Dodgers' Dave Roberts rejuvenated, ready: 'We're not going to run from expectations'
The Dodgers' latest playoff exit renewed scrutiny on the manager, but Roberts said: "You just sort of don't give a crap what people think." Dave Roberts, Dodgers manager, is relishing the opportunity to get away from the team's catastrophic first-round losses in franchise history and is determined to keep it going at all. He is confident that the team will not run from expectations, and is ready to climb the mountain again. Despite the loss, Roberts is optimistic and confident that his team can still win the World Series title in 2018. His team has had a successful season, with at least three rookies playing their way into prominent roles and several tentpole leaders leaving the club in free agency. Roberts is confident in his ability to overcome the challenges of the past two seasons, and hopes to make a mental reset in the coming months.
Published : one year ago by Fabian Ardaya in Sports
In the hours following one of the most catastrophic first-round losses in franchise history, Dave Roberts sought an escape. He wanted to get away from it all.
The Dodgers had been stunned in the city that Roberts called home. A season highlighted by 111 wins and expectations of much more lasted just four games in October, meekly going out against a San Diego club the Dodgers had dominated and outpaced by 22 games during the regular season. The so-called “dragon up the freeway” had been slayed.
Talk of the greatest club, potentially ever, was instead rife with disappointment. And the celebration that surrounded him all but swallowed him whole. So Roberts asked his wife, Tricia: Let’s get out of here, rather than return to their San Diego-area home.
“I wanted no part of that,” Roberts told The Athletic of sticking around to watch the rest of a postseason run that could’ve cemented his Dodgers club as an all-time great team.
The next morning, Roberts was at the San Diego airport. If a Padres fan recognized him, they elected not to revel in the manager’s misery. His aim, in the ensuing weeks spent in castles in London and wine-tasting in Barcelona, was to disconnect.
For Roberts, it was not running away from the loss that was quickly dubbed a massive failure. It was about “survival,” he said, a coping mechanism for the tolls of a job that has worn on him. No manager who has lasted as long as Roberts has won games at a higher clip than the .632 mark he’s had at the helm of the Dodgers, but after another early exit, the focus was again on him.
Yet here he is now. Entering his eighth year as Dodgers manager, Roberts said he is as invigorated as ever. His smile has remained for much of the spring. His laugh echoes from a room away.
“It’s a superpower of his,” Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers president of baseball operations, said of Roberts’ endless optimism.
Roberts will not guarantee a World Series title, as he so infamously did on “The Dan Patrick Show” a year ago. The Dodgers aren’t even considered the favorites to reclaim their own division for the 10th time in 11 seasons, trailing the Padres according to FanGraphs’ preseason projections.
His clubhouse looks and feels different, with several tentpole leaders walking out the door in free agency. Justin Turner, for so long a pillar, is now wearing a Red Sox uniform. Talks with star shortstop Trea Turner didn’t get very far before he signed for $300 million with the Phillies to return to the East Coast. Cody Bellinger is settling into a different shade of blue with the Cubs. Even Tyler Anderson, the surprise All-Star, left to sign a three-year deal across town with the Angels.
The club will break camp with at least three rookies playing their way into prominent roles: infielder Miguel Vargas, outfielder James Outman and right-hander Ryan Pepiot. They’ve already been dealt a massive blow, losing Gavin Lux for the season due to a torn ACL.
But this much uncertainty breeds new energy. The unknown means possibility, a chance for a mental reset. Another start at scaling the mountain, even as the fall from the last one might be as damaging as any he’d had yet.
One-hundred-eleven wins. All to be undone over four nights. Immediately ranking high among the list of painful snapshots, like the shocking NLDS defeat to the wild-card Nationals in 2019, or Game 7 of the World Series in 2017.
Roberts is ready to climb again.
“We’re not going to run from expectations,” Roberts said. “But I do think it takes a special character of people to maybe not realize expectations but to kind of bow your neck and try to do it again.”
Crooking his neck out involves finding himself once again in the crosshairs, vulnerable as anyone to what comes next. His pitching decisions led a sitting President to critique him in the middle of the 2018 World Series. The collapse that came in Game 5 against Washington the following year led him to question if he wanted to keep going at all.
“Is this really worth it?” he recalled thinking to himself. A fleeting one. He’d return the following year, endure a pandemic shutdown and lead the Dodgers to their first World Series title in more than three decades. He’d log 217 regular-season victories over the next two seasons, but the subsequent postseason defeats that have followed have not diminished that urge to keep going.
“You just sort of don’t give a crap what people think,” Roberts said.
“I’m going to do this as long as I feel that I can give the best version of myself to the organization every day, and the players. Once I don’t feel that, I don’t need to do this job. … Right now I’m having the time of my life. I love what I do.”
He has learned to manage the hazards of the job, how to unplug and disconnect, for what he called “quality of life.” The criticism made Roberts “jaded,” he admitted. While he has rarely allowed his mind to wander to life after managing, he understands the toll the grind has taken. Roberts is 50 years old and said he “understands” what drove Sean McVay, the 37-year-old Super Bowl-winning Rams coach, to consider walking away this offseason, even if he’s not there yet himself.
“I don’t envy his job at all,” general manager Brandon Gomes said of Roberts.
Roberts has learned to manage, establishing buffers to shield from the focus of the microscope.
“That’s a difficult thing to grow accustomed to,” Friedman said. “It’s not human nature to like that, or to accept it, and I think he has evolved to a point of not letting the outside noise influence him as much.”
The former center fielder and grinder, who spent half a decade in the minors before his big-league debut, has made optimism his calling card. Tasked with handling a roster full of stars, he held clubhouses together with his ability to massage egos, spinning buy-in into a skill. But his in-game tactics have also brought him under fire. The images of using Clayton Kershaw in relief in 2019 or burning 20-game winner Julio Urías out of the bullpen in 2021 launched a narrative that Roberts and the organization’s decision-making in the postseason bordered on over-managing.
Each of the Dodgers executives pushed back on the critique of their manager, with Gomes calling him one of the best, “if not the best” in the game. They backed their collective processes that ultimately fall on Roberts and his veteran-laden coaching staff, which outside of a few clerical changes (Danny Lehmann will take on a more prominent role as bench coach) has largely remained intact. When Friedman was pressed following the Dodgers’ collapse last October about whether Roberts had the autonomy to make his own decisions, that the in-game moves had not followed a set script, the executive was terse.
“Is that really a narrative?” he asked then, sniping that it was only one because he kept getting asked about it every winter.
Friedman, too, said he feels the arrows that have been aimed at Roberts are misdirected.
“I think it has been unfair on a personal level,” Friedman said, “even understanding it comes with the territory.”
Last October’s loss had plenty of blame to go around. It was sealed with a Game 4 loss that saw the Dodgers stray from what had been their stated pattern. Given a 3-0 lead, a rarity in a series in which their bats went dormant, they opted to reserve their best reliever, Evan Phillips, for the ninth inning rather than deploy him against the heart of San Diego’s order in the seventh. A miscommunication over a pickoff signal led to a mid-at-bat pitching change. The Padres surged ahead in the rain, slamming the door shut on the Dodgers’ historic season.
The circumstances of the final three innings cloaked what had been an alarming trend all series: Baseball’s best regular-season lineup stopped hitting, at one point going 20 at-bats with runners in scoring position without recording a hit.
“Most of the time (the decisions) work,” Gomes said. “And when they don’t, it’s easy to say, ‘Well, why’d you do that? It didn’t work.’ We don’t have the benefit of seeing what the future holds.
“Our expectations are high every year, to win the World Series. And that’s the way we want it. So when we don’t, it’s a disappointment for everyone. Unfortunately, Dave takes a lot of that on himself. It’s not always fair. It’s not fair. It’s always an organizational effort.”
The self-professed “organizational failure” of a year ago has led to a winter of change. Roberts lamented the lack of fire he saw in the dugout last October, as the businesslike machine of the Dodgers sputtered for the first time in the season’s most pivotal point. He doesn’t confuse the flame with focus. “S—,” he says, “we were focused and won 111 games last year.” But he looks at his new room and sees a different spark.
In his opening remarks to this year’s club, he had a series of new veterans speak to the room. That included Jason Heyward, a two-time All-Star the Dodgers are paying the league minimum after the Cubs cut him and his $184 million deal loose. It included David Peralta, who emerged from independent ball to become a quality big leaguer but at age 35 has played in just five postseason games. Miguel Rojas was traded away from Los Angeles in 2014, just as the club was starting this decade-long run of postseason runs, only to see plenty of losing in Miami. Roberts’ message he hoped to convey was simple: Show why you chose to be a Dodger, why you wanted to be part of this.
That hunger, Roberts said, is there. It’s there in the veterans who want to be part of what the Dodgers have built. It’s in the crop of young players Friedman likened to 2019, when the Dodgers saw debuts from the likes of Will Smith, Dustin May and Tony Gonsolin. It’s also in the group that outscored its opponents by more runs than any club since the 1939 Yankees just to watch it slip away in the NLDS.
“(They) felt we left money on the table last year,” Roberts said.
As Roberts finished, he turned and waved. His speedwalk turned into a jog. Roberts is back in the fire after running toward it rather than looking for an escape.
Topics: Baseball, MLB, Los Angeles Dodgers