Dodgers fans ignoring main reason Dave Roberts got snubbed in Manager of the Year voting

On Monday night, the BBWAA rolled out their finalists for the year's top awards — league MVPs, Cy Youngs, Rookies of the Year, and Managers of the Year. Most of the usual suspects ended up exactly where they were expected to. Shohei Ohtani and Francisco Lindor will battle for NL MVP; Jackson Merrill, Jackson Chourio, and Paul Skenes will make for a close race for NL Rookie of the Year; and Tarik Skubal and Chris Sale should run away with their respective leagues' Cy Young awards.

For Dodgers fans, there was one conspicuous absence. Carlos Mendoza, Pat Murphy, and Mike Schildt were the nominees for NL Manager of the Year. Dave Roberts, even if he got a modicum of votes before the regular season ended, didn't place in the top three.

Roberts only won the award once in 2016, his first year managing the Dodgers, and some fans are treating his exclusion this year, especially after LA's World Series victory, like it's a travesty.

Before the Dave Roberts stans pull out pitchforks: we generally like Roberts here, and it's true that he had a lot of hoops to jump through in order to help the Dodgers to 98 wins and a World Series championship. However, his real challenge was the postseason, and voting for this award closed before the Wild Card round started. It's really as simple as that.

Dave Roberts snubbed for NL Manager of the Year award despite Dodgers' World Series win

Last year's Manager of the Year awards went to Brandon Hyde and Skip Schumaker. Hyde's Orioles won over 100 games, the most in the American League, but Schumaker's Marlins finished third and snuck into the postseason as the fifth seed in the National League. Both were working with imperfect rosters — Hyde had a handful of rookies, and Schumaker had, well...the Marlins — and saw unexpected levels of success.

There was nothing unexpected about the Dodgers' success this year, at least not until the postseason. Roberts had to deal with an unprecedented number of injuries this season, but he still had some of best (if not the best) raw materials in baseball to work with across the board.

Mendoza and Murphy are both first-time managers who still led their teams to around 90-win seasons, and although we hate to say a nice word about the Padres, there was a reason they were heavily favored over the Dodgers to win the NLDS, and they were at times hot on LA's heels for first in the NL West.

If postseason performance was a factor in voting, then Roberts would absolutely deserve to be a finalist, if not the winner of this award. However, based on the constraints in the voting period and the general pattern that MotYs are usually given to underdogs who made something unexpectedly great out of imperfect parts, it was never going to be Roberts' year.