Dodgers News: Dave Roberts Loses Manager of the Year Award to Buck Showalter

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts finished second in the NL Manager of the Year voting, losing to a guy with a higher payroll, a worse record, and a blown double-digit division lead.

Let's start with a disclaimer: No one, including the people voting for the Manager of the Year Awards, really knows what makes one manager better than another. Voters do their best to parse how much of a team's success was due to the players and how much was due to the manager. In the end, they generally just vote for the team that outperformed (or seemed to outperform) their expectations by the most.

In the National League this year, the Mets were projected to win 87 games and won 101, so Buck Showalter won the Manager of the Year Award. The Dodgers outperformed projections by 10 games, so Dave Roberts finished second. And the Braves were seven games better than projected, so Brian Snitker finished third.

2022 NL Manager of the Year: Buck Showalter, Mets.

Full voting details: https://t.co/9zuUhuxElM

— BBWAA (@officialBBWAA) November 16, 2022

Of course, Showalter's Mets had the highest payroll in baseball and finished in second place in the NL East after leading by 10.5 games when June started and seven games on August 10, which seems like maybe it should have counted for something.

Roberts' Dodgers won 111 games despite getting just 12 starts from Opening Day starter Walker Buehler and having only two starting pitchers stay healthy all season, getting just five innings from their best reliever from last year (Blake Treinen), plus subpar offensive seasons from Cody Bellinger, Chris Taylor, and Max Muncy.

Expectations are always high for the Dodgers. But in a year Walker Buehler went down after 12 starts, LA still managed to exceed those expectations with an eye-popping 111 wins

That's why I voted for Dave Roberts for Manager of the Year https://t.co/P3gCI24B5L

— Eric Stephen (@ericstephen) November 16, 2022

The Manager of the Year is a regular-season award, with votes submitted before the postseason started, so voters didn't take into account the postseason stumbles of any of the teams and/or their managers.

In the end, it appears that the voters, like Dodger fans, have been spoiled by L.A.'s constant and consistent success, and it would take something even more ridiculous than the best National League record in over a century to impress them. Especially the 13 voters who didn't even have Roberts in their top three. Don't like it, Dave? Just win 130 next year or something.