TORONTO — Asked whether he felt like a villain, Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts tilted his head and widened his eyes, startled that he was being categorized as some baseball equivalent of Lex Luthor or Darth Vader.
Roberts has been the club’s skipper since the 2016 season, and this year the Dodgers have been criticized for spending $509 million on their MLB roster, more than seven times the $69 million of the Miami Marlins, the lowest team in the majors in terms of payroll. The affable Roberts had yelled to the home crowd’s fans after last week’s National League pennant clincher: “They said the Dodgers are ruining baseball. Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball!”
“I was just having a little fun with people that said that about the Dodgers,” he explained Thursday, a day ahead of the World Series opener against the American League champion Toronto Blue Jays, “but I hope I’m not the villain.”
The Dodgers are also the first reigning MLB champions to reach the World Series since the 2009 Philadelphia Phillies, who lost to the New York Yankees. No team has won consecutive titles since the Yankees won three in a row from 1998 to 2000, and no NL team has achieved the feat since the Cincinnati Reds won back-to-back championships in 1975-76, their “Big Red Machine” era.
“The one thing we cannot do is look over there and say that is Goliath,” said Blue Jays manager John Schneider, whose team has home-field advantage after going 94-68 in the regular season this year with one more win than the Dodgers.