Dave Roberts Further Vindicated by Dodgers’ Latest National League Pennant
Dave Roberts seems to be interviewing annually for the job he has held for nine years, such is the tenuity of being manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers when they don’t win the World Series. The man has the greatest record in baseball history of any manager with at least 1,000 games and yet he has no contract beyond next year and his job was imperiled if he did not win two elimination games against San Diego in the National League Division Series.
The National League Championship Series loomed as another interview to keep his job. It smacked of a common test puzzle employers use when hiring software developers:
Four people need to cross a bridge in the dark of night. Some are slow and some are fast. The trick is that there is only one flashlight, and the bridge can support only two people at a time. What’s the fastest way to get all four across?
The answer involves sending the two slowest across after the two fastest cross, with one of the fast ones returning with the flashlight in between. It’s a puzzle designed to test problem solving efficiency.
The Dodgers’ NLCS version of the puzzle test for Roberts went like this:
Find a way to get the Dodgers across the bridge to the World Series. The trick is your starting pitchers will give you only 20 1/3 innings, or an average of 3 1/3 innings per start. You will use 28 pitchers in six games. And you are not permitted to lose a lead.
Tommy Edman may have been the NLCS MVP. Shohei Ohtani may have reached base a record 17 times in the series. But nobody had a better series than Roberts.
All series he talked about “threading the needle” with his pitcher usage. He twice let games get away by not using his best relievers in a deficit, even with such a loaded offense that scored 46 runs in the NLCS, a record for any series. And there he was at the end with his best pitcher, Blake Treinen, on the mound rested enough for the six outs to salt away a 10–5 victory in Game 5 and win a 22nd pennant for the Dodgers.
“You have to do that,” Roberts said about threading the needle. “I did for six games. I sat there looking at Game 2, and I sat there looking at Game 5 saying, ‘I don’t like this.’ ”
It took discipline for Roberts to stick to the plan, especially as criticism mounted that the Dodgers were letting playoff games get away.
“It did,” Roberts said, “because even after the game the other night, I was taking s— because people were like, ‘If you’d gone the other way …’ But if I would’ve done it and lost it, we wouldn’t have had tonight.”
It would be just if Roberts felt redemption, winning the NLCS with a pitching plan that was novel and worked to perfection. Until the Dodgers did it, nobody thought about not chasing a four-run deficit with plenty of at-bats left in a playoff game.
You know what? I try not to go there,” Roberts said. “Because I’ll tell you right now, there’s a little bit of you that goes, for all those people that got on me, ‘f— you,’ but I just check my humility because I go, ‘Stay humble. Just stay humble.’ Because that’s who I am. So, it’s like, I don’t ever want to be that guy.
“People, they get an opportunity to yell at me. I get it. But that’s just not who I am. I’m not going to do that. I’m going to stay humble.”
The Dodgers are in the World Series both despite and because they used bullpen games in three of their past eight games. They went 2–1 in those games of designed chaos.
