When Waymon Roberts moved his family around Marine bases, from Okinawa to California, Hawaii and North Carolina, he knew it was not easy, especially for his children. So he regularly repeated a mantra that can be useful for military families.
“We have no choice about where we’re going, but we have a choice about what we do when we get there,” Roberts said. “Like where you’re at; miss it when you’re gone.”
Such pragmatism helped shape his son, Dave, in many ways.
It allowed him to make fast friends wherever he went and cultivated a sense of determination, which helped him go from a college walk-on to UCLA’s career leader in stolen bases. He then had a solid big league career — with a stolen base that has an important place in Boston Red Sox lore — despite not reaching the major leagues until he was 27.
So it was poignant that in the days after Dave Roberts was named manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers last month, his father, who is African-American, pulled him aside and told him to remove his nose from the grindstone for a moment and reflect on something broader — his being the first minority manager in the long history of the Dodgers, the franchise that led the way in integrating baseball.
Waymon Roberts and his wife, Eiko, who is Japanese, do not recall speaking about race with their children because, they said, race did not seem to matter much in the insular military community. What mattered, Waymon Roberts said, was “what you did and who your daddy is — how many stripes.”
Still, the significance of his son’s hiring by the Dodgers — a team identified not just with Jackie Robinson, but with Fernando Valenzuela and Hideo Nomo — was too much to ignore.
“We don’t get too deep into those type of conversations, but it kind of hit me a little bit,” said Dave Roberts, who was introduced at a news conference at Dodger Stadium on Tuesday. “When he brings something like that to my table, he wants to go in a certain direction, so it was big. It forced me to take a step back and acknowledge it. A little bit of emotion goes through, and that’s all part of it.”
A short while earlier — wearing a No. 30 jersey, as he had as a Dodgers outfielder in homage to Maury Wills — Roberts had pointed to his parents and to Wills and another Dodgers great, Don Newcombe, who were seated in front of the stage, and had spoken passionately about the responsibility he felt to those who had come before him. Ignoring them, he suggested, would be irresponsible.
That such sentiments would be required in 2015 may seem odd, but when the Dodgers job opened with the departure of Don Mattingly on Oct. 22, there was only one minority manager in baseball — Fredi Gonzalez of the Atlanta Braves. The Washington Nationals later hired another, Dusty Baker.
Magic Johnson, the Los Angeles Lakers great who owns a stake in the Dodgers and who has been lauded for investing in African-American communities, said it was important that minority candidates be interviewed, as long as they were qualified.
“The only thing I encouraged them to do — let’s get the best candidates, and hopefully one of them will be a minority to get interviewed,” Johnson said. “Other than that, I stayed out of the way.”
Shortly after Mattingly left, reports indicated that the Dodgers’ director for player development, Gabe Kapler, was a leading candidate and that perhaps a couple of others would be considered. Eventually, though, the Dodgers interviewed nine candidates.
Farhan Zaidi, the Dodgers’ general manager, said that when Roberts had an initial interview with him and Andrew Friedman, the team’s president of baseball operations, it was as if Roberts had the answer key to their questions.
“What this demonstrates is, if you have a process that is open-minded to new candidates that you don’t know and you listened carefully during those interviews, you might come to results you wouldn’t have predicted when you began,” said Stan Kasten, the Dodgers’ chief executive officer. “That’s what happened with us. When we began, I don’t think we would have predicted that five weeks later, Dave Roberts would be standing here as our manager.”
Roberts, 43, who spent the last five seasons as a first-base and bench coach with the San Diego Padres, has never spent a season as a manager — not unlike many other recent hires around baseball. What impressed Friedman and Zaidi seemed to be Roberts’ enthusiasm and interest in what he called team baseball — an emphasis on the little things.
The Dodgers, despite a payroll well beyond $200 million this past season, won only one playoff series in five seasons under Mattingly. A fitting epitaph came in the decisive fifth game of their National League division series loss to the New York Mets when Daniel Murphy took third base after it was left unoccupied.
“It’s about harping on the fundamentals of the game and appreciating the small things that can be the difference between winning and losing a game,” Friedman said when asked what the Dodgers needed to do better.
He added: “Through the interview process, it was very evident that Dave is very in tune with that and driven by those principles. You can’t really control a pitcher dotting a slider down and away, but you can control advancing and taking an extra base on a ball in the dirt. Just the mindfulness of that will make us better.”
There are other questions looming for the Dodgers, such as whether Roberts can help outfielder Yasiel Puig mature and whether the team will be able to re-sign starter Zack Greinke. (“We want him back,” Johnson said. “He’s our No. 1 priority in the offseason.”)
But as Roberts sat on the stage, answering questions about his hopes and his vision, he seemed to be cherishing the moment. To some in the room, the enthusiasm, the determination and the sincerity sounded familiar.
“He was so calm and smart and kind,” his mother said. “I said, ‘This is my son.’ I was so proud I almost had to hide tears.”
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