5 unforgivable Dave Roberts moves with Dodgers that should get him fired

After a franchise-record 111 wins in the regular season, the Los Angeles Dodgers were sent home in just four games in the NLDS against the San Diego Padres. After winning Game 1 thanks in large part to a Mike Clevinger stinker, the Dodgers were thoroughly outplayed in Games 2-4 and were handed the gentleman’s sweep.

While winning 100+ games in the regular season almost every year is nice, the Dodgers have now made the playoffs every year for a decade and only have one (controversial) World Series title to show for it. With all the talent this team has possessed throughout the years, that has to be considered an underachievement.

This has led many Dodgers fans to point the finger at Dave Roberts, who has been managing the club since the 2015 campaign. While reports have already confirmed that Roberts will return next season, there are plenty of postseason mistakes in his past that are worthy of getting him fired.

In 2015, the Dodgers were torched by a nuclear Daniel Murphy, while 2016 was very obviously the Chicago Cubs’ year. However, since then, the Dodgers have been the bonafide favorites to win it all and have only done so once — often falling short because of a managerial mistake.

Let’s dive into those mistakes, in reverse chronological order.

5 most fireable decisions that Dave Roberts has made with the Dodgers:

2022 NLDS: Tommy Kahnle and the disastrous seventh inning

The seventh inning in Game 4 of the 2022 NLDS will go down in two different ways. For one fanbase, it will be a miraculous inning that finally propelled their team over their bigger brother and could potentially fuel a World Series run. For the other, it will be what many fans consider to be the breaking point.

The game simply sped up for Dave Roberts, and he could not handle it. Roberts tried stealing outs by starting the inning with Tommy Kahnle, who had just 12.2 regular-season innings since 2020. Even worse, he threw him against the exact same bats that he had faced the night before. 

That clearly blew up in the team’s face, and Roberts then went to the guy who probably should have started the inning, Yency Almonte. Almonte shouldn’t have pitched to the heart of the Padres’ order; that should have been Evan Phillips.

Then, with Jake Cronenworth due up and the game on the line, Roberts rushed Alex Vesia into the game without giving him a proper warm-up (and with a 1-0 count on the batter!). It was a disaster, and was entirely avoidable.

Almonte should have started the seventh against the bottom of the order. Evan Phillips could have pitched the eighth against the heart of the order assuming Almonte had a clean seventh, and then the Dodgers could have deployed their secret weapon — Dustin May — in the ninth.

Ah, what could have been.

2021 NLCS: Julio Urías misuse, costing the Dodgers two games

Julio Urías was magical out of the bullpen for the Dodgers during the 2020 playoffs. And, to be fair to Dave Roberts, he did manage that 2020 postseason to near-perfection. If we are going to dissect his mistakes, we have to acknowledge that his management of the pitching staff in 2020 was fantastic.

Roberts tried to replicate that magic in 2021 by bringing Julio Urías out of the bullpen in the NLCS even though he was established as one of the team’s best starting pitchers. Los Angeles did not have the starting pitching depth to make this move, especially with Clayton Kershaw not pitching at all in the postseason due to injury.

Urías pitched in Game 5 of the NLDS against the San Francisco Giants, throwing 59 pitches in four innings of work. His pitch count remaining low gave Roberts the chance to bring Urías out of the bullpen in between starts for Game 2 of the NLCS against the Atlanta Braves.

While starting pitchers typically throw bullpen sessions between starts, there is a reason they are bullpen sessions that don’t mean anything and aren’t playoff games. On just two days’ rest, Urías was not sharp, allowing two runs in the eighth inning that ultimately allowed Atlanta to walk the Dodgers off in the ninth.

Urías still had a scheduled start on October 20, meaning he was pitching again on just two days’ rest. Once again, he was not sharp, allowing five runs in five innings en route to a 9-2 blowout loss.

2019 NLDS: Bringing Clayton Kershaw out of the bullpen

The blown lead in the seventh inning against the Padres in 2022 feels awfully similar to the blown lead in the eighth inning in the 2019 NLDS against the Washington Nationals. Both games were absolutely winnable for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Roberts putting in the wrong pitcher at the wrong time is ultimately what lost the game.

In the case of 2019, Roberts once again tried to recapture the magic from a previous decision and went with Clayton Kershaw out of the bullpen. It worked in the 2018 NLCS, so it had to work in the 2019 NLDS, right?

Every decision is different, and while it may have worked one year, that does not guarantee it will work another year against a completely different opponent.

To be fair, the decision did initially seem to pay off, as Kershaw came into the game in the top of the seventh in a high-leverage spot and was able to strike out Adam Eaton.

But that is where Kershaw’s outing should have ended. Instead of trusting his bullpen to get the final six outs, Roberts left Kershaw out there against the two best hitters in the Nationals’ lineup. Anthony Rendon and Juan Soto made him pay for that decision, hitting back-to-back home runs on back-to-back pitches.

Just like 2022, the offense was in too much shock to overcome this jarring series of events, allowing the game to go to extra innings, where Howie Kendrick delivered the final blow with a grand slam.

2017 World Series: Not pulling the plug on Yu Darvish sooner

There is a lot of revisionist history with Game 7 of the 2017 World Series. In hindsight, most Dodgers fans are outraged at the team’s decision to start Yu Darvish over Clayton Kershaw. Fans, of course, are saying that because Darvish was shelled and Kershaw came in and pitched perfectly in relief.

Starting Darvish was the right decision. Kershaw was on short rest and was coming off of a Game 5 in which Houston punished him at the plate (at the time, we didn’t know they were banging trash cans to do so!). The Dodgers traded for Darvish literally for this moment, as they desperately needed another big-game pitcher.

Where the mistake lies is Roberts not having a quick enough hook in a do-or-die game. This is something Roberts has gotten better at, but it unfortunately has led to him having too quick of a hook on occasion, such as when he pulled Tyler Anderson in Game 4 of the 2022 NLDS.

With the way Darvish was pitching, he never should have been given the chance to face George Springer a second time. If Roberts is one batter quicker in using Brandon Morrow, then the game could have stayed at 3-0, and who knows? Maybe the bats would not have been as demoralized, and could have put more pressure on Houston’s pitching staff.

While it might not seem to matter in a game where the Dodgers only scored one run, that home run gave the Astros a comfortable enough lead where the tying run never came to the plate. That changed the complexion of the rest of the game.

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And who knows, if Roberts pulls Darvish after the first inning it would have just been 2-0, and then everything changes.