Dave Roberts is getting blamed for Sunday night's 3-2 loss to Atlanta, and it's the wrong target.
Start with what actually happened at the plate. The Dodgers went 0-for-8 with runners in scoring position and left seven men on base. Freddie Freeman was stranded after a leadoff single in the second. Miguel Rojas led off the third with a double and the inning died anyway, in part because Tommy Edman popped out trying to bunt him over. By exit velocity, the Dodgers only hit six balls hard all night while Atlanta hit ten and still had to settle for three runs. Two solo home runs, one from Freeman and one from Max Muncy, were the entire offense. That's a lineup that couldn't do anything with traffic on the bases.
The Roberts complaint centers on one thing: benching Muncy to start the game. Roberts said it was a roster call tied to starting Blake Snell with Yoshinobu Yamamoto in reserve for Game 3, unrelated to how Muncy's been playing. The irony is total: Muncy, pulled from the lineup entirely, came off the bench and drove in the only other run L.A. scored besides Freeman's homer. If the move was supposed to cost them offense, it didn't.
The quick hook of Snell in the fourth, after a fifth walk, makes sense too. Roberts' own account, that Snell had no feel for his changeup or his slider and was fighting himself all night, matches what anyone watching saw. Pulling a struggling starter who's handed out that many free passes is the obvious call.
The approach at the plate is what's hurting the Dodgers. Atlanta's bullpen, with a 21-year-old rookie doing most of the damage, retired a long string of Dodgers hitters after the fifth inning's walk-and-single start fizzled. Compare that to Muncy's night: a full-count strikeout in the fourth that at least made Dylan Lee work, and a two-out, two-strike homer in the ninth that came from grinding a reliever into a mistake. That's the at-bat the rest of the lineup needs to copy. Instead, too many Dodgers hitters were giving away outs early in counts against a bullpen game that had no business dominating a lineup this talented.
Atlanta's manager made the bolder call this weekend, holding Chris Sale back for a second straight bullpen game, and it worked. Roberts made a defensible, almost boring set of decisions and still had his team two runs away from a 2-0 series lead. The gap was in the batter's box, and the hitters need to answer for it in Atlanta.
