wild-card round.
And do we even need to bring up all of those pitching decisions that have gone awry through the years? Pitchers fail, manager gets the blame – even if he’s following the front office’s script. It’s been true as long as this game has been played.
All of this, plus more than $1 billion in free-agent signings over the winter, and it shouldn’t be hard to imagine that the pressure is really on the affable Roberts now, though you’ll never hear that from this front office in so many words. But this team is built to win it all. The signings of Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow were a visceral reaction to October’s three-game flameout against the Arizona Diamondbacks.
And if you…
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