In his eight-year career as the Dodgers manager, Dave Roberts has done little but prove that he is a Hall of Fame-worthy skipper. His .630 career win percentage would put him at third on the all-time leaderboard of baseball managers. Roberts has yet to have a losing season, and it hasn’t really been close. The closest chance the 51-year-old had to being sub-.500 came in his first season in LA when he took the Dodgers to a 91-71 record.
Roberts has made the postseason in each of the eight seasons he’s been at the helm of the Dodgers, only losing in the Divisional Series twice. After two losses in the World Series, Roberts finally got over the hump in 2020 to bring the Dodgers their first championship since 1988.
As the Dodgers look to emulate their 2020 performance and recapture the World Series title, Roberts says that his approach to the postseason has changed as he develops as a manager.
Roberts could face challenges this postseason when it comes to trusting pitchers, purely because he has not spent much time with some key role players in the Dodgers’ World Series hopes. Bobby Miller, Emmet Sheehan, Gavin Stone and Ryan Pepiot are all promising rookies that will see game action in the postseason.
However, Roberts has repeatedly expressed his trust in his young players. And we saw that early in NLDS Game One when the manager handed the ball off to the rookie Sheehan after Clayton Kershaw couldn’t get out of the first inning.
Regardless of the good and the bad that Roberts has experienced in his career, he is focused on the task at hand and learning from his past choices to keep evolving and working toward becoming a more well-rounded decision maker.
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