Dave Roberts was toast.
Out the window. Kicked to the curb. Yesterday’s news.
Well, almost. Had Robert’s 98-win Dodgers lost one more game to the 93-win Padres in the National League Division Series last season, one of the most successful managers of his era almost certainly would have been fired.
Instead, the Dodgers took the last two games of that series en route to their second World Series championship under Roberts, who was rewarded in the offseason with a four-year extension worth $8.1 million annually. That about doubled his salary and made him the highest-paid manager ever — by a skosh — besting the Cubs’ Craig Counsell’s $8 million per year.
Talk about a fortunate turn.
But that’s the high-wire act that is managing the most talented baseball team on the planet. Roberts, in his 10th season, never has missed the playoffs. He has gotten to the World Series four times. The career winning percentage of .628 he brought to Wrigley Field for a two-game series starting Tuesday against Counsell’s Cubs ranked fourth all-time and put him miles ahead of the Yankees’ Aaron Boone, who’s next among active managers at .585. Of the top 14 managers all-time in winning percentage, Roberts is the only one who has been active since — are you ready for this? — 1951.
But that hot seat, right?
Anybody would win big with Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, right?
There’s a conceit among baseball writers and analytics nerds everywhere that baseball managers don’t have much impact on winning and losing. That the best skippers are good for some extra ‘‘W’s,’’ sure, but you probably can count them on one hand over 162 games. That Roberts and Counsell are no different from Bruce Bochy, Terry Francona or anyone else held in high regard.
Clearly, however, the Dodgers and especially the Cubs have taken the opposite position. By throwing $40 million at Counsell, Cubs president Jed Hoyer staked his very reputation on a managerial hire.
Were they wrong?
‘‘Baseball is a world where everything is quantified,’’ Counsell said. ‘‘We want objective information. It’s turned into that, right? And the manager’s job is still a job that we haven’t found a great way to do that with, with their decisions and everything else.
‘‘It’s also very much a people job, so how do you figure that part out? I think that’s what baseball wants to do. It’s a numbers game, and we want to put numbers to everything, and there’s not for this.’’
Roberts pushed back on this topic more directly.
‘‘The most important people — the players — know the value of the manager,’’ he said, ‘‘and I’m just glad our guys value me, as well.’’
Roberts has been NL Manager of the Year only once — in 2016, his first go-round — and at times has felt dismissed by some around the game. It has a bit of a familiar ring to it: a winning Los Angeles coach who’s taken by some as being more lucky than anything else. It was easy for the Lakers’ Phil Jackson to win titles with Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, that conceit went, much as it had been in Chicago with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen.
But Jackson won 11 rings. Roberts is winning games at a clip not seen since the Truman administration.
‘‘I do feel [dismissed],’’ he said. ‘‘I’ve got one Manager of the Year award, where I felt last year I did my best job of managing. It kind of comes with the territory when you manage a club like the Dodgers.
‘‘But it’s like this: If you take Apple or Google or Microsoft, the great companies annually, they do excellent things to continue to maintain excellence. So I pride myself and our organization on being consistently great. If you don’t win the world championship, then you’ve had a failure of a season? It’s not true. It doesn’t mean you’re not still a great leader of people.’’
Roberts and Counsell are big fans of each other’s work.
‘‘Dave’s job has been to take great expectations and not let the train get off the tracks,’’ Counsell said. ‘‘You probably don’t know about all the situations where the train almost came off the tracks and Dave kept them on the tracks. That’s managing an organization, and I think he’s done an incredible job of that.’’
Said Roberts: ‘‘I personally admire Craig and his consistency of mind and preparation and attitude and respect that he has in the game. He’s a person I certainly look toward in how he goes about it. I think he’s a great manager.’’
Worth all that big bread, too?
‘‘I certainly hope so,’’ Roberts said.
‘‘A baseball manager is hard to be quantified; it’s hard to put a value on it. But when you’re talking about how you manage player workload, pitcher usage, to potentially win one game and then another and to get through 162, that certainly has the manager’s fingerprints all over it.’’