Dodgers: Dave Roberts Reveals Where 111 Win Season Ranks For Him
The Dodgers had the best regular season in franchise history in 2022, going 111-51 to shatter their previous record of 106 wins (set in each of the previous two full seasons). Unfortunately, Los Angeles went cold at the worst possible time, losing the NLDS in four games to the Padres.
L.A. manager Dave Roberts was on MLB Network earlier this week as a finalist for the Manager of the Year Award — he finished second behind Buck Showalter — and he was asked where the 111 wins rank in his accomplishments as a manager.
“It’s up there. Certainly being the last team standing in 2020 was right at the top. But I think if you look at the body of work that we accomplished this year, it’s right below winning a championship.
"I’m just excited that our organization — the staff, the coaches, the players — get highlighted being a finalist. And it’s kind of like the Academy Awards. We’ve already won right now. I’ve already won.
"And I’m just excited about the consistency. There’s a lot of talk about baseball and the quality of the game. But I can say for the Dodgers and seeing our guys play every night, it’s a quality effort and a quality product we put out there every single night. And baseball fans and Dodger fans, I know, should be pretty proud.”
This probably won't sit well with the "everything less than a World Series title is a failure" crowd, but as Andrew Friedman said a couple weeks ago, the people intimately involved in the day-to-day of the organization couldn't do their jobs all year if they really believed three weeks in October were all that mattered. Roberts acknowledges that winning the World Series is better than winning the most games in the regular season, but as 2020 taught us, we can have both.
The 2022 postseason didn't go the way we hoped, but it's good Roberts can still appreciate what the team accomplished in the regular season.
