In the ensuing months, the details have blurred. As the Dodgers recorded the final out, their manager remembers throwing up his arms and sprinting toward the field. He might have cried. He probably shouted. He definitely beamed.
You might have thought Dave Roberts had just won the World Series.
When he actually did, two weeks later—his second in five years—his reaction was similar. By then, he had put the finishing touches on a masterful postseason and all but posed for his plaque at Cooperstown. But in order to do all that, Los Angeles had to win the NLDS, three games to two, over the Padres, and when they did, Roberts felt relief—not just that his team would keep playing but that he would be there while they did.
On a warm day in January, Roberts, 52, leans forward in the dining room of his sprawling San Diego home and addresses the fear he tried not to let consume him that week. The Dodgers had won two pennants and a World Series since he arrived in Los Angeles before the 2016 season. But dating to a 2022 NLDS defeat to the Padres (after winning 111 regular-season games), they had lost six straight postseason games, all to less talented division rivals, all in games that Roberts later admitted the opponents had just wanted more. Now they had spent $1.2 billion in a single offseason to assemble perhaps the greatest collection of talent ever to jog onto a baseball field—and they were on the verge of crashing out of the Division Series yet again.
“I did feel that—right or wrong, truth or not truth, I don’t know that answer—but I felt my job was on the line if we didn’t win that series,” Roberts says. “That’s just my truth.”
