TOKYO – Back-to-back World Series-winning manager Dave Roberts said Wednesday the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Japanese star trio “all have decisions to make” regarding their participation in the World Baseball Classic next March.<\/p>\n
The 53-year-old was wary of the impact of letting Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki go to help the Samurai Japan after a grueling Major League Baseball season, but left the choice to the players.<\/p>\n
“We had a long season,” Roberts said at an event in Tokyo. “We’ll support them. But I do think that pitching, it’s a lot on the body, the arm, (and) the rest would be beneficial for next year for our season.”<\/p>\n
“But we understand how important the WBC is for these individual players and for the country of Japan.”<\/p>\n
Roberts, born to a Japanese mother in Okinawa and planning to visit his native prefecture during his stay in Japan, also gave his assessments of the three players, each of whom enjoyed a year to remember, starting with Ohtani, who won the fourth MVP award of his MLB career.<\/p>\n
“After he got the award, I just texted him and I said congratulations, I’m very proud of you, and I expect him to win another MVP next year, and win another championship,” Roberts said. “He’s a special, special player. I never want to put a ceiling on Shohei because Shohei always exceeds it.”<\/p>\n
“I think he is the best player to ever play, complete player… I just let him play. He does things that you can never imagine, whether it’s hitting four home runs in one game, pitching, hitting the ball out of Dodger Stadium, it just seems like every night, Shohei does something really special, so I just want him to be himself.”<\/p>\n
Roberts said it was “important” for him to treat World Series MVP Yamamoto and rookie Sasaki differently during the season and was happy to see them react in their own ways.<\/p>\n
“I thought this year Yoshinobu took a big step forward. Last year was his first in the major leagues, and I felt I managed him pretty carefully,” Roberts said. “This year, I basically let him go on his own more and challenged him more. I felt his growth from the beginning of the season to the World Series was tremendous.”<\/p>\n
“The other person I really felt individually grew was Roki. Roki is obviously a young player, and the way it started for him, I thought he overcame a lot of adversity.”<\/p>\n
Roberts expects the 24-year-old Sasaki, who had an underwhelming start, was sidelined for more than four months with shoulder impingement and then made big contributions as a make-shift closer in the postseason, to return to his usual starter role next year.<\/p>\n
“Roki is a starting pitcher and the plan is to get him back to being a starter, making sure he gets his rest, probably pitching once a week,” Roberts said. “Our goal is to keep him healthy, keep him strong and make starts for us next year.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TOKYO – Back-to-back World Series-winning manager Dave Roberts said Wednesday the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Japanese star trio “all…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301092,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[363,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-301091","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-mlb","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}