Dodgers Team News

Dodgers News: New Manager Is Team’s Biggest Change

Quite a bit has changed this offseason, from the Los Angeles Dodgers losing star pitcher Zack Greinke to a division rival to Corey Seager replacing Jimmy Rollins at shortstop, but none has been bigger than Dave Roberts replacing Don Mattingly as the team’s manager.

Roberts got the job this offseason, and the team, from the players to the executives, seems to absolutely love him. As they should. You should always love the new manager that you hire. And Roberts fits the bill of a coach that the players can get behind and play hard for.




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From Steve Dilbeck at the Los Angeles Times:

But most of the attention and excitement will be aimed at the enthusiastic Roberts as he tries to mold a sometimes fragmented club into a cohesive team, to push them beyond simply qualifying for the playoffs and into a team that advances to the World Series.

If Roberts can help propel the Los Angeles Dodgers to their first world championship since 1988, it’s possible that the organization will build him a statue in the near future. Getting the team to gel together and play as a unit might be tough, but it’s something Roberts is capable of doing.

And, if he is able to do that in his first season, he’ll really have earned his nickname:

Roberts might be playing the role of an actual psychiatrist as much as he’ll be a manager. That’s the lovely nature of the job that he’s inheriting for this team. He’ll need to mold them into a team rather than, as Dilbeck puts it, a “fragmented club.”

Whether the team reaps major rewards under the first-year manager remains to be seen, obviously, but the team certainly appears to be headed in the right direction under a new voice. We all hope it leads to something glorious down the road.

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11 Comments

  1. I hope that  his best attribute is knowing how to use his pitchers. Being a leader of men is one thing, but if he don’t use his staff effectively, it’s fruitless. Seems like Bruce Botchy gets more out of less than any manager in baseball. At least we didn’t hire another Yankee. Can you imagine the Yankees hiring a Dodger as manager.

  2. I do not have any worries about Dave Roberts. I like the way he played the game and as he has said he plans to manage and coach guys to be aggressive. I think Mattingly did not play “Dodger Baseball” I am glad we will be back to that style..
    He has coaches that are very respected in the game to assist him in decisions so I think they have that well covered…

  3. Roberts was a gritty smart ball player. His biggest challenge will be getting through to these knuckle heads. I do not put it all on Mattingly like a lot of people do. I think he had a lot of ego’s to deal with. And some people got their feelings hurt when they were not in the lineup everyday. Players today have to be coddled, and pacified a lot. They do not, with some exceptions, just go out and play the game the way it should be played. I remember Walter Alston stopping the Dodger team bus because players were complaining. He challenged the whole team to step off the bus if they did not like it…….no one got off…….and that team had 6’7″ Frank Howard. If Roberts can convince Yasiel Puig to get his head out of his ass, he will have accomplished something good.

  4. Michael Norris Great point. The more money some of these guys get, the more selfish they are. Greinke and a few others seem to have their best season when their contract is up. They get paid whether they are a bum or stud. Smokey Alston was the best manager of pitchers that I have seen. Yes, he was no nonsense. To bad Kirk Gibson is sick, because I think he would be a Walter Alston type. When Gibson joined the the team and the players put some foreign matter in his cap, he told them that he was not there for bull……. , he was there to win. There after they followed all the way to a Title.

  5. robert20156h Michael Norris  Guys like Gibson are considered dinosaur’s by today’s players, and the Arizona guys eventually tuned Kirk out. But he was a no nonsense manager and Az played balls out while he was there. Alston was a great manager, but he also made, in my opinion of course, one of the worst decisions in Dodger history in a playoff game. Lasorda blew it when he pitched to Jack Clark…..Alston blew the 62 playoffs when he brought Stan Williams in to finish off the Giants instead of Big D……..He said he was saving Drysdale for the 1st game of the world series………you have to get there first Walt…….

  6. Tmaxster I like that Dodger baseball analogy. The style that won us Championships got lost after the 88 season. Other teams in the major league started emulating our style. That was good pitching, good defense up the middle and speed to pressure defenses. The three time champion Okland A’s use it, so did the big red machine. We were the trend setters. Gordon was a the perfect fit.

  7. Michael Norris robert20156h True that was a mistake. And he should have known that after missing most of the second half of the season, that Koufax wasn’t ready. But what I liked was that the team didn’t run him. And you’re right about Stan Williams. He reminds me of Ralph Branca.

  8. robert20156h Tmaxster  Actually Dodgers style of play started to disappear after Lasorda was replaced as manager by Bill Russell. Subsequent managers after Russell bought much different views, and styles of play. When Russell was fired after the 98 season, none of the managers since then were Dodger system guys…Johnson, Tracy, Little, Torre, and DM, were all from different playing systems. And Robert….the Big Red Machine, and those A’s teams were in the 70’s …..neither has done much since

  9. Michael Norris robert20156h Tmaxster No matter the decade, the Dodgers started the small ball era. The A’s went as far as having a designated pinch runner. The Reds began to copy when Rose came up and was added to Vada Pinson, but perfected in the 70’s with Rose, Morgan and Griffey. No it didn’t last because it wasn’t their tradition, the reason that we kept it was because we started it.

  10. Michael Norris Michael I am not a Mattingly hater but s you said in previous post he came from the Yankee System and I prefer the traditional Dodger Ball that Alston & Lasorda played and Scioscia plays when he has the players. 
    I think Robert’s engaging personality is a right fit for the time with most guys being Multi-Millionaires and the only leverage he has is playing time. 
    Of the names bandied about this winter Roberts was my choice. I wanted a Dodger. And I dreaded the idea of Kapler because I thought he would not be seen as independent from the FO. 
    Roberts having played/coached for other organizations is a plus as he has experienced other systems and can distill the best out of them to use.

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