The Manager of the Year Awards will be announced later today, and Dodgers manager Dave Roberts is a finalist for the National League award, meaning he finished in the top three in votes. The other finalists are Buck Showalter of the Mets and Brian Snitker of the Braves.
Over at ESPN, they ran an article predicting the winners of all the awards using votes from their experts, and Roberts finished third, receiving just one of their 13 expert votes. David Schoenfield writes about why that might be.
This looks like a toss-up, especially given that Roberts' Dodgers won 111 games -- most in the National League since 1906 -- and he rates as third favorite on the board. It was the fourth time Roberts has won at least 104 games, although his one Manager of the Year award came in 2016, when the Dodgers won just 91 games.
He probably won't win this year, because as dominant as the Dodgers were in the regular season (remember, voting is done before the playoffs), the Mets and Braves perhaps had more compelling storylines. Showalter took over a Mets team coming off a 77-85 season and guided it to 101 wins and its first playoff trip since 2016. He brought some professionalism to a team that needed it, cleaned up the defense and the little things, and had all that success even though Jacob deGrom didn't start a game until August. Snitker, who won this award in 2018, guided the Braves to their fifth straight division title -- rallying from 10.5 games down on June 1 and sweeping the Mets the final week of the season to wrap up the division.
One thing this underscores is that no one — including the people voting on the award — can really quantify what makes a great manager. This award almost always goes to the manager whose team exceeded expectations by the largest margin. The Dodgers were projected to win 101 games and won 111; the Braves were projected for 94 wins and won 101; and the Mets were projected to win just 87 games and ended up tied with the Braves at 101. So the "outperform projections" metric goes to Showalter.
Roberts and his Dodgers outperformed projections by a huge margin, and that was with record-high projections to start with, but that's part of the argument against him. The Dodgers were built to be great, and then they were great, so how much credit does the manager really deserve? That's the argument, and while I personally think it's a bunch of fertilizer, it often seems to carry weight with the voters.
Roberts has received votes for Manager of the Year in all seven seasons he's managed the Dodgers, but chances are, when the winner is announced this afternoon, Roberts will still have just the one award, coming in his first (and worst) season.
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