Dave Roberts, the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, has taken great care in these past few years not to act smug or entitled about being the man who guides the best-paid team in American sporting history. That Roberts has more or less pulled it off is one of the great achievements of his stint in that role, but even he cannot hold up the charade any longer. Roberts has decided this gig is so easy that he needs to introduce a new challenge to keep things interesting, and this October, he has decided to win games with his own bullpen tied behind his back, his wrists bound by the cord on the deactivated dugout telephone. It’s going well.
Roberts has had perfectly good tactical reasons to let his starting pitchers go on forever in the first two games of the National League Championship Series against Milwaukee; if the Brewers want to pay homage to the dead ball era, Roberts might as well let his starters do their best Mickey Lolich imitations, too. But there is a bit of the imp in Roberts, and he has won these two games while mostly sitting rather than leaning on the dugout railing; if this were an earlier time, he’d be in a rocker and smoking a brier pipe. Those analytics drones who have seen the diminution of the manager’s position can finally point to the Dodgers and shriek, “Excelsior! Proof, if proof were still needed, that we’ve been right all along!”
