Was The 2024 Season Dave Roberts’ Best Coaching Job?

Fresh off of an NLDS win versus the division foe San Diego Padres, the Los Angeles Dodgers are headed to their sixth Championship Series since 2016, when Dave Roberts became the head coach.

Despite the immense amount of success he has had in his nine years at the helm, Roberts has had a lot of critics, and some of them have been calling for his job.

The Dodgers have had one of the highest payrolls in the MLB during that span, so the expectations should be high, but let’s take a deeper look into his managerial career.

Does Los Angeles Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts Deserve The Criticism?

Fresh off a loss to the New York Mets in the divisional round of 2015, Don Mattingly was fired as the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and rookie head coach, Dave Roberts was given the keys to the team.

At the time, this roster had arguably the best pitcher on the planet, Clayton Kershaw. Still, it looked as though this team was entering a rebuild of sorts as Zack Greinke and some other key pieces left during free agency.

They relied heavily on young players like Yasiel Puig, Joc Pederson, and rookies Corey Seager and Julio Urias.

Related: Kike Hernandez Drops Legendary F-Bomb In Postgame Interview

The team was projected to be somewhat competitive, but take a step back from the previous year, get some young guys exposure and then look to compete again the following season. Dave Roberts had other plans and led this team to the NLCS for the first time in 8 years.

Fast forward to Spring Training  2024, and in his 8 years (not including this season) Dave Roberts had led the Dodgers to 8 playoff appearances, 7 NL West titles, 5 NLCS appearances, 3 World Series appearances, and 1 World Series title.

Even before you consider the franchise hadn’t even reached the World Series in the roughly 30 years prior to Roberts being hired, that is extremely impressive. Pair that with the fact that he has the highest managerial winning percentage of all-time, and has five 100-win seasons under his belt, he is on his way to a hall-of-fame career.

Now you’re probably asking, why would a 98-win season be the best coaching job of his career, especially when the Dodgers handed out contracts costing 1 billion dollars? Here are a few reasons why.

2024 Has Been Dave Roberts’ Best

On the surface, you can look at the Dodgers and their 5 ^th highest payroll and think that they underachieved, but upon further inspection, it’s remarkable what Roberts was able to do.

For starters, the Dodgers had 28 different players spend time on the injured list over the course of the season. To give that some context, the maximum number of players on an opening-day roster is 26. It’s easy to look at their current lineup and say that team should win as much as they did, but its also easy to forget that for about a month, the Dodgers were rolling out a lineup consisting of Nick Ahmed (DFAd), Cavan Biggio (DFAs), Jason Heyward (DFAd), James Outman (optioned to AAA), and Miguel Vargas (traded).

On the pitching side of things, Roberts was forced to use 17 different starting pitchers this season, many of whom were rookies. This season not only saw their starting pitching get devastated by injuries (Kershaw, Buehler, and Yamamoto missing huge chunks of the season, May, Gonsolin, and Sheehan not being able to take the mound at all this season, but also losing Glasnow and Stone down the stretch and not be available for playoffs), but they also were missing Mookie Betts and Max Muncy for significant portions of the year as well as losing Freddie Freeman due to a family issue for a couple weeks late in the year.

In addition to the injuries, rookie standouts from 2023 Bobby Miller and James Outman provided very little for the team this year.

Despite all of that, Roberts still ended the season with the best record in the MLB and home-field advantage throughout the postseason.

Another reason Roberts deserves praise this season is for his bullpen management. Many fans have criticized Roberts for his usage of the bullpen, especially in the postseason, but Roberts has been absolutely surgical with his moves.

In the NLDS against the Padres, the starting pitching, which we knew going in was going to be the Achilles heel, allowed 15 runs through 18.1 innings. The bullpen on the other hand didn’t allow a run in the final 24 innings of the series, including a 9-inning shutout in a bullpen game in a win-or-go-home Game 4 on the road. Roberts played the matchups perfectly over the final 2 games, improving his career record in winner-take-all games to 6-2.

Dave Roberts and the Dodgers will take on the red-hot New York Mets in the NLCS where he will have a chance to lead his team to a 4 ^th World Series appearance in 9 years.

Kodai Senga (2 IP, 1 ER) will get the start for New York and the Dodgers will counter with Jack Flaherty (5.1 IP, 4 ER). Neither one was particularly effective their last time out and will look to bounce back to give their team a very important win in game 1 in a West Coast – East Coast showdown starting tonight at Dodger Stadium .

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