The Dodgers may not feel like a team in decline right now, but history has a way of catching up with the biggest powers in the sport. After Los Angeles was swept by the Milwaukee Brewers, the bigger question isn’t just whether this was a bump in the road. It’s what happens when a run like this finally starts to bend.
That’s where Dave Roberts enters the picture. The Dodgers manager could end up in the same place Joe Torre once did with the Yankees: front and center when the dynasty starts to lose its shine, even if he isn’t the real reason it happened.
Tyler Kepner of The Athletic looked back at the late stages of New York’s famous run in the early 2000s and drew lessons that feel familiar for Los Angeles. One of the clearest is that the league eventually pushes back against dynasties.
MLB changed the Competitive Balance Tax during the 2002 CBA negotiations and introduced the first version of the repeat offender tax, a direct attempt to rein in the Yankees, who clearly saw the tax as no real obstacle to spending. The Dodgers now face a similar challenge, only with the league pushing for something even harsher: an outright salary cap.
Whether that ever becomes reality is another matter. What isn’t in doubt is that every great run ends eventually, and when it does, managers tend to take the hit first.
Torre’s story is the template. He wasn’t walking into New York as a legend.
As a manager, he brought a .471 winning percentage over 14 years and had never won a playoff game. George Steinbrenner may have liked him partly because he seemed controllable.
Torre then won the World Series in his first season, with the Yankees cast as the upstart against the more established Atlanta Braves. After a quick postseason exit in 1997, New York stormed back in 1998, piled up 114 wins, and gave Torre his second title.
He added two more championships to complete the three-peat, while also reaching the Fall Classic and falling short in 2001 and 2003.
The final stretch was messier. The Yankees bowed out in the first round in Torre’s last three seasons, and the club never formally fired him. Still, after 2007, they only offered him a one-year deal with a pay cut.
The bigger issue was never just Torre. The organization drifted from the formula that had made it special in the first place.
That Yankees core was built around Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada and Andy Pettitte, with Bernie Williams also playing a major role even if the Core Four label left him out. Around them were smart additions like Paul O'Neill, Tino Martinez and Scott Brosius, players who found the right home and became better versions of themselves in New York.
But after the 2001 loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks, the decline took shape. The key pieces got older, and instead of replacing them with younger rising talent, the Yankees turned to free agency and spent heavily on names like Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield.
Those were expensive bets on what players had already done, not what they were going to do next. The moves weren’t all bad, but the roster was leaning on decline.
That’s the trap Roberts could eventually walk into with the Dodgers. He can’t stop players from aging.
He can’t control how Andrew Friedman builds the roster. He can’t stop MLB from trying to legislate away the advantages that helped make the Dodgers what they are.
If the downturn comes, Roberts is the one most likely to pay first, just as Torre did.
The Dodgers will keep winning plenty of games. But if the run slips from dominant to merely very good, the blame will land somewhere, and the manager is usually the easiest place to put it.
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