Image credit: Dodgers manager Dave Roberts (Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)

Over his nine years as manager of the Dodgers, Dave Roberts has learned something about his position.

When the Dodgers win—and they have won more than any other team since 2016—it is never because of Roberts. It is rationalized as their resources and payroll and their sophisticated front office that brings together the star power that makes winning inevitable.

But when the Dodgers lose, the blame falls on Roberts more than anyone else. He took the pitcher out too soon, brought in the wrong reliever, was too wedded to analytics or was not guided enough by analytics.

“I’ve learned to have thicker skin and try to appreciate the fact that there’s always going to be criticism—maybe more jaded at times,” Roberts said this fall. “But it is a results business, and I get that.”

It is absolutely a results business. And Roberts got the results in 2024.

Despite losing top players Mookie Betts and Max Muncy for months at a time and being saddled with more pitching injuries than any other team in MLB this year, Roberts guided the Dodgers to the best record in baseball. Los Angeles’ 98 wins were actually low by their standards. The last time the Dodgers failed to break 100 in a full season was 2018.

And despite having just three healthy starting pitchers, Roberts guided the Dodgers to their fourth National League pennant in the past eight seasons, their second World Series title in the past five and their first full-season championship since 1988.

“To be honest, Dave is the real reason why we’re here,” Betts said after the Dodgers defeated the Yankees to win the World Series. “I know there’s a lot of talk about Doc—(but) Doc is the best, man.

“Doc loves each and every person in here. Doc has confidence in each and every person in here. Doc never lost confidence in anybody in here. And no matter what we went through, he was always positive.”

All of that came to bear in a mid-September moment that “turned our season around,” as Muncy and others saw in hindsight.

The Dodgers were in the midst of a slide that saw them lose six of nine games including the first two of a four-game series in Atlanta that trimmed their lead in the NL West to just 3.5 games over a hard-charging Padres team.

On top of that, they got news that ace Tyler Glasnow would not be returning to pitch again in 2024 because of an elbow injury. For many in the Dodgers clubhouse, it felt like the final straw.

“Not from the team, but from the outside. Everybody was panicking because we had a lot of injuries. We lost a lot of pitchers,” left fielder Teoscar Hernandez recalled. “And it was one time that we felt like we were down as a team.

“And one meeting changed everything.”

Roberts called that meeting before the third game in Atlanta because he felt “a little ‘woe is me’ ” attitude sinking in and “that’s just not who we are.”

“The message basically was, ‘I can’t believe more in them than they believe in each other,’ ”

Roberts said. “They’ve got to believe in themselves, right? And I just felt we have enough talent in the room to do that.”

That reminder carried the Dodgers into the postseason, where so many previous Octobers had been undone by the wrong pitching choices. Back-to-back first-round exits hung like a cloud over the 2024 Dodgers when they fell behind two games to one in the NL Division Series against San Diego.

But Roberts stitched together a shutout in Game 4, using eight pitchers in a bullpen game, then getting another shutout in Game 5 from Yoshinobu Yamamoto and four relievers.

“I thought he was surgical in Game 4 and Game 5,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said of Roberts’ handling of the team’s limited pitching resources.

It was part of a postseason record-tying 33 consecutive scoreless innings from Dodgers pitchers.

“Hats off to our guys and the way they threw the ball the rest of that series,” Dodgers starter Jack Flaherty said. “But you’ve got to give (Roberts) a lot of credit as well. The way guys were brought in and put into situations to succeed—and just be put in those right situations.”

Roberts’ decision-making continued to be on point through an NL Championship Series victory in six games against the Mets and a five-game dispatch of the Yankees in the World Series.

And you have to give Roberts credit.

His career winning percentage of .627 is first among active managers and fifth all-time. He ranks sixth all-time in postseason victories. Three of the five managers ahead of him—Joe Torre, Tony La Russa and Bobby Cox—are in the Hall of Fame.

The other two—Dusty Baker and Bruce Bochy—likely will be enshrined one day.

Just 24 managers in MLB history have won at least four pennants, as Roberts now has. Twenty-two of them are in the Hall of Fame, with Roberts and Bochy the only two active managers on the list.