Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts is among the finalists for the 2022 National League Manager of the Year Award, along with New York Mets skipper Buck Showalter and the Atlanta Braves’ Brian Snitker.
Although all three managers saw their clubs disappoint in the postseason, the award voting is done prior to the start of the playoffs, so their October managing did not affect their cases.
During the regular season, the managers led their teams to the top three records in the National League, with Roberts and the Dodgers going 111-51, while the Mets and Braves tied with a 101-61 record.
All three of them have a case to be voted Manager of the Year, and all of them have previously won the honor, with Roberts winning in 2016, Snitker winning in 2018, and Showalter winning three times in the American League in 1994, 2004 and 2014.
The announcement of who is adding one more to their resume will be made on Tuesday, Nov. 15 at 3 p.m. PT live on MLB Network.
Why Dave Roberts should win Manager of the Year
Roberts should win the 2022 NL Manager of the Year Award in recognition of the Dodgers’ historic 111-win season. His club finished with 10 more wins than the next-closest NL team and five more victories than the best AL record.
Their 111 wins placed them second all-time in a season by an NL team and tied them for fourth in MLB history. The last time an NL team won that many games was the 1909 Pittsburgh Pirates, and the only NL team with more was the 1906 Chicago Cubs.
In more than a century of baseball, no NL team was better than the 2022 Dodgers.
This was despite injuries to key players throughout the year, including Clayton Kershaw, Walker Buehler, Tony Gonsolin, Blake Treinen and Daniel Hudson, and multiple players underperforming for much of the season, including Max Muncy, Justin Turner, Chris Taylor and Cody Bellinger.
Roberts has also managed the clubhouse as well as anyone in baseball and has succeeded in keeping a group of superstars happy and without distracting problems. If you don’t believe that is valuable, just look back to the 2021 San Diego Padres when they dealt with clubhouse issues between their stars as their team with high expectations failed to finish .500 on the year.
Furthermore, the Trevor Bauer investigation has still not been fully settled, but the Dodgers never let that get in the way of their on-field performance since it began.
Is Roberts a perfect game manager? No, he makes mistakes just like every other manager does, and he has room to improve. But when all is said and done, Roberts is one of the best managers in baseball, and maybe even baseball history.
In the history of MLB, Roberts’ four seasons of at least 100 wins is tied for third-most, and all other managers on the list have been inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
In his seven seasons as Dodgers manager, Roberts has led the club to a 653-380 (.632) record with a postseason berth every year, including six National League West titles, three pennants and one World Series championship. His winning percentage is the highest of any manager in MLB history with a minimum of 315 games.
It’s easy to point at the Dodgers roster as the reason for his success, but it’s a poor excuse. Regardless of how talented a team is, a bad manager is not going to continue to continually win like Roberts has, and there are more than enough examples in MLB history to show that.
But as the award is just focused on the 2022 season, Roberts has a historically good case to win, and no other manager came close to putting up the regular season he and the Dodgers had.
Why Dave Roberts should not win Manager of the Year
Roberts should not win 2022 NL Manager of the Year because the season went about as expected for the Dodgers while Snitker led his team from a poor start to winning their division, and the Mets had one of their best years in recent memory despite losing Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer for a significant portion of the season.
In April and May, the Braves went 23-27 (.460) and at one point they were seven games behind the Mets. But after May, the Braves went 78-34 (.696) to overcome the deficit despite the Mets playing well and win the NL East Division title.
Although it was the Mets that lost the division lead, they played quality baseball throughout the season and were just overtaken by a team who went on an incredible run over 112 games. Both teams also had to deal with another playoff contender in their division with the Philadelphia Phillies, the team that eventually won the NL Pennant.
The Dodgers played in a weaker division, and although the Padres ended up making the playoffs and reaching the NL Championship Series, the other three teams in the NL West were uncompetitive.
The Mets and Braves also dealt with injuries throughout the year and players who underperformed. Snitker lost his team’s best player to the Dodgers in the offseason, then lost Ozzie Albies to an injury, Ronald Acuña Jr. was hurt for nearly 50 games, and Matt Olson underperformed expectations.
Along with Showalter having his top two aces miss some of the season, with deGrom making just 11 starts and Scherzer making 23, they also lost Starling Marte to an injury that limited him to 118 games.
While there was less for those teams to overcome on the injury front by the number of players, the Dodgers had a much deeper roster and generally played worse competition, which made it easier for Roberts to manage through.
So although both Snitker and Showalter won 10 fewer games than Roberts, the competition they faced while also dealing with injuries and player struggles of their own make for an impressive case as the Manager of the Year.
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