In checking off the things that the Dodgers have yet to finish in the 2024 offseason, their manager needs to be extended.
For the second consecutive year, this offseason has been a delight, a gluttonous feast of the senses. As it reaches its final days, let us review the unfinished business that the Dodgers still have to complete before going to Tokyo.
Pay Dave Roberts
The Dodgers have gotten everyone on the shopping list, from The Monster of the Reiwa Era to reunions with the Hernandez boys to splurging on Blake Snell and Michael Conforto. Even Clayton Kershaw is lurking in the wings.
The Dodgers should have extended Dave Roberts — yesterday. His current contract expires after the 2025 season. Recently, word broke that Roberts and the team started contract discussions.
Now, the team needs to sign Dave Roberts for five years and $42 million. I do not have strong feelings about the length or amount of the deal.
While I have criticized Roberts during various issues and with the media, the fact remains that he has earned his payday, and the message of giving the Dodgers’ field general the highest managerial salary in history has the energy of “because we can.”
Confessions of a Roberts Skeptic
The above paragraph would have been inconceivable for me to write last fall before the playoff run. I have been a Dave Roberts skeptic for many years. Considering that thought, imagine the following as an alternate timeline.
It’s NLDS Game 4 against the San Diego Padres. As the opener, Ryan Braiser gets tuned up for three runs, and the Dodgers’ offense goes back to sleep. The Padres ultimately prevail in 4.
Does the dream offseason play out in that timeline like the one we know?
We have no way of knowing, but it seems unlikely that the Padres would have stood pat in this alternative timeline. What seems probable, considering all of the changes to the Dodgers roster over the past three seasons, another NLDS exit would probably signal the end of the Dave Roberts era in Los Angeles.
Frankly, a dismissal in this situation would not have been fair, but it would probably have been right. Failures in 2021 and 2023 were much larger than the manager’s chair, and 2022 was a generational failure, with no one except Freddie Freeman and the now-disgraced Julio Urías avoiding ignominy. Even as a skeptic, Roberts wasn’t to blame, but he didn’t help either.
If the Dodgers had lost in this past NLDS, I had a killer analogy lined up. Imagine you have built a car for a race, and while it does well in the marathon qualifiers, it keeps blowing up at the start of the final sprint. You upgrade the parts, the gas, and the design, but the car keeps exploding right after the final sprint starts.
Eventually, you realize that you keep using the same mechanic.
I make no apology for wanting Roberts to be dismissed since Game 5 of the 2019 National League Division Series against the Washington Nationals. That game served as a masterclass on how not to manage a bullpen in a deciding postseason game. While Roberts had less than stellar bullpen management in the postseason, it always felt unfair to blame him when someone did not have it unless it was clear that the reliever was cooked (see: Ryan Madson, 2018).
The memes are dead. Long live the new memes.
It’s the difference between someone having a bad day and someone having a bad plan. YouTuber Steve Linkowski summarized how I felt in 2022.
In 2023, Roberts’s admission that he had “to do a better job of figuring out a way to get our guys prepared for the postseason. I’ll own that” did not help my ongoing concerns.
What was ripe for criticism for Roberts from 2019 on was an almost panicky usage of relievers, especially when the roster had been constructed to give Roberts and the Dodgers multiple viable options. Andy McCullough of The Athletic put it succinctly after the 2024 World Series win against the New York Yankees:
In his first years at the helm, Roberts excelled at identifying high-leverage situations. This was still an era when many managers assigned roles based on innings, rather than matchups. Roberts utilized data from the front office to smother an opposing team’s best hitters with his best relievers. In an extended series, though, there were consequences to repeated usage of even the strongest arms.
During Game 3 of the 2017 World Series, Roberts used Kenta Maeda for eight outs despite a sizable deficit. The manager believed his offense deserved a chance to get back into the game. Yet when Maeda returned to action two days later, he served up a back-breaking home run to Jose Altuve. In 2019, Pedro Báez was unavailable for the season’s final game, because he had appeared in the previous two — both losses.
“I have evolved,” Roberts said earlier this month. He described his “trust tree,” the collection of relievers he believed in the most. “Each moment you feel that that’s always the best option, for fear that if you go somewhere else or with another player and it doesn’t work out, you didn’t deploy your best option in that moment,” he said. “That’s the inner struggle that any manager has. I’ve lived it.”
[emphasis added.]
Would a Skip Schumaker-run Dodgers feel as inevitable as this pending 2025 team, and how would it respond after a third consecutive NLDS exit?
The point is that now, we will never know. It’s time for Roberts to get paid.
As an aside, I don’t know when the baseball world decided to universally conclude that 2020 was just lesser, but the argument that Roberts was being buoyed by talent was not allayed in that series. Remember that the most critical managerial decision came from the other dugout.
For the past five years, while the Dodgers had a competent regular-season manager, it felt like he was not the manager to get the team through the 11-win crucible to the promised land, which felt inexcusable for the talent being assembled on the roster. What was maddening about the situation was that the players, almost seemingly to a man, wanted to and would run through a wall for Roberts.
If you have a spare hour, watching Roberts talk to Mookie Betts after the World Series parade is an excellent example of the strengths of Roberts in the clubhouse.
Yes, I had written off the Dodgers as dead at the start of the 2024 playoffs. I was wrong, and happily so. Duck shenanigans aside, an argument I made that has been largely overlooked at the time was that the Dodgers likely saved Dave Roberts’ job by beating the San Diego Padres.
Even Roberts alluded to that argument at the time:
“There was some part of it that was on my mind if we didn’t win the series,” Roberts said in the aftermath of one of his finest professional moments, a 2-0 victory over the San Diego Padres on Friday night that advanced the Dodgers to the National League Championship Series against the New York Mets.
“I’m not going to lie and say it didn’t kind of bleed in. That’s the profession, the job. But at the end of the day, I was proud of myself for not letting any outside noise or things I can’t control affect the way I managed these games. I had complete clarity. I believed in our players. And they performed.
In this successful World Series run, Roberts did something he had previously not been able to do throughout his tenure in Los Angeles: effectively use the entire roster to get the team to the finish line. While punting when necessary, Roberts’ bullpen and rotation management was damn near masterful in 2024.
If you want an example of how far Roberts has come, you can analyze how Yankees’ manager, Aaron Boone made a dog’s breakfast of his bullpen in the World Series. Rather than give an exhaustive list, once again, Steve Linkowski:
Nestor Cortes threw his final two pitches as a Yankee! Marcus Stroman was apparently on the roster! Tommy Kahnle was asked to throw nothing but change-ups! Luke Weaver was asked to be Brent Honeywell with actual consequences!
Can you imagine Dave Roberts just having 2024-Bobby Miller on the playoff roster, never to see a game? I think not. You get the idea.
While I will never see eye-to-eye with Roberts for some of his playoff decisions from 2019 to 2023, I can and do doff my cap to Roberts’ successful plan and the corresponding execution thereof in 2024. There’s only one thing to do as to Roberts as the Dodgers attempt to run in back in 2025, quoting one of my favorite bands: pay the man.