Dave Roberts will be hired as new Los Angeles Dodgers manager
Dave Roberts, who parlayed a modest skill set into a solid 10-year major league career, will now be responsible for guiding Major League Baseball's most expensive ballclub to an elusive World Series appearance.
The Los Angeles Dodgers on Monday named Roberts the 10th manager in their history. Roberts will receive a three-year contract and will be introduced in a Dec. 1 news conference.
The Los Angeles Times first reported that Roberts was the Dodgers' choice, emerging from a field of nine candidates to beat out the other finalist and early front-runner, Gabe Kapler.
Like Roberts, Kapler - the Dodgers' farm director - was a fringe major league outfielder whose front office experience and embrace of analytics endeared him to the Dodgers' decision-makers, despite no major league coaching experience.
In the end, however, club president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman opted for Roberts, 43, who spent the past two seasons as bench coach of the San Diego Padres.
He takes over for Don Mattingly, whose job status became an annual question even as he led the Dodgers to three consecutive National League West titles. Mattingly was just 1-3 in playoff series, however, and the mandate to reach a World Series only seemed to grow after Friedman assumed his new position in October 2014 and the club payroll exceeded $300 million during the 2015 season.
So Mattingly, 446-353 in five seasons with the Dodgers, parted with the club on what was described as mutually appealing terms, and he received a four-year contract to manage the Miami Marlins.
That left the door open for Roberts, who played college baseball at UCLA and had his most productive seasons as a Dodger from 2002-2004.
In his final season in Los Angeles, a July trade sent him to the Boston Red Sox, where he carved out a place in baseball history with his steal of second base off Mariano Rivera in the ninth inning of Game 4 of the American League Championship Series. The Red Sox went on to tie the game, overcome a 3-0 ALCS deficit and go on to their first World Series championship since 1918.
In L.A., the club's billionaire ownership group is seeking the club's first World Series title — and NL pennant — since 1988.
It will be up to Roberts - who's never managed at any level - to take the Dodgers two steps further than Mattingly.
After Mattingly's departure, the club launched an exhaustive search that included managerial names old and new, and surely ran up an extensive expense report interviewing candidates. The nine interviewed included ex-managers, first-timers, even college coaches: Roberts, Kapler - currently the Dodgers' farm director - Ron Roenicke, Bud Black, Darin Erstad, Dave Martinez, Tim Wallach, Kirk Gibson and Bob Geren.
In the end, they chose Roberts, affable and well-liked as a player and familiar both with the Los Angeles landscape and the evolution within the game. Roberts spent 2010 as a special assistant in the vaunted Boston Red Sox front office before beginning his coaching career with the Padres the following season. He also recovered from a March 2010 diagnosis of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
Roberts, of African American and Japanese descent, joins Dusty Baker as the second black manager in the major leagues for the 2016 season.
Roberts had a career .342 on-base percentage in a career that began in Cleveland and had stops with the Dodgers, Red Sox, Padres and San Francisco Giants.
Contributing: Bob Nightengale
MLB MANAGERIAL CAROUSEL: