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The plans for Games Four and Five, though, were always interconnected, impossible to separate. Roberts didn’t want to lose Tuesday night, but he understood that he had four shots to win one game, and he managed accordingly. Last night, the six relief pitchers he declined to use in Game Four threw 6 2/3 innings of one-run baseball, holding down the Yankee offense long enough for the Yankee defense to help the Dodgers win the baseball game. Keeping his best six relievers fresh enabled him to hook an ineffective Jack Flaherty nine batters into the game and manage aggressively from that point forward. Game Four’s strategy won Game Five.
Roberts now has two rings in nine seasons, to go with two other NL pennants and eight NL West titles. Teams managed by Dave Roberts have a .627 winning percentage in the regular season and .560 in the postseason. No manager of at least 1000 games has a better winning percentage than Roberts does. For all the criticism of the Dodgers’ postseason record, Roberts’s teams are 12-7 in playoff series of at least five games. It may be, when we look back, that it was Roberts, not Bruce Bochy, not even Dusty Baker, who was the signature manager of his time.
