Dave Roberts has built a résumé around October decisions, guiding the Dodgers to three World Series titles in five years, but one of his sharpest instincts came long before he filled out a postseason lineup card. It came in Boston, with Roberts standing on first as a 32-year-old pinch-runner in Game 4 of the 2004 American League Championship Series.
The Red Sox had put on a bunt, Roberts recalled during a conversation with Jimmy Rollins and Ryan Howard on The 6-1-1 podcast. Roberts asked first-base coach Lynn Jones to wipe the sign away, and third-base coach Dale Sveum followed through. Jones gave Roberts the green light: go play your game.
What followed was the steal that helped turn the Red Sox’s comeback against the Yankees into one of the sport’s defining postseason memories. Roberts said he brushed himself off after reaching the bag and heard Derek Jeter marvel at how he had pulled it off. The moment remains a fitting early snapshot of Roberts: a player who understood the temperature of a game and was willing to act on it.
October is about the people in the room
Roberts also revisited several Dodgers championship moments, from a text conversation before Miguel Rojas delivered in a Game 7 to the replay challenge that set up Andy Pages’ saving catch. He discussed Freddie Freeman stopping a proposed pitching change, as well as Walker Buehler’s response after closing out the 2024 World Series.
Those memories fed into Roberts’ larger view of managing in October. Analytics remain part of the job, but he said the postseason demands a different feel than the 162-game grind. A club chasing 11 wins in October needs players a manager can trust when the game gets tight, even when the numbers do not fully capture a player’s pulse or presence.
Roberts acknowledged that he once carried too much regular-season process into postseason games. Over time, he came to believe more strongly in reading the players and the moment rather than applying the same formula used from April through September.
That trust extends to Shohei Ohtani, whom Roberts called the best player he has ever watched. Roberts said Barry Bonds was the finest position player he either played alongside or saw, but placed Ohtani in a category of his own after Ohtani’s three-home-run, 10-strikeout outing in Game 4 of last year’s National League Championship Series.
Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto have also changed the Dodgers’ daily standard, Roberts said. He recalled Mookie Betts telling him that Los Angeles would not have won the World Series without the Japanese stars. Betts’ point, Roberts explained, was that their discipline and purposeful daily work pushed the rest of the clubhouse to another level.
Asked for his favorite postseason memory, Roberts chose the Dodgers’ 2024 World Series win over the Yankees. Beyond the trophy, the matchup revived one of baseball’s classic October rivalries and, in Roberts’ view, quieted the lingering criticism aimed at Los Angeles’ 2020 championship because that season had a shortened schedule.
There was one more reminder that Roberts’ baseball memory runs deeper than his time in the Dodgers dugout. Rollins remembered meeting Roberts on the field in 2002, when Roberts sought him out to say he admired Rollins’ game and considered him his favorite player. Rollins, still early in his own career at the time, reacted with surprise: he had barely arrived in the majors.
Roberts has since become the manager making the calls in baseball’s biggest games. But the old pinch-runner is still there, too—the player who saw a sign he did not like, trusted his read, and took off.
