Dave Roberts is talking about joy. For years, he’s often said, he transacts in a currency of relentless optimism. It is the only way to survive his occupation, and even that outlook has shown some cracks.
Roberts’ ninth year managing the Los Angeles Dodgers will conclude with his ninth postseason appearance, and the 12th in a row for a Dodgers franchise that has had more chances at a World Series than any other team for more than a decade. No non-Negro League manager has won games at a higher clip than Roberts’ .627 winning percentage. He’s overseen five 100-win seasons; Only Joe McCarthy and Bobby Cox have more.
And yet.
“It’s hard to completely enjoy something that I guess everyone in the world thinks just happens, that it’s expected,” Roberts said in a quiet moment last month.
He sat down with The Athletic amid the chaos of the stretch drive once again. “So when it does happen, it’s more relief. Because you didn’t disappoint. You realized expectations. With the Dodgers, we’re never going to over-exceed expectations because of the reputation we have. That’s a compliment. But I do think that it does take away some of the joy. It’s where we’re at, the job I’ve chosen and the job I love.”
All that winning has resulted in one championship. The past two Octobers, a first-round exit. As part of his recruiting pitch to Shohei Ohtani this past winter, Dodgers team chairman Mark Walter bluntly explained to Ohtani why the Dodgers needed him: The owner considered his tenure running the team to be an on-field failure.
Perhaps that colored Roberts’ comments. Maybe it was the burden of expectations of a Dodgers club that spent more than $1.4 billion this past winter. Maybe it’s a Sisyphean effect of pressure that mounts every year without a parade down past the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Vin Scully Avenue.
That, Roberts admitted, saps some of the joy.
When the Dodgers open the postseason, Roberts will have the enviable task of getting to write out a lineup that boasts three MVPs: Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman. Even with Betts and Freeman each missing time, it’s a group that has scored the second-most runs in baseball.
He’ll also roll out as uncertain a pitching group as he’s had, even more unsteady than the patchwork group that got bombed out of the NLDS a year ago. Injuries have wrecked this Dodgers club; Roberts has had to use a franchise-record 40 pitchers just to get through.
The end result: their first full season with fewer than 100 wins since 2018.
Enter Roberts, the man at the dials trying to navigate it all.
As Roberts and the rest of the Dodgers brass assembled in suburban Arizona this February, they spoke giddily of the group they had assembled. Their quest to acquire Ohtani was successful; as part of their splurge, they’d also swung a trade to acquire Tyler Glasnow from the Tampa Bay Rays. They gave Yoshinobu Yamamoto the richest contract for a pitcher in baseball history before he threw so much as a pitch in Major League Baseball. A year after seemingly running out of pitching, they committed more than half a billion dollars to their starting staff.
They added bodies, too. They signed James Paxton for depth to complement a prized group of young pitchers. Ascendant rookie Gavin Stone wasn’t penciled into the Dodgers’ Opening Day rotation by the time spring began. The group whittled down from there.
Emmet Sheehan went down for the season without throwing a single pitch. Tyler Glasnow was a first-time All-Star but threw his final pitch in August. Stone had a breakout season, then his shoulder began to bark. Yamamoto missed time with a strained rotator cuff. River Ryan shot through the system before his elbow tore. Clayton Kershaw made it back from shoulder surgery but was felled by a toe. Paxton was dealt. Bobby Miller, who started the second game of last year’s postseason run, had an 8.53 ERA. Walker Buehler’s return off a second Tommy John surgery has been murky, at best.
Absorbing body blows, Kershaw said, “is part of our organizational philosophy.” They’ve positioned themselves to take risks.
They’ve gotten the sour end of volatility instead. Dodgers starters ranked 25th in innings pitched (797 2/3), and 19th in ERA (4.23).
They’ll enter the postseason filled with question marks. Jack Flaherty, acquired at the deadline, has seen a dip in velocity each of his past two starts. Yamamoto has thrown into the fifth inning just once since June. Buehler has delivered mixed results. Landon Knack, “probably 10th or 11th” in the Dodgers’ preseason depth chart, according to Roberts, could pitch Game 4.
This is not the rotation the Dodgers envisioned.
“It’s been a unique challenge to try to piece things together,” pitching coach Mark Prior said. “We’ll see what happens when we get in the playoffs. Probably have to piece it together even during the playoffs as well. That’s not ideal.”
“We’re going to go into October with not as robust of a starting staff as we wanted to go into it with,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman conceded last week.
That thrusts Roberts at the center. If the Dodgers are to survive three rounds in October, it will likely have to come on the thump of Ohtani, Betts and Freeman. It’ll also have to come with Roberts’ strolls to the mound, signaling toward a bullpen that boasts depth, but has been worn down by the rigors of surviving the 162 games that preceded October.
Threading the needle with bullpen usage is hardly a way to live. Each huddled meeting between Roberts, Prior and bench coach Danny Lehmann brings with it a series of questions. What is the best lane? Who do we stay away from? How do we piece together the outs?
From his suite, Friedman has often contemplated the same scenarios.
“We’re talking about what we would do and then following along,” Friedman said. “There are a lot of times that things happen that are different than what we would do. Doesn’t make it right or wrong. In fact, probably more than not it was the right thing that was done.”
Postseason narratives are scripted in bullpens, and not usually in successful ones.
The iconic image of the night the Dodgers won the World Series in 2020 is not of any Dodger but of Blake Snell, handing the baseball to Rays manager Kevin Cash. That decision, and the narrative surrounding it, is what has been remembered.
What’s not remembered: the delicate dance that Roberts deftly navigated, deploying seven different pitchers to record 27 outs and allowing just one run.
“It’s easy to scrutinize when we don’t win,” said Austin Barnes, the club’s longest-tenured position player. “We’ve been in these situations a lot. He’s won, too.”
Operating along those lines is still combustible by nature, with diminishing returns. Utilizing the same arms in the same lanes multiple times over a series invites disaster.
“The thing that’s hard is, obviously, logically speaking, the more decisions anyone has to make, the more chances you are to be wrong,” Roberts said. “I have a lot of information. I have coaches. I’m using my eyes. To then make the decision, you just hope that it works out.”
This, the Dodgers know well. Roberts called the offseason after the 2019 NLDS the most difficult of his career, a series marred by his decision to go to Kershaw in relief in the deciding game. The decision to deploy Julio Urías in relief in Game 2 of the 2021 NLCS was just as flummoxing, as was conceding to Max Scherzer’s insistence in pitching in relief to close out Game 5 of the NLDS right before it; Scherzer would pitch just once more that postseason, bowing out of the decisive Game 6.
“If I’ve learned anything, you’re going to go with guys you trust,” Roberts said. “I’m going to go with guys I trust. It’s going to be unconventional. It has to be.”
There’s a book that sat on Roberts’ desk this last month, home and road. John Mark Comer’s “Live No Lies” has tapped Roberts into his faith, to fight three evils: the devil, the flesh and the world. To Roberts, he explains, the book “keeps me humble.”
“These are things,” he says, “to keep my mind and soul right.”
Roberts has operated with happiness as his compass. During his first spring with the Dodgers, Freeman marveled at Roberts’ ability to bring energy daily to meetings, normally a quiet and sleepy affair. “To do meetings every single morning and captivate a room and have everyone listening to you and care about what you’re saying, that’s really, really hard to do,” Freeman said.
Gavin Lux said, “he brings the same energy every day.”
“It’s so hard,” first base coach Clayton McCullough said, “to be as positive and energetic and consistent as Dave is every day.”
To become a curmudgeon, Roberts said, is a sign that he’s lost something he’s actively fought against. The most recent years of his tenure have been defined by what his Dodgers club hasn’t accomplished. The Dodgers broke through in the artificial bubble of 2020, yet wore down in its title defense, losing in six games in the NLCS to the Atlanta Braves. The Dodgers haven’t won a postseason series since despite winning 211 combined games in those two seasons.
Rather than sour, Roberts has learned to retreat.
“If I want to do this for an extended period of time, I’ve got to take care of myself,” Roberts said.
Roberts is not alone in the shadow of the expectation that follows these Dodgers. For years, they have been baseball’s winningest regular-season club. The model organization that others have sought to replicate. Winning one title hasn’t cured what has preceded it and what has followed.
“It’s been heavy this year,” Max Muncy said.
“It shouldn’t be the end of the world,” Betts said last month, sitting in the Dodgers dugout. “I think the expectations placed on us make it the end of the world.”
Add in the most expensive offseason in baseball history, and those expectations will multiply.
“I think it’s hard to lump every year in together and just say it’s been a failure that we haven’t won,” Kershaw said, referencing Walter’s words used last December during the organization’s meeting with Ohtani.
“I don’t think every year’s been the same. Every year, there’s been other circumstances and different situations. We’ve all played a part in the failures and successes, and Doc’s no different. I think every time you lose, you feel it and it sticks with you. It might not manifest itself every day, but you still feel it. There’s probably a little bit of a compounding effect every time you lose. But at the same time, I feel like we all understand that it’s a special opportunity. I don’t think Doc’s any different.”
The Dodgers had limped into the middle of September when Roberts entered the visiting clubhouse at Truist Park. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d called a team meeting in the middle of a season. But the second-place San Diego Padres nipped at their heels. They’d just lost Glasnow, and soon Stone, for the season. The message was short and direct: This is still a good team.
At 98 wins, they’d still finish with baseball’s best record. Injuries and all.
“We have the expectation of being possibly the greatest team that’s ever been assembled and we haven’t lived up to that hype,” Muncy said. “We all feel it. But we also understand that we can be the greatest team that’s ever been assembled and we all want to go out there and prove that.”
Roberts’ words resonated. The Dodgers won that night in Atlanta, halting a small skid in an uneasy summer. They clinched the division a week later.
“He’s a guy that, he’s probably not going to approach you with a lot of team meetings, stuff like that, but when he has a message, he has a really good feeling and understanding of when to communicate it with players,” Miguel Rojas said.
It hardly has qualified as the most difficult conversation that Roberts has had this season.
The most consequential move of the Dodgers’ season to date likely occurred in spring training, when the club’s offseason plans at shortstop imploded and a preposterous solution emerged. For the second consecutive offseason, the organization planned to hand the position off to Lux, a former top prospect who flashed with the bat but saw his season end before it began in 2023 due to a catastrophic knee injury. Even with Lux’s ACL fully healed, he began to show signs of erratic fielding.
So, they moved him off — the second time in as many years the job had been snatched from him before the season even began.
Rather than hand the role to Rojas, who had emerged as the Dodgers’ everyday shortstop for a 100-win team the year before, they broached the idea of Betts playing there instead. Betts was already set to move to the infield anyway, a return to his roots after turning into a Gold Glove right fielder. But this? Betts hadn’t played shortstop full-time since he was a senior in high school. His bat, the Dodgers thought, would generate enough surplus value to overcome any gaps as he acclimated.
Roberts assuaged what could have been a calamitous situation. He reasoned with Lux, assuring him that the club still needed his bat.
“Obviously it was a s–tty situation to happen but to his credit, he did a good job where it didn’t feel like too much of a punch in the gut,” Lux said.
He explained to Rojas that, at 35 years old, the club wanted to manage his workload rather than run him out there on an everyday basis.
“He came straight to me, no bulls—, just straightforward,” Rojas said.
Lux rebounded, hitting at a league-average level by OPS+. Rojas battled a litany of lower-body ailments but turned in the best offensive season of his career.
The conversations are ever-present. When Betts returned to the lineup after missing two months with a broken hand, he did so in the second spot — not leadoff. “It’s Shohei in front of me,” Betts reasoned then. “Whatever he’s got, whatever he wants to do, he can do.”
The move arrived without much awkwardness, despite navigating the pair of former MVPs.
“I think when I have conversations that they might like, not like, agree with, understand, or not, I think they respect it,” Roberts said.
He’s had to convince Muncy to be OK with hitting only part-time against left-handed pitching. “It’s one of those things where I definitely want to be out there every day, but I also understand I can’t do certain things,” Muncy said. “When you have honest, open conversations you’re able to buy into that a lot easier.”
For that, Muncy said, he will always vouch for his manager. His presence in the clubhouse is frequent, but not constant. The 10-year major-league veteran outfielder knows his line is thin, but must be handled with care.
“Managing is, you’ve got to have really good players,” Freeman said. “When the wrinkles do come, you nail it. Then you manage the egos. Everyone has a little ego. We’re all human, that’s just how it is. You manage it, keep everybody’s egos in the bumpers and that’s what makes everyone go out there between 7 and 10 o’clock and give you everything you have. He cares and truly cares about the Dodgers. It’s not him himself. He cares about this. He does a great job just handling it.”
The eye-popping numbers and deferrals of Ohtani’s 10-year, $700 million contract this winter obscured some fine print that secured control within the franchise. A “key man” clause, a contract mechanism known more in finance than in baseball, has attached Ohtani at the hip to the centers of the organization. If Walter or Friedman were to leave the organization, then he’d have the ability to opt out of the deal.
“Everybody has to be on the same page in order to have a winning organization,” Ohtani explained then. “I feel like those two are at the top of it and they’re in control of everything, and I feel almost like I’m having a contract with those two guys.”
Roberts was not included. He sat not on the podium, but in the first row of media as Ohtani was introduced as a Dodger and this new era of the franchise was inaugurated.
That era, more than any other, has emphasized the idea of generating results, now. In the glory of a division clinch a week ago, a baby powder-caked, booze-soaked Friedman acknowledged where things stand for the Dodgers in an Ohtani-filled world: after years of talking about sustainability, they need results in October.
“We like high expectations,” Friedman said. “We relish them. It beats the s— out of the alternative. People care, they’re passionate about the Dodgers. They have high expectations. So do we. We think that’s a great thing. And for us, this is step one.”
All eyes will be on Roberts over the next few weeks. Success in the postseason, and it’s more champagne for all involved. A third consecutive early exit, and the focus —fair or not — becomes trained on the Dodgers’ most prominent face in management.
Roberts remains under contract through the end of next season, the final year of a three-year extension he negotiated in spring training in 2022. How the Dodgers evaluate his status moving forward won’t necessarily be colored by October, Friedman said.
“To me, I think the evaluation for all of us gets at the consistency,” Friedman said. “The leadership. Putting guys in the best positions to succeed. … There are so many nuances that happen in a game, that it’s not just results. I think in terms of how we look at things, obviously, results are all that we ultimately care about. But as far as evaluating, there’s a lot more that goes into it.
“I don’t think we’re an organization that points fingers at any one person. It’s about us collectively coming together to figure out how to get better.”
There have been no talks yet of another extension, Roberts and Friedman said this week.
“That’s not up to me,” Roberts said.
Whether the Dodgers are comfortable allowing Roberts to enter that final year without a new deal remains to be seen.
“We are focused on winning 11 games in October,” Friedman said. “We’ve gone through this multiple times, and have been successful. Not a worry of mine.”
Roberts was transparent in his praise last offseason when then-Milwaukee Brewers manager Craig Counsell, exercising his right as a free agent, inked a record-setting five-year, $40 million deal to manage the Chicago Cubs, telling The Athletic then, “no one will ever reach their maximum value until or unless you’re willing to be a free agent.”
He suggested last week that it’s not out of the question.
“Right now, my clear focus is the postseason,” Roberts said. “I have a contract for next year. If we work something out in the winter, great. If we don’t, then I’ll just play it till the end. That’s kind of where my head is at.
“I know that I’ll have a job in baseball. I have a contract for next year. I’m not too concerned about job security. I just want to win another championship for the city of Los Angeles.”
As he got up, a smile returned to Roberts’ face. He smacked the dugout bench and descended back down the tunnel. The joy has returned amidst the thanklessness. Roberts wants more.
(Top photo of Dave Roberts: Chris Bernacchi / Diamond Images via Getty Images)
