Mookie Betts' candor on Dave Roberts is sure to enrage Dodgers fans

The easiest path in Los Angeles this year has been to pin every roster quirk and cold stretch on Dave Roberts. The Dodgers still won, still headlined, still packed Chavez Ravine, but the anxiety never really left, and it crystallized around a lightning-rod choice: Mookie Betts at shortstop.

That decision became the catch-all for many things the fans didn’t like, from an offense that went quiet in pockets to an outfield that misfired more than it should have. So when Betts stepped to a mic and chose empathy over outrage, sticking up for his manager instead of joining the pile-on, it landed like a record scratch.

Because this isn’t just a lineup note; it’s identity-level stuff. Betts is a six-time Gold Glove right fielder, the kind of defensive metronome contenders build around. Moving him into the everyday shortstop role rewired the Dodgers’ run-prevention map and, fairly or not, became the avatar for a year of uncomfortable trade-offs. Right field fell to Teoscar Hernández, who soaked up innings but left the corners leaky, while Betts’ own bat sagged for stretches under. Fans saw a superstar pulled out of his sweet spot and a defense that lost its margin for error. That’s catnip for talk radio, and a fuse for any regular season wobble.

Dave Roberts gets a surprising ally as Mookie Betts defends 2025 plan

Betts, though, didn’t bite. He chose to humanize the guy in the dugout. “He’s like a mentor of mine. He’s like a dad sometimes. He’s like a coach sometimes. He puts on a lot of hats when it comes to me,” Betts said of Roberts in a feature written by Bob Nightengale of USA TODAY. Betts called Roberts "probably the best manager" he's ever had.

And the substance behind the sentiment matters. The “why is Mookie still at short?” chorus ignores two truths that can live alongside the frustrations. First, Betts has actually graded out as an above-average defender at shortstop (and has been excellent in the postseason) — a remarkable adaptation given the reps and reads demanded there. Second, the bet wasn’t made in a vacuum: Los Angeles tried to patch the outfield with power bats and ended up living with some predictable corner-defense leakage from Hernández. If you’re going to fault Roberts for the ripple effects, you also have to credit him for trusting a generational athlete to learn the hardest infield job on the fly, and largely holding water.

There’s also the day-to-day reality inside the clubhouse that fans rarely get to see. As The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya and others noted, Betts walked into Roberts’ office earlier this season to give an update on how good his swing was feeling. For what it’s worth, the door was open as media entered — nothing cloak-and-dagger, and not uncommon around this team. Read that however you want, but it sure sounds like a superstar and a manager aligned on process: communication first, ego second. If Betts is vouching privately and publicly, the narrative of a stubborn manager forcing a square peg into a round hole loses some oxygen.

None of this erases the optics. Fans watched a six-time Gold Glove right fielder vacate his corner while the offense fell off; they’re not wrong to connect the dots, even if some of those lines are more emotional than empirical. But Betts’ candor reframes the conversation. By calling Dave Roberts “arguably the best manager I’ve ever had,” he isn’t feeding outrage, he’s saying the quiet part out loud: 162 games is a long laboratory, and the calculus gets messy, especially when a club is balancing superstar health, roster depth, and October matchups on the same spreadsheet.

If you’re a Dodgers fan, that might be a bit frustrating. Yet Betts just drew a line: this is our plan, my manager has my respect, and I’m owning my role in it. Maybe the only real salve is the one Los Angeles knows best — winning late, when the lights blind the second-guessing.

Dodgers fans might not agree, but the results have largely been there. So it's maybe time to listen to Betts.