The end of the Yankees dynasty could be telling for Dodgers, Dave Roberts’ future

Empires crumble, dynasties fade, and new powers emerge. The only thing consistent through history is change, which is something that the Los Angeles Dodgers will come to learn sooner or later. Whether the sweep the Dodgers suffered at the hands of the Milwaukee Brewers was a temporary setback or the beginning of the end remains to be seen.

Regardless, the end is coming at some point, and that will put Dave Roberts in an uncomfortable position. Tyler Kepner of The Athletic covered the New York Yankees during the end of their famous dynasty in the early 2000s and put together some lessons the Dodgers will learn from history.

The first big key is the fact that the league doesn't like dynasties. MLB updated the Competitive Balance Tax during the 2002 CBA negotiations, introducing the first version of the repeat offender tax in an attempt to stop the Yankees, who clearly felt that the tax itself was no barrier to their big-spending ways. Los Angeles faces a similar, but more stringent obstacle coming down the pike, with the league now pushing for an outright salary cap.

Whether or not that actually comes to fruition and slows down the Dodgers remains to be seen. What is for sure is the fact that the run will eventually come to an end, and it will mean the end for Roberts.

Sooner or later, Dave Roberts will become a Los Angeles Dodgers scapegoat

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, New York was led by Joe Torre. Torre wasn't a legendary manager at the time. The former catcher came to the Yankees with a .471 winning percentage over 14 years as a manager and had never won a playoff game. He might have been hired because Yankees owner George Steinbrenner believed he could control the undistinguished skipper.

Torre won the World Series in his first season at the helm, with the Yankees serving as the upstart against the more established Atlanta Braves. He'd suffer an early exit from the postseason in 1997, but his club would come back and go on a rampage in 1998 with a whopping 114 wins and a second ring for Torre. He'd then win two more to complete the three-peat, while making the Fall Classic, but coming up short in 2001 and 2003.

Torre's final three years with New York featured first-round playoff exits, and while the Yankees never actually fired him, they offered him only a one-year contract with a pay cut following the 2007 season.

The dirty little secret is that Torre wasn't really the reason that New York entered a championship drought. Instead, the organization moved away from what originally made it successful. The Yankees were built on a foundation that was called the Core Four — homegrown heroes Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, and Andy Pettitte. The name is a misnomer because, in reality, Bernie Williams, also a homegrown star, who just happened to be a couple of years older than the others, was an integral part of their success.

Supporting that core were a bunch of savvy pickups. Paul O'Neill was a platoon bat who frequently clashed with Lou Piniella in Cincinnati, but became the fearsome No. 3 hitter in the Yankees' order. Tino Martinez was a similar sort of player who was pushed out of Seattle and became a fearsome slugger with New York. Scott Brosius became the defensive whiz with a penchant for the clutch hit after being rescued from Oakland. The list goes on.

However, after the 2001 heartbreak at the hands of the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Yankees saw two things happen. Key players aged, and rather than finding young, up-and-coming stars as they had before, they spent like a drunken sailor in free agency, bringing in guys like Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield. What ended up happening is they paid a premium for past performance, and while many of these pickups weren't bad, they were on the decline.

Rather than have general manager Brian Cashman or Steinbrenner face the music, Torre was the easy scapegoat.

At the end of the day, the league will try to make it harder for a dynasty to continue leveraging whatever it was that gave it an advantage. Meanwhile, the rest of the teams will start emulating you, reducing the value of what originally set you apart. And while a manager has a lot of responsibility for what happens on the field, he ultimately is the low man on the totem pole in the leadership hierarchy.

Roberts can't control how players age. He can't control how Andrew Friedman adds to the roster. He can't control what MLB does to legislate the Dodgers' advantage out of the game. And he'll eventually learn the same fate that Torre learned.

The Dodgers will still win a lot of games, but these external factors will keep them from reaching the summit, and he'll get the pink slip before anyone else is held accountable for the deterioration of the Los Angeles juggernaut.

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